The Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800 9781501346057, 9781501346088, 9781501346071

Table of contents :
Cover
Series page
Title
Copyrights
Author bio
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. An Object and Its Positions: The Lever, the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point
1 The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant
2 The Levers of German Romanticism
3 The Contested God of Naturphilosophie
4 From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology
Concluding Thoughts
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

New Directions in German Studies

Vol. 25 Series Editor: IMKE MEYER Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

Editorial Board: KATHERINE ARENS Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin ROSWITHA BURWICK Distinguished Chair of Modern Foreign Languages Emerita, Scripps College RICHARD ELDRIDGE Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE Professor Emerita of Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin CATRIONA MACLEOD Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German, University of Pennsylvania STEPHAN SCHINDLER Professor of German and Chair, University of South Florida HEIDI SCHLIPPHACKE Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago ANDREW J. WEBBER Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, Cambridge University SILKE-MARIA WEINECK Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

DAVID WELLBERY LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, University of Chicago SABINE WILKE Joff Hanauer Distinguished Professor for Western Civilization and Professor of German, University of Washington JOHN ZILCOSKY Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Volumes in the series: Vol. 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf Vol. 2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard Malkmus Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature by Thomas O. Beebee Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel Vol. 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler Vol. 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon Vol. 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation by David Horton Vol. 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck Vol. 10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems by Luke Fischer Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins Vol. 12. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World by Lorely French Vol. 13. Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State by Katherine Arens Vol. 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange edited by Tobias Döring and Ewan Fernie Vol. 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Vol. 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck Vol. 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O’Neil Vol. 18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone Vol. 19. Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 by Curtis Swope Vol. 20. Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History by Richard T. Gray Vol. 21. Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings by Marie Kolkenbrock Vol. 22. Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke Vol. 23. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant edited by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby Vol. 24. Staging West German Democracy: Governmental PR Films and the Democratic Imaginary, 1953–1963 by Jan Uelzmann Vol. 25. The Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800 by Jocelyn Holland

The Lever as Instrument of Reason Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800

Jocelyn Holland

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2021

Copyright © Jocelyn Holland, 2019 For legal purposes the acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Andrea F. Busci Cover image: “Diagram of a Lever,” Pierre Varignon, Nouvelle Mécanique, ou, Statique. Chez Claude Jombert, 1725, n.p. Courtesy The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call no. 497290. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4605-7 PB: 978-1-5013-7114-1

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Our consciousness develops from something, that did not yet have consciousness, our thinking from something, that did not yet think, our contemplation from something, that did not yet contemplate; our will from something, that did not yet want; our reasonable soul from something, that was as of yet not a reasonable soul. A mechanical lever—which, for this reason, need not be entirely senseless—appears to be everywhere the first. The ancients saw it too, without making an image of it, for it was to them the god of gods, before which even Jupiter, the highest, bent his head. But how have I stumbled upon these hideous contemplations. In truth, Amalie, it was not my intention… Letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin Düsseldorf, March 14, 17821

1

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß. Ungedruckte Briefe von und an Jacobi und Andere. Nebst ungedruckten Gedichten von Goethe und Lenz, vol. 1, ed. Rudolf Boeppritz (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1869), 53.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction. An Object and Its Positions: The Lever, the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point

x 1

1 The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant

33

2 The Levers of German Romanticism

63

3 The Contested God of Naturphilosophie 111 4 From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology

151



Concluding Thoughts

191

Bibliography Index

195 204

Acknowledgments

The initial research for this project was funded by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation in 2012, which facilitated a lengthy stay in Berlin for me, my husband, and our then-five-month-old daughter. The research and writing conducted during the remaining years would not have been possible without the further support from my colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, who had complete understanding of the challenges of pursuing teaching, research, and motherhood at the same time, particularly after the arrival of my son in 2013. I would also like to thank those friends who have read and provided feedback about my work along the way, especially Leif, Gabe, Edgar, and Carolina, as well as Joel, Rüdiger, and all those who provided an opportunity to present my work in a critical forum. Finally, I would also like to thank the administration of the California Institute of Technology for providing me with significant institutional support that helped me bring this project to an end.

Introduction An Object and Its Positions: The Lever, the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point

I can circumnavigate myself, but I cannot get beyond myself. I cannot find this Archimedean point. Søren Kierkegaard1 A stick, coupled with the will to power: levers have existed ever since early humans desired to increase their strength by instrumental means— since the advent of technology. At least, that is how one narrative goes. Another version of the same story suggests that the view of man as an originally “a-technical being,” may not be correct and that culture, including technology, is a part of human nature, not simply an extension of it.2 The Lever as Instrument of Reason is positioned at the intersection of these two perspectives. It shows how descriptions of the lever and its resting place—whether envisioned as an ordinary fulcrum or the idealized Archimedean point—are deeply entangled with descriptions of the human. In particular, we can observe this phenomenon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the work of such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Herbart. Around this time, in contexts ranging from moral philosophy and Romantic poetics to Naturphilosophie and empirical psychology, the lever was used in such a way as to become deeply implicated in various cognitive activities, ranging from the act of making

1

Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 186. 2 Hans Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phänomenologie,” in Theorie der Lebenswelt (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 15.

2  The Lever as Instrument of Reason moral judgments (Kant), to the construction of concepts (Romanticism) and the emergence and suppression of thoughts (Herbart). Each of the case studies that informs The Lever as Instrument of Reason is designed to show how the lever was taken from the field of classical mechanics and deployed within various contexts associated with the human, even as the mechanical principles associated with it continued to play an influential role.

The Lever in Antiquity: Practical Use and Theoretical Reflection

In order to underscore how the intellectual work done with the lever around 1800 draws upon a tradition of mechanical thinking, even as it incorporates the lever into new contexts in unexpected ways, it helps to have an idea of the historical context within which discussions of the lever emerged. The purpose of this section and the next is therefore to highlight a few key moments in the history of the lever. Reflections about the lever in antiquity are often framed in terms of questions directed toward those objects that informed the landscape and seascape of daily life. It is appealing to imagine that ancient Greek and Roman philosophers looked to the fields and saw levers in the yokes of the oxen pulling the plows, that they looked at the oars and masts of their great sailing ships and saw levers that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, and that, in the marketplace, scales ensured the physical and economical balance of all transactions. These images need to be considered with a few caveats. Sylvia Berryman, in The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy, warns against applying the term “mechanistic” to early Greek thought and plainly states that there was no discipline of mechanics before the fourth century bce, nor were there “mechanical conceptions” of nature.3 Mark J. Schiefsky has noted that when the science of mechanics in antiquity did emerge, it encompassed two categories of knowledge, the one theoretical and the other practical, and he refers to the lever to illustrate how deeply intertwined they were. The law of the lever, he writes, was a “paradigm example of theoretical mechanical knowledge .  .  . stated and proved by Archimedes as a precise quantitative relationship between forces and weights.”4 At the same time “any practitioner who had made use of a lever would be familiar with the fact that it

3 4

Sylvia Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39. Mark Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice in Heron’s Mechanics,” in Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution, ed. W. R. Laird and S. Roux (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 15.



Introduction 

3

is easier to move a weight if it is placed closer to the fulcrum,” which makes the lever a “paradigm example of practitioner’s knowledge” as well.5 For Schiefsky, this means that as much as mechanical technology applies theoretical knowledge, it is also the case that “new technologies often preceded any theory that could explain them.”6 One can observe further evidence of the close relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge in the Mechanical Problems, a wellknown treatise on the lever dating from the third century bce that has been attributed at various times to Aristotle and those in his school.7 Here, one finds a series of simple, yet fundamental questions: “Why do the men at the middle of the boat move the boat most? Is it because the oar is a lever? . . . Why does a steering oar, small as it is, and at the end of the boat have such force that with one little handle and the force of one man . . . it moves the great bulk of ships?”8 Questions such as these demonstrate not only the way in which commonly existing technologies can lead to intellectual inquiry, but also something that is unique to the lever itself: the frequency with which it can be discerned in various contexts.9 The lever, it seems, is embedded in how humans view the world, and once connections are established—for example, between a ship’s oars or mast and a lever—they can be invested with an explanatory power and take on a life of their own. For example, when Lucretius writes in Book IV of The Nature of Things that it should come to us as no surprise that the air we breathe as well as the soul can, “bit by bit,” move the “entire mass” of the human body, he makes

5 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice.” 6 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice.” 7 Anonymous, “The Mechanical Problems in the Corpus of Aristotle,” trans. Thomas Nelson Winter (http://di​gital​commo​ns.un​l.edu​/clas​sicsf​acpub​/68),​ 1. Whereas Winter attributes the authorship of the text to Archytas of Terentum, others are more skeptical. Michael A. Coxhead limits the identification to a member of the peripatetic school. See “A close examination of the pseudoAristotelian Mechanical Problems: The homology between mechanics and poetry as techne” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 43.2 (June 2012): 300–06. Note that this text is sometimes referred to as the “Mechanical Questions.” 8 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 11–12. 9 E. J. Dijksterhuis sees in the Mechanical Problems the “seed of a general principle that will later play an important role in mechanics under the name of the principle of virtual displacements or with an older name that recalls its origin in the thought process sketched out above [in the Mechanical Problems, JH], the Principle of Virtual Velocities,” E. J. Dijksterhuis, Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes, trans. Helga Habicht (Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1956), 35–36.

4  The Lever as Instrument of Reason an analogy to a ship at sea, but the underlying idea is connected to the mechanics of the lever: The gentle breeze, so soft of substance, sets a great ship, great burden and all, to moving; whatever her speed, one hand controls her helm and one lone rudder alters her course at will; the sheave, the tackle, the windlass make light work, again and again, of shifting heavy weights.10 Attached to this passage from The Nature of Things one also finds a history of commentaries designed to drive the point home even more clearly, such as this one by Thomas Creech, dating from the eighteenth century: This being premis’d, ‘tis easy to understand, why a Sail, swell’d with wind, makes a Vessel move very swiftly, tho’ the Sailyard be not far distant from the top of the Mast: for the Mast is, as the Lever; the Foot or Bottom of the Mast supplies the Place of the Pression or Rowler: and the Wind which fills the Sail, is as the Mover.11 Creech’s commentary, in particular, stands out for the concern with which he justifies the mechanics of Lucretius’s metaphor, with an eye to strengthening the initial comparison between breath and wind. The examples cited above, as persuasive as they may be concerning the ways in which levers have historically become embedded within our observations of cultural phenomena, need to be considered alongside another idea that was widespread in early writing about levers and simple machines: that technology is fundamentally “unnatural.” The opening lines of the Mechanical Problems, for example, state that “one marvels at things that happen according to nature, to the extent the cause is unknown, and at things happening contrary to nature, done through art for the advantage of humanity.”12 After adding a quote from Antiphon, “we win through art where we are beaten through nature,” the anonymous author of the Mechanical Problems then introduces the lever as the most fundamental of instruments by which mankind “wins” against nature: “What a person cannot move without a lever

10 Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, trans. Frank O. Copley (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), 103. 11 Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, vol. 1, trans. Thomas Creech (London: J. Matthews, 1715), 383. 12 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 1.



Introduction  5 is moved—even adding the weight of the lever—easily.”13 In more contemporary parlance, we say that a lever gives its user “mechanical advantage,” although we no longer perceive of this advantage as “unnatural.” Walter Roy Laird and Sophie Roux explain the origin of this perception in their introduction to Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution. According to them, when a “machine moves a large weight with a small power,” it “produces an effect for human benefit” that was considered “not natural, for it violates the Aristotelian physical assumption that a moving power must be greater than the weight it moves.”14 Mechanical theory, with its assumption that a relatively weak individual can displace a load much heavier than himor herself using the right tool for the job, seemed therefore to stand in an awkward relationship to Aristotelian “natural philosophy” which, up to the seventeenth century, was primarily a science concerned with motion and change (and in particular: natural changes such as generation and growth).15 As Schiefsky has shown, however, mechanical theories that developed after Aristotle, such as Heron of Alexandria’s, attempted to reconcile mechanical arts with nature. One of the ways in which this occurred was by arguing that the principle of the lever was common to other devices and itself related to natural principles. Heron’s original manuscript has been lost, but most historians of antiquity accept the validity of a lengthy passage from the Mathematical Syntaxis written by the third-century (CE) philosopher, Pappus of Alexandria. At stake is the question of whether there is a common principle underlying the five “simple machines” of antiquity, which Heron and Pappus refer to as “powers”: the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the wedge, and the screw. In the Mathematical Syntaxis, Pappus cites Heron as an authority on the subject: The five powers that move the weight are like the circles around a single centre, this is clear from the figures that we have drawn in the preceding chapters. But I think that their shape is nearer

13 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 1. Readers should be aware that the English translation, “against nature,” is not uniformly accepted. Sylvia Berryman has pointed out that “the phrase need not imply transgression against or opposition to, rather than merely going beyond, a given category” and that in “the particular case of Aristotle’s use of para phusin, there are reasons not to understand the Greek phrase to refer to phenomena opposed to or excluded from natural philosophy altogether” (Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis, 47). 14 Walter Roy Laird and Sophie Roux, “Introduction,” in Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 3. 15 Laird and Roux, “Introduction,” 2.

6  The Lever as Instrument of Reason to that of the balance than to the shape of the circle, because in the beginning the first explanation of the circles came from the balance. For here it was shown that the ratio of the weight hung from the smaller arm to that hung from the greater arm is like the ratio of the larger part of the balance to the smaller.16 As much as it is possible to observe circular motion in each of the machines (an idea that can also be traced back to the Mechanical Problems), Schiefsky argues that for Heron, at least, the “crucial step” in linking the five powers is their connection to the balance (a device that is essentially interchangeable with the lever, as each can be constructed with a horizontal bar and a fulcrum point).17 These simple machines might seem to be “wondrous,” but they can still be “integrated into the explanatory framework of natural philosophy” such that the mechanical thinking of antiquity is “still part of a science of nature.”18 Of course, one needs to be careful not to think in terms of a linear narrative when it comes to innovations in mechanical theory, given the complicated history of manuscripts being lost or existing only in various translations. The same holds true when philosophers who appropriated mechanical ideas for their own thinking reached back to various elements of antique mechanics that might not have figured as prominently in contemporary scientific discourse. One could take, for example, the notion that a lever (or balance) in equilibrium is not just acting “against nature”—it is also acting against itself, such that self-opposition is an innate structural feature of the lever in equilibrium. This perspective of the lever, as a figure of self-contained opposition, becomes clearer when visualized as balanced around a fulcrum point, with weights on either side, such as in the following illustration of mechanical scales, sometimes referred to as the “scales of justice”.

16 A. G. Drachmann, The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1983), 81. Also quoted in Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice,” 31. 17 For another historical point of reference, consider Leonardo da Vinci, who “instead of the term lever (lieva), prefers balance—sometimes scale, which for him does not necessarily have equal arms,” Raffaele Pissano and Danilo Capecchi, Tartaglia’s Science of Weights and Mechanics in the Sixteenth Century (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 3. Pissano and Capecchi also note that Leonardo “avoids separate treatments of the lever, balance, wheel, and axle . . . considering all of one type, as defined by the balance” (Pissano and Capecchi, Tartaglia’s Science of Weight and Mechanics). 18 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice,” 17.



Introduction  7

Figure I.1  “Balanced scale of Justice” by Perhelion (2011) is licensed under CC0 1.0. Source: https​://co​mmons​.wiki​media​.org/​wiki/​File:​Balan​ced_s​cale_​of_ Ju​stice​.svg.​ Hans Blumenberg has traced the notion of a “coincidence of opposites” in Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophy to the discussion of the lever in the Mechanical Problems,19 where the lever is derived from the fundamental principle of the circle (the claim Heron later reverses), which the author understood as embodying a tension of opposing directions. Or, to provide another example, when Leibniz explains his principle of sufficient reason, he does so with reference to Archimedes’s treatise, On the Equilibrium of Planes. In that work, Archimedes’s first postulate is that “equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium, and equal weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards the weight which is at the greater distance.”20 Although the mechanical theories of equilibrium and the lever that informed Leibniz’s time had become quite sophisticated, Leibniz reaches back to this first principle: [Archimedes] takes as given that a balance will remain at rest when everything is divided equally on both sides and one attaches

19 Hans Blumenberg, “Neoplatonismen und Pseudoplatonismen in der Kosmologie und Mechanik der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 320. 20 Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes, trans. Sir Thomas Heath (New York: Cosimo, 1897; Reprint 2007), 89.

8  The Lever as Instrument of Reason equal weights to the ends of the lever arms. Then there is in this case no reason, why one side should sink before the other. Only through this principle, that a sufficient reason is necessary, why things behave one way or another, can the godhead be proven, as well as all further metaphysical propositions or natural theology, and even to an extent the physical principles independent of mathematics, the dynamic ones or principles of force.21 Readers will note that Leibniz does not call the principle of sufficient reason a lever, nor does he content himself with a mere comparison. The result is neither a simple metaphor, constructed by a basic act of identification, nor a simile. Instead, one can discern two contexts, one philosophical and the other mechanical, whose relationship can be characterized by a reciprocal explanatory affinity. Leibniz’ lever serves as the illustration or model of a philosophical idea, one where he uses the lever for philosophical “advantage” in order to apply the idea much more broadly.

Aspects of the Lever in Renaissance Mechanics

When gaining a perspective of the history of the lever prior to the eighteenth century, it is also important to acknowledge the fact that the lever, however intuitive its mechanical properties might seem to be, is not necessarily a stable object from an epistemological point of view. The fact that central questions connected to levers were debated well into the Enlightenment suggests that they were not only instruments to be integrated within larger physical and conceptual models: under certain circumstances, they could also acquire the characteristics of “epistemic things” (Rheinberger) in their own right. One of the key questions troubling Renaissance philosophers had to do with whether or not the mechanical principle of the lever should be understood as the

21 I was not able to find a standardized English translation of this passage. Readers might find it useful to consult the German edition (which is a translation of Leibniz’ Latin): “Er [Archimedes, JH] nimmt als zugestanden, daß eine Waage in Ruhe bleiben wird, wenn zu beiden Seiten alles gleich verteilt ist, und man an den Endpunkten der beiden Hebelarme gleiche Gewichte anbringt. Denn es gibt in diesem Falle keinen Grund, weshalb eine Seite eher als die andere sich herabsenken sollte. Einzig durch dieses Prinzip, daß es eines zureichenden Grundes bedarf, weshalb die Dinge sich eher so als anders verhalten, lassen sich die Gottheit und alle übrigen Sätze der Metaphysik oder natürlichen Theologie, ja in gewisser Weise auch die von der Mathematik unabhängigen physikalischen Prinzipien, d.h. die dynamischen oder die Kraftprinzipien beweisen,” Gottfried Leibniz, Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, part 1, vol. 3, ed. Ernst Cassirer, trans. Artur Buchenau (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), 85.



Introduction  9 basis for the other simple machines. As mentioned above, the opinion of Pappus of Alexandria was that one can find in the lever a unifying principle or “common denominator” that would connect it to other simple machines, such as the wedge or the pulley.22 This idea gained some traction in the Renaissance, most notably through the work of Guidobaldo dal Monte. Domenico Meli relates how dal Monte helped popularize the work of Archimedes and Pappus of Alexandria and how, in the preface of his Mechanicorum liber (Book of Mechanics) from 1577, he vowed to describe the properties underlying the balance “in order that my whole work might be more easily built up from its foundation to its very top.”23 Another important text from Renaissance mechanics was the Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences of Galileo Galilei. The “two sciences” of the title are statics (the science of bodies in resting equilibrium, which relies upon the law of the lever) and the science of motion. In their commentary of Galileo’s Discourses, Arkady Plotnitsky and David Reed emphasize that these sciences “are as much technological as they are natural,” and that means both “pure” and “applied” sciences of statics and motion.24 Their reading also underscores the way in which Galileo’s thinking about the lever relies upon a translation of the physical object into geometric terms. The lever “provides a geometric configuration or figure . . . that interprets or realizes the mathematical concept of ratio in the measurement of moments of heavy bodies.”25 The point of view of the character Salviati demonstrates the way in which a “geometric representation of a physical object can be used to make a mathematical argument,” a point of view that Galileo affirms using the lever.26 The lever thus becomes paradigmatic for an act of translation between laws associated with natural phenomena and their geometric representations, which enable us to visualize the concepts at hand. Benvenuto has also described the

22 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects. The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 27. 23 Dal Monte quoted in Meli, Thinking with Objects, 24. 24 Arkady Plotnitsky and David Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science in Galileo’s Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences,” in Configurations 9.1 (2001): 40. 25 Plotnitsky and Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration,” 52. See also Pissano and Capecchi, who note that “In Le mecaniche Galileo introduced a concept and a term, that of moment (momento), that will be of great fortune and adopted, at least in Italy, until the early nineteenth century” (Pissano and Capecchi, Tartaglia’s Science of Weight and Mechanics, 175). 26 Plotnitsky and Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science,” 53.

10  The Lever as Instrument of Reason particular position of the field of statics as existing “between physical research and pure mathematics.”27 He reminds us that, historically, the principles of statics have two attributes: they are “propositions with empirical relevance” and “theorems of a deductive system whose axioms were so immediate as to require no specific confirmation,” like the intuition that accompanies the observation of a lever or balance with equal weights equidistance from the fulcrum.28 The following chapters contain numerous examples of how this basic idea associated with the lever—its ability to translate between the empirical and the theoretical—is retained when the lever is imported from classical mechanics into other areas of thought. For all that dal Monte and Galileo worked to secure the lever’s position, however, other philosophers and mathematicians were equally invested in its “dethronement.”29 Descartes wrote that “it is a ridiculous thing to want to use the law of the lever for the pulley, as Guidobaldo convinced himself he should do,” and readers of Descartes, such the French mathematician Pierre Varignon, took up the cause for a “more abstract principle” underlying the simple machines of the inclined plane, pulley, and screw.30 Benvenuto describes the problem as a tension between “power” and “act”: either “to focus one’s attention on power” or “to concentrate on the actual motion of the mobile body.”31 He reminds us that the quest undertaken by Pierre Varignon and others to define more general mechanical principles that did not privilege a particular instrument led to the adoption of the principle of virtual velocities formulated by Jacob Bernoulli in a letter to Pierre Varignon dating from January 26, 1717. In the Nouvelle mécanique (New mechanics), Varignon refers to the contents of the letter when he writes that Bernoulli, “after having defined there what he meant by the word energy . . . declared to me that in every equilibrium of forces whatsoever, in whatever way they are applied to one another, either indirectly or directly, the sum of positive energies will be equal to the sum of negative energies, taken

27 Edouardo Benvenuto, An Introduction to the History of Structural Mechanics: Statics and Resistance of Solids (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1991), 14. 28 Benvenuto, An Introduction, 14. 29 Benvenuto, An Introduction, 67. 30 See Meli, Thinking with Objects, 303. For Meli, it is significant that Varignon’s critique of dal Monte occurs in conjunction with the publication of the Principia Mathematica: he sees a connection between Newton’s rejection of visual analogies between projected and orbiting bodies and Dal Monte’s quest for a “more abstract principle” (Meli, Thinking with Objects). 31 Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 67–68.



Introduction 

11

positively.”32 Varignon’s definition of virtual velocities is taken directly from Bernoulli’s letter: Given several forces acting in various directions that hold in equilibrium a point, a line, a surface or a body, let us imagine applying to the whole system of these forces a slight movement, either parallel to itself in any one direction or around any one fixed point. It is easy to see that, because of this movement, each of the forces will go forward or backward in its own direction, unless the direction of the slight movement is perpendicular to one of the forces . . . [These] advances and withdrawals are what I call virtual velocity.33 Although the details of the debates that centered around the principle of virtual velocity and the related notion of virtual work go beyond the scope of the present study, one point of interest here is that the state of equilibrium is conceived of without any reference to a lever, whether as a physical body or a geometrical representation. The most important question is not what the implications are for the history of mechanics, but rather, and more narrowly, how the advent of the principle of virtual velocities changes the way in which the mechanical “object” of the lever as well as the mechanical law associated with it are conceived of and used in philosophical arguments. In his discussion of Vincenzo Riccati’s “universal principle of statics,” Benvenuto describes how for Riccati the “law of the lever” itself was “only an instrument, useful in research” but which “lacks intrinsic value as a foundation because it is only a consequence of the general principle.”34 An analogous turn of phrase is used to describe Lagrange’s work on the mechanical pulley (or “poliplaste”), when Benvenuto writes that that Lagrange “frees this object from its material existence and turns it into a pure instrument of thought” in the Mécanique analytique (Analytical Mechanics).35 It would seem, then, that the question of lever’s “usefulness,”— regardless of whether it is understood as a mechanical or geometric object—is perhaps not as straightforward as one would think. I argue that what is described above as a lack—whereby the law of the lever becomes “only” an instrument, once it is dethroned as a fundamental principle for the field of statics—ultimately becomes a gain for other areas of scientific research. One of the most striking things about the

32 33 34 35

Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 89. Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 89. Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 94. Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 95.

12  The Lever as Instrument of Reason law of the lever is the degree to which it could be deployed across vast scales. The same age that brought us the most intricate automata, such as the mechanical musicians constructed by the Droz brothers, whose near microscopic levers required the use of a clockmaker’s loupe in order to see, also witnessed the lever used to describe laws of planetary motion.36 These innovations are connected by the workings of the lever, which astronomers such as Borelli and Kepler used to draft their blueprints of the heavens.37 The fact that the lever and its mechanical laws become topics of interest for other fields however— such as philosophy, literature, and psychology—raises a new range of questions. To what degree are these areas of thought changed by the introduction of mechanical concepts? And, conversely, what happens to the lever when it is adapted into these unfamiliar environments?

What a Lever Can Be

One of the challenges an investigation into the lever poses is how to navigate between the vagaries of historical example—the ways in which levers have been deployed as models in extra-mechanical discourses— and those contemporary theoretical perspectives that may be useful for making connections between the historical roles levers play in various contexts. It is one thing to analyze the mechanical laws associated with the lever in the writings of Galileo or Varignon, for example, but quite something else to describe a lever when it is being used heuristically in a different theoretical context altogether, as shown in the case of Leibniz and his definition of “sufficient reason,” or, Benvenuto’s assessment of the lever as “useful in research” for the mechanical theorists of the Renaissance. To give just a brief example of how varied the metaphorical terrain can be, one could take the historical example of Pierre Massuet, who prefers to speak of levers in terms of êtres de raison (beings of reason) in his Elements of Modern Philosophy (1752),38 whereas the psychologist Johann Herbart chooses Gedankending (thought-thing), a term popularized by Idealist philosophy that takes on its own idiosyncratic meaning in Herbart’s writings.39 What kind of descriptive or theoretical

36 Readers interested in this aspect of eighteenth-century mechanics can consult Simon Schaffer’s essay, “Enlightened Automata” in the volume, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. 37 “Several scholars, including Kepler, Descartes, Borelli, and Leibniz, used the lever in their accounts of circular and orbital motion” (Meli, Thinking with Objects, 312). 38 Pierre Massuet, Elemens [sic] de la Philosophie moderne, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Chatelain et fils, 1752), 264. 39 Johann Herbart, Schriften zur Psychologie 3, ed. G. Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1851), 367.



Introduction  13 language would be most appropriate for navigating between the lever as being and thing, a creature of reason and thought? One can contrast those examples against the work of the historian of science Domenico Meli or the philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Meli refers to the lever as a philosophical and mathematical instrument and, more descriptively, as a “tool of investigation.”40 He also taps into the notion of the lever as an innately translatable object when he describes “creative and fertile applications of the lever” that could be both “conceptual and mathematical.”41 Hans Blumenberg, for his part, puts his finger on the ineffable quality of the lever when he describes a kind of “hybrid space” within which the lever functions. With reference to one of Galileo’s dialogues, Blumenberg comments that the simplicity of devices [Geräte] such as the lever and balance is such that they approach the “pure conditions” required for mathematical representation. The common factor among them—which Blumenberg refers to as highly “artificial” (perhaps with reference to the suggestion found in the Mechanical Problems that they operate “against nature,”)—is that something small moves something big. These objects, he suggests, occupy a hybrid space between mathematics and physics: the objects involved are physical, and the method of describing them is mathematical.42 This theoretical description of a “hybrid space” will prove useful when, in later chapters, it comes time to analyze the ways in which levers as “thought-things” are being mobilized, and to what end. Another fruitful axis of comparison that connects historical descriptions of the lever to more contemporary theoretical language centers around analogies between the lever and the human body. As noted in the opening paragraph, the boundary conditions between the human and the technical are open to debate, and nowhere is this more the case than in those instances in which the lever itself is anthropomorphized and in which the human body itself is associated with the lever. With regard to the former, one could take as a historical example Jacob Leupold’s Theatrum Machinarum Generale. Leupold refers to the longer arm of the lever as the “head” and the shorter arm as the “tongue.”43 In other words, the lever, that most primitive of instruments, is described as a monument to the human faculties of thought and language. The notion of the “body” of the lever appears

40 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 234. 41 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 312. 42 Hans Blumenberg, Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 484–85. 43 Jacob Leupold, Theatrum Machinarum Generale, Schauplatz des Grundes mechanischer Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Christoph Zunckel, 1724), 8.

14  The Lever as Instrument of Reason in various contexts. In specialized levers, such as ones that were specifically used for “loading” and “packing,” the relationship of head and tongue might be reversed. Thus, in Krünitz’s Economic Encyclopedia “the short round part” is the head and the “longer part” is the tongue, a state of affairs that comes complete with a piece of mechanical wisdom almost proverbial in its tone: “Therefore, the larger the head of the lever is, the more capacity one has to master a burden.”44 Even though the dominant association of the lever and the human body is usually one where levers are part of the human body (i.e., when we understand our arms or legs as levers), this second understanding, whereby the lever itself is understood in terms of the human body and as an illustration of ars superat naturam, has an important role to play in my study. Readers should keep this perspective of the lever as body in mind when they come to the second chapter, because it will help contextualize German Romanticism’s more radical claims that the lever—and its fulcrum point—are equated with the ego. I would also like to make it clear from the beginning that this inquiry into the theoretical use of levers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries outside of classical mechanics is neither focused on modernity’s fascination with automata, nor is it concerned with the technologies and discourses on prosthetics that developed in the wake of increasingly devastating acts of warfare. That is well-traveled terrain— there are numerous writings on automata and prosthetics to which interested readers can refer.45 Instead, I focus on a historical tendency to understand certain aspects of being human, such as making judgments, thinking, or organizing concepts, in terms of the activity of the lever. To frame this problem and provide an example from a contemporary theoretical perspective familiar to most readers, Jacques Derrida’s 1990 essay “Mochlos, ou le conflit des facultés” (Mochlos, or the conflict of the faculties), is a useful point of reference. Though Derrida is not the first name that comes to mind when thinking about the theoretical discussions that incorporate mechanical terms, mochlos is the Greek word for lever and Derrida refers to it directly in the last paragraphs of his essay. The main thrust of his argument has to do not with mechanics but with a different kind of positioning and leveraging: the responsibility of the academic with regard to the university. Eventually, however, he calls out for “a new university

44 Johann Georg Krünitz, Oekonomisch-technologische Encyclopädie, vol. 44 (Berlin: Joachim Pauli, 1788), s.v. “Kopf,” 3. 45 One of the few studies devoted almost entirely to the eighteenth century is Alison Muri’s, The Enlightenment Cyborg (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2011).



Introduction  15 law” based on the existing, “traditional law” that will “provide, on its own foundational soil, a support for leaping to another place.”46 Derrida continues: We might say that the difficulty will consist, as always, in determining the best lever, what the Greeks would call the best mochlos. A mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing a boat, a wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in short, to lean on for forcing and displacing. When one asks how to be oriented in history, morality or politics, the most serious discords and decisions have to do less often with ends, it seems to me, than with levers.47 In this passage, Derrida makes an analogy between the endpoints of the lever and the political ideologies of “left” and “right,” but—after a detour through Heidegger—it is the lever of the body, articulated through a quotation from Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, that claims the final word of the essay: The fact that Prussian infantrymen are trained to start out with the left foot confirms, rather than refutes, this assertion [i.e., the assertion that the right foot has the advantage over the left J.H.]; for they put this foot in front, as on a hypomochlium, in order to use the right side for the impetus of the attack, which they execute with the right foot against the left.48 Derrida—and Kant—go beyond a simple alignment of man and simple machine, of human and lever, in order to implicate the human body within acts that are at the same time physical and concerned with foundations and structures of law and power. The lever, as understood here, is not contained within the human body, where joints are usually understood as the fulcrum points for arms and legs. Instead, the body as (total) lever seeks its fulcrum point at the interface of the human with its environment. Through the complete overlapping of the physical interface of body and ground and the theoretical interface of human ideologies, we are reminded of Blumenberg’s notion of a “hybrid space” that levers have historically inhabited, and that more contemporary

46 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand, trans. Amy Wygant (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1992), 19. 47 Derrida, “Mochlos.” 48 Derrida, “Mochlos,” 20.

16  The Lever as Instrument of Reason reflections on the lever seem to do as well. Derrida’s comments on the fulcrum point, or hypomochlion, also remind us that for as long as there have been theoretical reflections about levers, philosophers have also pondered the notion of the lever’s resting place. The history of the lever—in particular, its history as thought-thing—cannot be separated from the history of the Archimedean point. The following section will sketch out the historical parameters of this idealized point, which has actively participated in expanding the borders of knowledge and sovereignty in the modern era.

Where to Put Your Lever: The Archimedean Point

The above pages have provided a brief overview of the lever’s practical and theoretical importance in antiquity and the Renaissance and emphasized the lever’s extreme. I have also introduced a few of the fundamental ideas associated with the lever, such as its connection to the body and the “hybrid” space it occupies between mathematics and physics, each of which will be elaborated in greater detail in the course of the following chapters. The question has also arisen of how, precisely, to refer to the lever in the context of this study. Clearly, its instrumental value should not be underestimated. After all, the lever responds to fundamental philosophical questions and has demonstrated its potential to be the instrument of knowledge-building par excellence. The lever does not usually appear in isolation, however. It is part of a larger conceptual “apparatus” that includes the mechanical moment, the state of equilibrium, and of course the fulcrum point (also known as the hypomochlion, literally that which “rests beneath” the lever). The lever’s conceptual apparatus also includes an idealized version of the fulcrum known as the Archimedean point, which is traditionally associated with an extreme demonstration of the lever’s mechanical advantage—the ability to displace the world itself. The Archimedean point provides the most intuitive example of how the lever is useful beyond the field of mechanics. This section will outline a few of the most prominent moments in the history of this special point as well as its connection to those aspects of the lever noted above. If the history of the lever could be said to have a mantra, it would probably be this: give me a firm point, and I will move the world, an English equivalent of the famous dos moi pou sto associated with Archimedes. To this day, these words continue to refer back to an original scene which likely has never taken place.49 Still, if there is a foundational moment to

49 Plutarch, recounting the life of the Roman general Marcellus, allows for a digression in order to relate a few anecdotes from the life of Archimedes, whose own life is inseparable from the history of mechanics. In the face of a



Introduction  17 the myth of Archimedes—foundational also in the literal sense that the promised firm point from which to move the earth is itself given a solid basis of exposition—then it is the moment when the mathematician single-handedly pulls a fully laden ship from the water. According to some accounts, this ship was the Syracusia.50 It was no ordinary one, but rather a world unto itself, complete with baths, horse stalls, sumptuous chambers, and a court of law for the king. And although historians are undecided as to whether the lever effect was achieved by a simple machine, a complex system of pulleys, another device altogether, or if it even occurred at all, the story contains a simple constellation that can provide a point of reference for future meditations on the Archimedean point. It sets up the juxtaposition of land and sea as a promise of the firm ground of knowledge and mathematical truth as opposed to the vicissitudes of epistemological uncertainty. It also sets the stage for a question that will ultimately haunt anyone who tries to claim Archimedes’s point—in other words, any theorist who, to paraphrase Hans Blumenberg, prefers a divine perspective to the alternative of bathing in the immediacy and banality of life: namely, the question of a subject’s standpoint in relation to his or her own knowledge.51 Archimedes, the Syracusan, dislodges the Syracusia—itself a model of the political and cultural environment in which he inhabits—from the water before (again, according to legend) suggesting that a firm point is all he would need to dislodge the earth itself from its axis. Modernity’s irritation with this claim led to many mathematical proofs

philosophical “contempt” of mechanics, Archimedes shows king Hiero that a mechanical demonstration can be a powerful illustration of a theoretical concept: that something “great” could be moved by a lesser force. “Archimedes, who was a relative and friend of Hiero, wrote that with a given power he could move any given weight whatever, and, as it were rejoicing in the strength of his demonstration, he is said to have declared that if he were given another world to stand upon, he could move this upon which we live.” It is not at all certain, however, whether the device was a lever or a simple machine such as the pulley that relies on the same principle of mechanical advantage: “Hiero wondered at this, and begged him to put his theory into practice, and show him something great moved by a small force. Archimedes took a three-masted ship, a transport in the king’s navy, which had just been dragged up on land with great labour and many men; in this he placed her usual complement of men and cargo, and then sitting at some distance, without any trouble, by gently pulling with his hand the end of a system of pullies, he dragged it towards him with as smooth and even a motion as if it were passing over the sea,” Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 2, ed. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2007), 31. 50 See John W. Humphrey, John P. Oleson, and Andrew N. Sherwood, Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 458. 51 Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014), 89.

18  The Lever as Instrument of Reason from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century that challenged its practicality, ultimately leading to disavowals that a so-called Archimedean point can even exist. This irritation occurs at the same time as the position of the self with regard to its philosophical endeavors is increasingly called into question in the wake of Cartesian philosophy. Bruno Latour describes Archimedes’s lifting of a ship as perhaps “the oldest public scientific experiment,” one that played an important role in the relations between rulers and scientists.52 His analysis describes four “reversals of forces”: that a single person could theoretically move the world; that “the power of a mathematical demonstration is greater than all other contrary . . . evidence”; that a simple, well-designed piece of machinery can change the face of the earth; that a “little bit of abstract reasoning” can be even more valuable than actual achievements; and lastly, that a powerful tale such as this one has a staying power despite historical evidence to the contrary.53 Michel Authier argues along similar lines as Latour, focusing on the engagement of science and politics in this story. He also makes an important connection to another (lost) text by Archimedes titled Grains of Sand. In this text, Archimedes calculated how many grains it would take to fill the volume of the universe. The question in this context is also how to manipulate the largest quantity (in this case, through imagining a number greater than the one which existed at the time in Greek thought, the “myriad of myriads” or 100,000,000).54 There is a trajectory here that crosses orders of magnitude in space, from grain of sand, to ship, to world, to universe. If it is clear that the history of the Archimedean point is inextricably linked to that of the lever, it should be equally evident that this history is much more than a simple fiction, or anecdote. As much as it is defined by the repetition of words that were never spoken in the first place and by the search for a fulcrum point that never quite materializes, it has gained status over time by being coupled with one of the definitive problems of modernity: the quest for a firm base of knowledge. This quest can be connected to various theoretical positions as well as to historical contexts in which the Archimedean point seems particularly well suited, such as in the epoch when the notion of a “new world” occupied the European imagination. Georg Harsdörffer

52 Bruno Latour, “The Force and Reason of Experiment,” in Experimental Inquiries, Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. Homer Le Grand (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 49. 53 Latour, “The Force and Reason of Experiment,” 50–51. 54 Michel Authier, “Archimède: Le canon du savant,” in Éléments d’histoire des sciences, ed. Michel Serres et al. (Paris: Larousse, 1997), 109.



Introduction  19 relates of the satirical poet “Euphormio” (i.e., Euphormionis, the pen name of English writer John Barclay), that he “compares the king of Spain with this Archimedes, who found the new world—that is, a place beyond our world—and was able to move it by using golden levers.”55 The geopolitical and philosophical uses of the Archimedean point are not necessarily distinct, however. The German philosopher Adam Weishaupt, in his On Kantian Intuitions and Phenomena (1788), refers to the Archimedean point when he describes the discovery of “a transcendental America” (ein übersinnliches Amerika) whose existence owes itself to our ability to posit a sphere beyond intellectual intuitions, that is, beyond the phenomenal world.56

The Lever, the Archimedean Point, and the Construction of Knowledge

Like the lever, the Archimedean point enjoys an amazing degree of discursive mobility. Both are implicated in those contexts when what is at stake is the grounding of knowledge. In modernity, this quest evolves as a bifurcated narrative, where attempts to define a firm point upon which to ground one’s knowledge and build a philosophical system are coupled with growing skepticism toward the self-same project. From a distance, all Archimedean points might appear more or less the same, but a closer look reveals that each is situated in a particular intellectual landscape. One of the most dramatic changes in terrain occurs when the point ceases to be external to the agent wielding the lever and instead is conceived of as an “interiorized” hypothetical point. Descartes is a special case in this regard. On the one hand, the interiorization of the point is implicit, because what is at stake is the certainty of knowledge: “Archimedes claimed, that if only he had a point that was firm and immovable, he would move the whole earth, and great things are likewise to be hoped, if I can find just one little thing that is certain and unshakeable.”57 The metaphorical language of the Meditations is not quite aligned with the philosophical language, however. When Descartes refers to his own situation, he describes himself in “a deep whirlpool” with purchase neither below nor above as he seeks just one certain thing.58

55 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae Mathematicae et Physicae, vol. 2, Deliciae Mathematicae et Physicae (Nürnberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter and the heirs of Johann Andreae Endter, Senior, 1677), 385. 56 Adam Weishaupt, Über die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen (Nürnberg: Grattenau, 1788), 91. 57 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17. 58 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.

20  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Philosophical skepticism with regard to the certain thing Descartes seeks and believes to find in the cogito—as well as with regard to the Archimedean point—takes many different forms. On the one hand, there are those critics who try to prove mathematically that such a point is either impossible or so unrealistic to attain as to be completely unfeasible. Consider, for example, Alexandre Savérien’s entry on the lever (le levier) from his Dictionnaire universel de mathématique et de physique (Universal Dictionary of Mathematics and Physics) from 1754. After a few admiring words about the mechanical advantage associated with the lever, he gets down to the business of calculating just how long a lever one would need to move the earth: “I think one will see with pleasure the determination of this length”: The force of a man who presses on a body is estimated to be 100 pounds, and the weight of the earth 39984700118074464789750 pounds. Let us place this weight at the end of a lever at the distance of 2000 leagues from the point of contact [i.e., the fulcrum point]. The person or power would have to be at a distance of 3997847001180744647897500 from the point of contact in order to lift the earth. Lifting it a mile, the pressure traverses a distance of 666307833530107441316 leagues & ¼.59 Savérien neglects to explain how he comes up with the “weight” of the world—he would have to answer the question: in whose gravitational field is this weight being calculated? Ultimately, the value of his calculation lies in the pleasure it provides to the imagination—the experimental scenario he describes is remarkably short on logistical detail as well as other, more theoretical concerns. In comparison to Savérien, the French literary figure Edouard Charton seems more cognizant of these problems. Charton, whose lever is conceptualized with somewhat different dimensions in mind, has calculated that “it would take three thousand years in order to move the earth the millionth part of a millimeter” and that one would need to increase the lever arm somewhat in order to take into account “the force of attraction that

59 La force d’un homme qui presse sur un corps est estimée 100 livres, & le poids de la terre 39984700118074464789750. Plaçons ce poids au bout d’un Lévier à la distance de 2000 lieues du point d’appui. Il faudra que la personne ou la puissance soit éloigné du point d’appui de 3997847001180744647897500 [sic] lieues pour soulever la terre. En l’élevant d’un mille la puissance parcourt l’espace de 666307833530107441316 [sic] lieues & ¼.” See Alexandre Savérian, Dictionnaire universel de mathématique et de physique, vol. 2 (Paris: Jacques Rollin, 1753), s. v. “Levier,” 63.



Introduction  21 tends to pull the earth toward the sun.”60 Then there are those, such as Andrew Motte, whose attention is more focused on the potential limits of the materials involved: “An Engine framed for that Purpose [i.e., to displace the earth, J.H.], would operate so very slowly, that not only Archimedes, but the Earth itself, would come to an End, before the Effect would be in the least sensible.”61 Most philosophers and mathematicians did not take Archimedes quite so literally. More in the tradition of Descartes, they used the Archimedean point as the fixed and certain point of an epistemology directed toward the reliability of knowledge itself, even if this goes against the Archimedean tradition. Schelling summarizes the problem succinctly, without pointing to a solution, with his observation that “Archimedes demands a firm point beyond the world. To want to find it theoretically (that means, in the world itself) is absurd.”62 By the same token, there is a well-documented history of disagreement with Schelling’s statement. One could instead refer to German Romanticism’s own appropriation of the Archimedean point as essential to the process of observing one’s thoughts and the manifold relations of the self. A fragment from Novalis’s General Brouillon connects Archimedes’s proverbial call for a fixed point to the formation of an “independent organ” of observation, one which would witness not only the phenomena of nature per se, but also the formations, changes, and mixtures of thoughts and images that are inspired by them.63 The early German Romantics imagine the fixed point as a paradoxical organ of observation capable of assessing and encompassing change, internal to and yet independent of the subject. After 1800, philosophers return to the question of what service the failed project of the Archimedean point might be, time and again, and with increasing urgency. We have Niklas Luhmann to thank for putting

60 Anonymous, “De la vie et des ouvrages d’Archimède,” in Le magasin pittoresque, ed. Edouard Charton (Paris, 1838), 150. 61 Andrew Motte, A Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, wherin the Laws of Motion, and the Properties of Those Powers Are Explained and Demonstrated in an Easie and Familiar Method (London: Benjamin Motte, 1727), 153–54. 62 “Archimed verlangt einen festen Punkt ausser der Welt. Diesen theoretisch (d.h. in der Welt selbst) finden zu wollen, ist widersinnig.” The quote is from Friedrich Schelling’s early work, “Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre,” written in 1796 and 1797. In Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, part 1, vol. 1, ed. Karl Friedrich August von Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856), 343–542, 400. 63 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Richard Samuel with Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln, Mainz: W. Kohlhammer, 1981), 421. Further references from this edition will be listed by volume, page number, and, when relevant, aphorism number.

22  The Lever as Instrument of Reason his finger on a problem already present in German Romanticism’s statements on the point: that of self-implication. For Luhmann, even the most powerful articulations of the subject as Archimedean point cannot escape a logic of recursion that prohibits any possible perspective external to the system within which a subject is defined: like Kierkegaard, he can circumnavigate himself without moving in any way beyond himself. In Luhmann’s writing, the modern loss of an Archimedean point requires a fundamental rethinking both of epistemology and of sociology. When asked if sociology could offer an Archimedean point from where to describe all of society, he responded that today it is no longer possible to imagine such an outside for the observation of the whole, sociology being no exception.64 In order to illustrate how a critical approach to the Archimedean point can be theoretically productive, I would like to mention just one example discussed by Hans Blumenberg in Care Crosses the River. This work unfolds as a series of short prose pieces, philosophical meditations unframed by either a preface or an afterword, leaving the reader to navigate the flotsam of section titles running the gamut from “Maritime Emergencies” to “Fundamental Differences.” The latter section contains two references to the Archimedean point in the context of the science of knowledge, in essays titled “The Building Site” and “On Board.” In each case, the point is embedded within a broader concern of epistemological certainty and uncertainty. Blumenberg frames “The Building Site” in terms of a philosophical interest in the question of foundations. The question, to what degree a proposed building site’s suitability for the raising of architectural structures can serve as a topos for philosophical thinking, can be traced from the first extensions of the Cartesian into the twentieth century. The extension of the Cartesian cogito into space (and, implicitly, the positing of the cogito as the Archimedean firm point) as well as the philosophical systems of idealism are indebted to this conceit, but in the early twentieth century such figurative relations are increasingly called into question. Blumenberg cites the philosophical debates of the Vienna Circle. His chief example is Moritz Schlick’s essay, “Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis” (On the Foundation of Knowledge) from 1934, which is one of the last attempts to fight the proverbial tide by (re-)establishing the firm ground of knowledge, even though this very insistence also

64 For more information about how systems theory can offer further theoretical insight on the Archimedean point, readers should consult Edgar Landgraf’s essay “Circling the Archimedean Viewpoint. Observations of Physiology in Nietzsche and Luhmann,” in The Archimedean Point: From Fixed Positions to the Limits of Theory, special edition of SubStance 43.3 (2014): 88–106.



Introduction  23 brands the project as intellectually conservative. Schlick’s work was, according to Blumenberg, behind the times for its insistence on “groundwork” when other more appropriate metaphors are available to describe structures of knowledge. What are the alternatives? “Net” is a possibility, according to Blumenberg, although its full potential will only be exploited years later. Otto Neurath’s revival of the encyclopedia is offered as a more viable alternative mode of collecting knowledge. The reference here is to the “Unity of Science” movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences, a series of monographs that eventually included both Neurath’s Foundations of the Social Sciences and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Blumenberg also writes about the “institution” of the encyclopedia in the context of the twentieth century more generally in a passage from The Legitimacy of the Modern Age where he refers to it with regard to the problem of how to speak about science without, on some level, also performing science: While we know more about the world than we ever did before, this “we” does not by any means mean “I.” The “we” of this statement confronts the “I” only in the form of institutions—of encyclopedias, academies, universities. These represent higherlevel agencies [Übersubjekte] that administer knowledge about reality in space and time and organize its growth.65 One could, perhaps, understand these Übersubjekte as the captains of what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “Archimedean platforms” in the sense that they are collectives of historically situated agencies who respond “in space and time” to conditions on the ground, were it not for Neurath’s bleak assessment of science in its individual and institutional manifestations with which Blumenberg concludes the “The Building Site.” Channeling Neurath, Blumenberg comments: “The condition of Archimedes, which had understandably already appeared to Neurath as unrealizable, also meant the theoretical unattainable: ‘We do not have a stable point from which we could turn the earth upside down: and, in the same way, we have no absolutely solid ground upon which we could erect the sciences.’”66 With reference to the IX International Congress of Philosophy in Paris of 1937, Blumenberg also quotes Neurath as saying, “We have no absolute foundation from which we can proceed. . . . Science in all its aspects is always under discussion.

65 Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace. Reprint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 238. 66 Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 74.

24  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Everything flows.”67 With these words, the problem addressed in Blumenberg’s essay receives its clearest statement: in the end, one is pulled back into the Heraclitan floodwaters. As it turns out, however, the question of on what ground one establishes a theoretical basis of knowledge is still relevant. Blumenberg’s decision to conclude the essay with the quotation is itself a silent declaration. The lack of a closing frame in his essay is tantamount to the relinquishing of narrative purchase. By allowing the quotation to speak for itself, Blumenberg leaves it an open question, to what extent the further qualification or leveraging of this sentiment is possible.

The Lever and Its Point: Constructing a Conceptual Apparatus

Although the case studies that inform The Lever as Instrument of Reason are situated historically in the decades before and after 1800, the above reflection on the Archimedean point should show that there are broader questions to be addressed, both concerning the relationship of the lever and its resting place to the construction of knowledge, and to the difficulties involved in positioning the lever relative to ourselves. Questions such as these demand an approach to the study of the mechanical lever and its fulcrum point that differ from the concerns and methodology of a traditional history of science. The distinction Joseph Vogl makes in the introduction to his Poetologien des Wissens [poetologies of knowledge], with reference to Foucault, is worth echoing today due to the pervasiveness of often conservative disciplinary biases: “A history of knowledge is not a history of science” because it remains critical of claims made in the name of scientific rationality and traditional narratives of the history of early modern knowledge.68 I would like to underscore the fact that the following chapters, though attuned to particular contexts in which the individual authors were working, do not purport to write a history of science, nor have they been written using a conventional historical methodology. It is rather my belief that an interdisciplinary project such as this one, which studies examples from philosophical, literary, and psychological texts, needs a more flexible approach. To be sure, disciplinary distinctions are not simply to be ignored, but neither should they be prohibitive. Christian Kassung’s study of the pendulum is a good point of reference in several regards. In The Pendulum. A History of Knowledge, he constructs a model or conceptual apparatus whose fundamental elements are comprised

67 Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River. 68 Joseph Vogl, “Introduction,” in Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1999), 10–11.



Introduction  25 of the terms circle, pendulum, and number, because “they mark the gravitational center of that knowledge that emerges in the pendulum in the most varied forms.”69 For Kassung, the replacement of a history of science with a history of knowledge is an important step because the kind of work he wishes to accomplish requires, as he explains, a “de-teleologisation” (Entteleologisierung) of historical genealogies of knowledge in favor of “focusing on the concrete materiality and practice of the construction of knowledge.”70 Kassung is more interested in a material history of the pendulum and its connection to symbolic order than I am to a material history of the lever, but to some degree his argument is still transferable to my project. The levers in question do not have to “work” in a positive scientific sense to be of theoretical interest (and value) for the discourses in which they participate. By remaining attuned to the function of the lever in various contexts, to the linguistic environment in which it is embedded, and to the theoretical concerns that cause its appearance in the first place, it is possible to observe surprising points of overlap between thinkers usually thought to have little in common. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Lichtenberg once wrote, in the notes of his Waste Books, that “among all heuristic lifting devices [Hebezeugen], none is more fearsome than that which I have called paradigms.”71 This study responds to Lichtenberg’s idea by studying the ability of the specific lifting device known as the lever to function more generally as a model of thought. In this concluding section of the introduction, I will provide some background to justify my decision to focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, outline my approach and specify which questions in particular this study will address, as well as give an overview of the four chapters that comprise the case studies of this project. As we have seen, the lever is both a very simple object, a tool used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks of lifting and balancing, and one whose mechanical law was foundational to the field of statics through the Renaissance. I have also provided evidence of the lever’s ability to cross physical scale and to prove itself relevant to

69 Christian Kassung, Das Pendel. Eine Wissensgeschichte (Paderborn, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 11. 70 Kassung, Das Pendel, 23. Kassung gives the example of two pendula associated with Jean Bernard Foucault: the first, found in his own house; the second, the famous “Foucault pendulum” that demonstrates the rotation of the earth. Kassung suggests that only the second is considered successful in a positivistic sense, but both are interesting for a history of knowledge: “An apparat, which has never functioned, can become the central Aussagesystem of an archaeology of knowledge” (Kassung, Das Pendel). 71 Georg Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1975), 455.

26  The Lever as Instrument of Reason both terrestrial and celestial mechanics. Not one of these phenomena, however, suffices to explain why, in the years around 1800, there is a proliferation of levers outside of traditional scientific contexts. Jean de Groot, in an essay on “Motion and Energy,” has noted that “what is remarkable about the long history of ancient mechanics is that a few basic principles . . . remained central even as mechanics moved away from theoretical formulations,” and he cites “Archimedes’s law of the lever” as a prime example for how “there is something basic about kinematic principles that keeps them freshly appearing in the history of science.”72 As of yet, though, no one has investigated the parallel observation that the same phenomenon holds true in areas of inquiry that, at first glance, have nothing to do with classical mechanics. Why, for example, is it advantageous for Kant, in his 1763 essay on negative magnitudes, to use the lever and the concept of equilibrium to explain the process of making moral judgments? Why do the early German Romantic writers Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) rely so much upon the fulcrum and the lever to model their understanding of the subject, as well as use it as a tool for constructing relationships between concepts? Even were one to consider the broader historical backdrop and argue that both the rise of mechanics as a science and the emergence of a “mechanical philosophy” (however disputed the definition of this historical phenomenon might be73) have a role to play, these developments cannot explain the widespread desire to translate the lever into new contexts and use it as an instrument for working through problems that seem to have little connection to mechanics. Such a tendency is even more surprising at a time when organic tropes and modes of explanation were rapidly gaining in popularity, as is the case with German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie.74 Although the research underlying The Lever as Instrument of Reason takes as its point of departure the surprising discovery of the lever’s transdisciplinary rise in popularity around 1800, what connects the

72 Jan de Groot, “Motion and Energy,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, vol. 1, ed. Georgia L. Irby (Chichester, UK; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 57. 73 For a historical overview, see J. A. Bennett’s essay, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science xxiv (1986). Bennett suggests that greater attention be paid to the historical context of mechanical philosophy (i.e., that it was “not solely an intellectual construction”), and that one should also consider to a greater degree contributions made by the “practical mathematical sciences” (Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy,” 24). 74 One can refer to my book, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge, 2009) for further information about this historical trend.



Introduction 

27

individual chapters and gives coherence to the work as a whole are further insights into what functions the lever performs. Even as the lever translates knowledge and mobilizes new ideas among the most diverse disciplines, these acts of translation participate in a common concern to use the lever to model certain problems connected with cognition, intellectual activity, and the ego. In order to see how this is the case, it is important to note that when the lever and the mechanics associated with it are imported into areas of thought as diverse as Kant’s precritical writings, Idealist philosophy, German Romanticism, Naturphilosophie, and empirical psychology, it is no longer simply being used as a metaphor of convenience or rhetorical effect. To be sure, there are numerous “levers of reason” scattered throughout the Enlightenment, just as one can find multiple references to levers of religion and the state. Most of these are just the illustration of a basic idea: the augmentation of human agency. In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, however, I show that in this time period the lever is also being used in more sophisticated (and interesting) ways that share some affinity with Hans Blumenberg’s concept of the “absolute metaphor.” Such metaphors, he writes, have a “conceptually irredeemable expressive function.”75 Glossing a passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Blumenberg finds an understanding of metaphor that points to his notion of an absolute metaphor, where metaphor “is clearly characterized as a model invested with a pragmatic function” and is “a principle not of the theoretical determination of what an object is in itself, but the practical determination of what the idea of it ought to be for us and for the purposive use of it.”76 Such metaphors cannot be reduced to a single concept or antecedent image but rather serve as models. One example, which will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, is Hegel’s definition of Aufhebung (sublation). It is often forgotten that Hegel’s explanation of this concept in the Science of Logic (1812–16) relies directly on the theory associated with the lever (Hebel) and the mechanical moment. Rather than using the lever metaphorically (one will not find any references to a “lever of sublation” in Hegel’s writing), he uses the lever and the mechanical theory associated with it to model the challenge that a philosophical definition and description of Aufhebung presents. One of the difficulties in writing about the lever lies in the fact that it is by no means a stable entity. Over time, philosophers and mathematicians found the law of the lever, which describes it in a state of static equilibrium, intuitively obvious yet difficult to prove. The

75 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 9. 76 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 10.

28  The Lever as Instrument of Reason initial attempts by Archimedes and Aristotle were disputed and revised by influential thinkers through the Enlightenment (including Descartes, de la Hire, Lagrange, and others). They argued about how to provide a mathematically and philosophically sound basis for the seemingly self-evident laws describing the lever and, eventually, whether it should even be seen as the “foundation and pillar” of mechanics.77 Those discussions, which emerged within the context of a widespread critique of the teleological explanations central to Aristotle’s natural philosophy,78 lasted through the end of the eighteenth century and have been described by Benvenuto, Meli, and others. These studies have inspired me to understand the lever as both historically unstable and yet, by the same token, uniquely adaptable, and my readings of Kant, Schlegel, Schelling, and Herbart are attuned to these nuances. I wish to show that the lever has had more influential role to play in the history of knowledge than has usually been recognized. Another important exception can be found in the work of M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, who refer extensively to the lever and balance in their work on the history of economics. The context is an argument about the “rediscovery” of time. In a series of essays gathered under the heading of “Work and Waste,” they argue that in the course of a “transformation of natural philosophy in the 1840s,” “temporality now entered in an essential way into the explanation of natural systems” and that “time was rediscovered.”79 In the years prior (their argument refers to the French Enlightenment and British scientific culture through the 1830s), before the “rediscovery” of time, they suggest, it was the balance that “served as a model of scientific rationality.”80 They refer to the historical use of the balance to explain “economies of nature” in contexts ranging from the solar system to geology, chemistry, biology, and political economy as something that provided an “explanatory strategy” in various ways.81 My work on the lever can be seen as a fine-tuning of

77 Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 76. 78 Descartes, Galileo, and Newton “began to criticize the idea that teleological explanations were appropriate for understanding nature, and advocated in their place explanations that privileged mechanical causation.” See Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature. How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16. 79 M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (I),” History of Science xxvii (1989): 263. 80 M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (II),” History of Science xxvii (1989): 391. 81 They define three aspects, whereby the first identified “an opposition of two forces, labelled ‘natural,’ ‘constant,’ or ‘regular,’ which would produce an



Introduction  29 this perspective, because it discusses numerous examples where time does, in fact, figure into the picture in ways that Wise and Smith might not have anticipated. In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, I also challenge the teleologically based assumption that human history can be defined by the invention of increasingly better tools, an argument that requires both a rethinking of the relationship between tool and agency and a revision of the anthropological model of the tool, which understands it as a substitute limb, in favor of an alternative where the body and tool are one. It is in this collapse that one can also observe the intersection of the two cultural histories, of the lever and the Archimedean point, that inform my project. Just as Blumenberg has argued that our failure to achieve the Archimedean point—the firm ground of knowledge—is unavoidable when one attempts to construct a theory of science from within a scientific mode of thinking, an analogous collapse occurs when the human and lever are one—when it is no longer possible to separate agency and instrumentality. The Lever as Instrument of Reason argues that the potential loss of “firm ground” from which to position oneself as agent is surprisingly productive, resulting in significant, if widely varying, philosophical gain.

Overview of the Chapters

Chapter One, “The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant,” focuses on the precritical essay, “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1763). This might seem like a peculiar choice, given that the essay, at first glance, does not seem to have much to do with mechanics at all. Kant devotes most of the argument to distinguishing between different modes of negation in mathematical terms, using the mathematician Abraham Kästner as a reference point, before turning to the case of psychology (Seelenlehre). As it turns out, the lever has an essential role to play as the concretization and, I argue, fundamental embodiment of “real contradiction” (i.e., one that does not posit a logical impossibility) and active “rest” when in a state of equilibrium. The lever is also what connects the disparate bodies of Kant’s essay: from the Spartan mother torn between pride and devastation, to the learned man whose apparent stillness belies

eternal, timeless stability in the natural state of the system” and the second “distinguished regular variations, or periodic ‘oscillations,’ controlled by the constant natural forces, from irregular variations or ‘fluctuations,’ produced by forces called ‘disturbing’ or ‘accidental’” (Wise and Smith, “Work and Waste (II),” 391). The third invoked analytic tools (such as variational calculus and statistical averaging) for locating the “optimum” (natural or average) state of a particular system (Wise and Smith, “Work and Waste (II)”).

30  The Lever as Instrument of Reason an active mind. With reference to these and other examples, this first chapter offers an eighteenth-century case for the lever’s use to model certain aspects of the human psyche, an idea that will return, vastly reconfigured, in Early Romanticism’s thought experiments, Schelling and Eschenmayer’s Naturphilosophie, and Herbart’s neuro-mechanics. Equally integral to this chapter and the project as a whole is the way in which the lever and, more generally, the concept of equilibrium mediate between material and abstract domains. Chapter Two, “The Levers of German Romanticism,” shifts the focus of the lever as a model of the human from processes of thinking and judgment to constructions of the self. Part of the continued interest in Romantic theory and literature today can be attributed to its ability to undermine the stereotypes that have populated research agendas since the nineteenth century. Familiar descriptions of Romanticism as the cult of irrationality, as pure nostalgia for a hypothetical golden age, and as a purveyor of idealized femininity have, with time, been exposed to more critical treatment. The most recent scholarship has taken up Romanticism’s manifold relationships to scientific thinking, once thought of as beyond its scope. Perhaps the last of Romanticism’s unchallenged concepts is that of organicism. The “organic” has left its mark on almost every aspect of early Romantic thought, from the tropes of its literary works to its aesthetics and its subject theory, and it is a concept that, at first glance, would seem to have little to do with the mechanical. In this chapter, I argue the contrary position and show that, in fact, the lever is deeply ingrained in early Romantic thinking, where its theory serves as a heuristic tool to model relationships between concepts, to describe processes of generation of both the individual and the universe, and, more generally, as a way of addressing potential contradictions of philosophical thinking through the logic of sublation embodied by the lever in equilibrium. The analyses of this chapter are far removed from the mechanical automata of later Romanticism. My study approaches the problem of a “mechanical” human from a very different angle: the second part of the chapter addresses the relation of the lever to early Romantic concepts of the subject to show that it no longer serves as an instrument for the augmentation of human agency in the spirit of Archimedes. Instead, it comes to stand in for the agent itself, such that the subject position and fulcrum point are one. Chapter Three, “The Contested God of Naturphilosophie,” reveals how Friedrich Schelling and Carl Eschenmayer remove the lever from purely mechanical contexts and use it as a model for both the self and the emergence of self-consciousness. For Eschenmayer, the mechanical lever is a way to make physical and psychological phenomena “more visible” (anschaulicher) and he constructs diagrams to make his case. He provides a theoretical basis that enables us to understand how Schelling



Introduction 

31

uses the concept of equilibrium as a bridge between the material and nonmaterial and the lever as a model for the basis for self-consciousness. This chapter also exposes the lever’s surprising role in a heated debate that erupts between Schelling and Eschenmayer around Schelling’s 1809 essay, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. As much as this debate is about God’s relationship to the concepts of “ground” [Grund] and “non-ground” [Ungrund] it is, surprisingly, just as much about the status of the lever. Although Schelling’s position is that the usefulness of the lever and its mechanical theory is “dead” from a nature-philosophical perspective, Eschenmayer counters with its apotheosis as the “god” of the philosophy of nature. The final chapter of the book, “From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology,” confirms that, despite Schelling’s prediction, the lever’s demise is far from certain. Its resurrection takes place in the field of psychology, as witnessed by the central role it plays in what Matthew Bell has called “the two best-known psychological products of Idealism”: Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts (1817) and J. F. Herbart’s Text Book for Psychology (1816).82 These two works go in very different directions: in Eschenmayer’s case, through further thinking about Schelling’s psychology of the absolute, and in Herbart’s, through the application of mathematics to psychology. Herbart, best known for his pedagogical theories, has an avid interest in what he calls the “statics and mechanics of the mind” where the role of the lever is, in his opinion, too obvious to ignore. I show how Herbart uses the lever to develop one of the first mathematically rigorous models of the human mind: a model where the emergence and suppression of thoughts and our cognitive states were understood as quantifiable. In the letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin quoted as the epigraph to this study, one finds embedded the most prominent themes of the following pages, including the lever’s connection to consciousness and thinking and, above all, the way in which it “appears to be everywhere the first.” For Jacobi, it is a contemplation that generates a degree of discomfort that derives, perhaps, from the awareness that the lever is, simply put, an unavoidable component of our worldview. Readers should not be surprised if, after perusing the following pages, they too are left with a heightened awareness of the myriad lever effects that inform our daily activities. It remains a personal decision whether such contemplations inspire unease or simply greater admiration for the way the simplest of mechanical objects remains so fundamental to our existence.

82 Matthew Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature and Thought, 1700– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164.

One The Balance of Life /  Quantifying Kant

This concept can be extended far beyond the limits of the material world.1 Immanuel Kant

Introduction

All too often, it is the fate of simple things to be overlooked. Such is the case of the mechanical lever. We can scarcely live an hour of the day without taking advantage of something that relies on its mechanical laws—leaving, for a moment, the levers of the body and those which function as extensions of the body entirely out of the equation. Yet the lever as such is rarely something that calls attention to itself, perhaps because, pace Archimedes, it is almost always available to us in the guise of something else. The levers that we encounter in our daily lives are better known as scissors, hammers, and bottle openers, each of which operates according to the same principle of mechanical advantage. And if that weren’t enough, the numerous metaphorical incarnations of the lever generate a different kind of clutter: from the eighteenth century onward, many objects conceptually linked to power and manipulation—in any sense of the word—were at some point metaphorically attached to a lever. The political, religious and philosophical texts of the nineteenth century are littered with ideological levers of all kinds, including the levers of reason, morality, intelligence, and the state. Clearly, there are historical trends to be observed: in our current climate of fiscal instability, there is much talk of the “economic levers” and, even more specifically, the “interest rate” levers being wielded by the monetary mechanics at the Federal Reserve. In the process of its dissemination as metaphor, however, the lever tends to lose its specificity as mechanical

1 Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into Philosophy,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236.

34  The Lever as Instrument of Reason object, with the result that it could just as well be exchanged with other instruments of power, such as Nietzsche’s—or Heidegger’s—hammer. In the introduction to this study, I argued that the most productive approach to the lever requires thinking of it as more than just a “simple” metaphor such as one finds in the examples above. I also raised a few alternatives which, collectively, can help work toward a broader understanding of what a lever can be. In the most general sense, one can think in terms of a conceptual apparatus, given that one rarely finds the lever in isolation, but rather attached to concepts such as equilibrium, power, and advantage, each of which have their own value in disciplines such as philosophy, literature, and psychology. The lever, as I understand it, also fulfills some of the criteria for the somewhat elusive notion of an “absolute metaphor” as defined by Hans Blumenberg. For Blumenberg, an absolute metaphor has a pragmatic function as a model. It cannot be reduced to purely terminological claims, but rather, within a specific historical experience, such a metaphor provides a point of orientation and helps to structure a world. To give a sense of the challenges faced when, around 1800, one is confronted with a lever that refuses the status of simple, rhetorical ornamentation, I would like to mention an example that will likely be familiar to many readers before shifting attention to the essay by Kant that is the focal point of this chapter. The example comes from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s discussion of the concept “sublation” in the Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), which can also be found in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). In these works, Hegel draws upon the theoretical language associated with the lever to explain the relationship between the real and the ideal. In the Science of Logic, when Hegel explains what it means for something to be sublated (aufgehoben) he reminds us that one of the peculiar features of this word is that it encompasses two opposed meanings in German: to preserve and to remove. To illustrate how the word aufgehoben unifies opposed meanings, Hegel turns to the lever: Something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this closer determination as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a moment. In the case of the lever, “weight” and “distance from a point” are called its mechanical moments because of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the difference between something real like weight, and something idealized such as the merely spatial determination of “line.”2

2

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82.



The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant  35

With this example, Hegel points to one of the most significant theoretical features of the lever: its ability to unite two fundamentally different things—a weight and the linear measurement of its distance from a fulcrum point—using a logic of the “sameness” of effect. The lever effectively provides Hegel with a model for both illustrating and understanding the concept of sublation. We could compare the passage from The Science of Logic with Hegel’s reference to the “tragic” lever in his Lectures on Aesthetics. In the context of aesthetics, the lever’s mechanics play no role whatsoever, such that it might just as well be a pulley (though admittedly to lesser rhetorical effect). The same does not hold true for sublation: if we want to understand this concept, and the negotiation it undertakes between the real and the ideal, one needs to have some familiarity with both the lever and the concept of the mechanical moment. It is important to understand how the mechanical advantage of the lever is translated into philosophical gain. To “grasp” intuitively the peculiar state of affairs through which force is expended and, at the same time, held in abeyance, one also needs to have a sense of the powerful act of translation the lever embodies, whereby one thing (the real) is understood in terms of something else (the ideal) quite distinct from it. As stated in the introduction, one of the tasks of this study is to call attention to the lever and thereby to defamiliarize it, to pare it down to its most basic functional relations, and to make it strange enough to become interesting again. An important first step is to divest the lever of any requirement of materiality. The levers that swing in and out of equilibrium in this chapter and the following ones are not necessarily made of wood or iron. Instead, they are often closer to what mechanical treatises refer to as “mathematical” rather than “physical” levers, a distinction that will become clearer with reference to a few of the key mechanical handbooks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the posthumously published Nouvelle mécanique ou statique (New Mechanics or Statics) (1725), Pierre Varignon, a French mathematician who moved in the circles of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoullis, writes that the lever is an “inflexible stick” (verge inflexible), with the added caveat that, for mathematical purposes, it should be considered without weight.3 Andrew Motte’s more literally minded Treatise of the Mechanical Powers (1727) only considers the physical lever. He describes it as “generally in Practice a wooden or iron Bar, when used for the lifting of Weights” and adds, with an eye for the lever’s versatility, “it comes

3

Pierre Varignon, Nouvelle mécanique ou statique, vol. 1 (Paris: Claude Jambert, 1725), 300.

36  The Lever as Instrument of Reason in Use under many different Forms upon several Occasions of Life.”4 As for the German philosopher Christian Wolff, whose system was an important reference point for Kant at all stages of his career, he writes in the third volume of his 1716 Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschaften (Fundamentals of All Mathematical Sciences), dedicated to mechanics, that the lever is simply “a straight line AB, which lies in a point C, upon whose one point A the force and on another B the weight can be applied.”5 For all their differences, in each of these cases, the emphasis is on the lever as a discrete object (a line, a stick, a bar), whether physical or not. The entry “lever” from Gehler’s Physikalisches Wörterbuch (Physical Dictionary) of 1798 takes a somewhat different approach. Drawing verbatim from the work of two influential German mathematicians, Abraham Kästner and Johann Erxleben,6 Gehler does not identify the lever with a material object. Instead, he writes: If one can think of three points on a firm, inflexible connection [Verbindung] of bodies, around one of which, the fulcrum, the entire connection can turn, in that two forces on both of the other points act in opposition to each other, this connection is called a lever.7 Gehler’s definition serves as a reminder that, for all that the lever pivots back and forth between physical and mathematical applications— between material and immaterial regimes—it is at heart a figure of pure connection, a Verbindung. Not all connections are levers, but in many kinds of connections, the minimal requirements for a lever are met. The following pages and subsequent chapters will show how this general understanding of what a lever is and can be allows for more flexibility in identifying levers and the mechanical thinking that informs them.

4 Motte, Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, 65–66. 5 Christian Wolff, Der Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol. 2 (Halle: Renger, 1726), 232. 6 Gehler quotes from Kästner’s Anfangsgründe der angewandten Mathematik (Fundamentals of Applied Mathematics) (1780) and Erxleben’s Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre durch Lichtenberg (Fundamentals of the Theory of Nature through Lichtenberg) (1787). 7 I include the German quote because I will return to this definition on several occasions in the course of this study: “Wenn man sich an einer festen unbiegsamen Verbindung von Körpern drey Punkte gedenken kann, um deren einen, den Ruhepunkt, die ganze Verbindung sich drehen läßt, indem an den beyden andern Punkten zwo Kräfte einander entgegen wirken, so heißt diese Verbindung ein Hebel,” in Johann Gehler, Physicalisches [sic] Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1789), 565.



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In addition to being a figure of connection, the lever also functions as one of ratio or proportion when its law of equilibrium is taken into consideration. Like a simple mechanical scale, a lever is in equilibrium when the product of the weight and the weight’s distance from the fulcrum on one side is equivalent to the product of a second weight applied to the lever and its distance from the fulcrum on the other side.8 Apart from being a fundamental law in the field of statics, this aspect of the lever is also central to the cases I analyze because it entails bringing two things that are not the same into a relationship of equivalence. As we saw above, in the example taken from Hegel’s philosophy, the lever is a simple mechanical device that also allows us to think of one thing in terms of something else. To that end, it is also a figure of translation. Translation, in this context, invokes both the materiality of the lever or scale, as something that balances forces applied to one side and another, and its ability to mediate differences more generally. The same quality Hegel identifies when he recognizes the lever’s suitability for mediating between the real and the ideal makes an argument for why the lever, when its mechanics are taken into consideration, can be “more” than metaphor. It is an instrument that preserves differences: it maintains the equivalence of effect (or mechanical “product”) without claiming a relationship of identity. As the basic unit of translation, the lever can therefore do the work of a metaphor while maintaining its integrity—the lever is the instrument that makes this process of translating differences into equivalences visible. This is also the key to the lever’s discursive mobility, to its usefulness as a figure of thought when taken from mechanics and applied to a number of other discourses. For the lever to function as a kind of organizing principle, then, there needs to be a basic willingness to quantify the abstract, so it can bring diverse things (whether objects, concepts, or something else) into a relationship. As a consequence, within many of the examples I address in this study one finds a historical interest in techniques of quantification, whereby things that were traditionally not thought of in such terms (such as processes of thinking, or emotions) find themselves subjected to quantitative, analytical descriptions. There is a unique phenomenon to be observed here. Even though it is easy enough to understand the lever as something that lends itself to application, the opposite also holds true. There are certain contexts where a particular set of concerns will cluster together, conjoin for the purpose of an experiment in thinking, and concretize in the lever. One of the objectives of my project is therefore to observe the conditions under which this phenomenon occurs.

8 This is with reference to “first-class levers,” where the fulcrum point lies in between the two weights.

38  The Lever as Instrument of Reason The history of the lever that is the focus of this chapter centers around Kant’s precritical essay, “Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen,” (“Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes to Philosophy”) (1763). For readers whose knowledge of Kant is based primarily on his three critiques, the essay on negative magnitudes might seem like an unusual place to start. After all, mechanical theory is usually not the first association one might have with Kant’s philosophy at any stage of his career, and it is therefore reasonable to ask what he knew about statics in general and levers in particular. Fortunately, Kant’s understanding of classical mechanics and other branches of scientific knowledge has been welldocumented in recent years by Michael Friedman, Eric Watson, and Martin Schönfeld, among others.9 We know, for example, that Kant possessed a thorough knowledge of mechanical theory as articulated by Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff. Kant’s very first published essay, “Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces” (1747), also makes frequent mention of the lever.10 Almost forty years later comes the publication of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), which contains an entire chapter on mechanics, and Michael Friedman has shown how Kant’s university lectures of the summer of 1787 also make reference to the laws of the lever in the context of chemical theory.11 The “Negative Magnitudes” essay, published in 1763, falls squarely in the middle of this span of years and was written at a time when Kant engaged with the mathematical and mechanical theories of Abraham Kästner, Leonhard Euler, Christian August Crusius, and Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, each of whom are cited in his 9

Of particular interest are the following: Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Pre-Critical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eric Watkins, Kant and the Sciences (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Friedman’s discussion of how Kant integrates the mechanics and materiality of the balance and lever into his thinking about a theory of the caloric is a good reference point (Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, 297–98). For the reception of Kant’s philosophy in the scientific debates of the nineteenth century, see Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science. 10 The “living forces” (vis viva) debate emerged from a difference in opinion in how to describe the conservation of energy in a mechanical system (Leibniz described the living force of a system in terms of the conservation of what today is called kinetic energy whereas other philosophers, such as Newton and Descartes, claimed that momentum was the conserved “living force”). 11 Friedman refers to the lectures collected under the title Danziger Physik, See also his recent work, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 246.



The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant  39

essay. Accepting Kant’s fluency in the concepts of classical mechanics— regardless of whether one agrees with his conclusions (as in the vis viva debate)12—is therefore a necessary prerequisite to the present subject of our inquiry. The driving question, however, takes a much different form: of interest is not how levers perform in mechanical contexts, but what happens when the lever and the concepts associated with it are deployed in other areas of intellectual inquiry. The following reading of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay will reveal how it is an appropriate choice in addition to being a surprising one: appropriate because the entire essay is conceived in the spirit of “application” and “translation” that the lever itself also embodies, and surprising because the stated emphasis of Kant’s essay is on mathematics rather than mechanics. For this and other reasons, my focus on the lever offers a new perspective on the essay, one that goes against the grain of both Kant’s stated purpose and how it has been interpreted since its initial publication. Kant’s essay is a challenging read because its author assumes the reader’s familiarity with a broad spectrum of knowledge that includes the Wolffian school, mathematics, and natural philosophy—what we would today call physics. At the same time, the question that motivates the essay is, at least from a formal perspective, relatively simple: Is it possible to take an idea from mathematics and demonstrate its usefulness for philosophy? This is the question Kant attempts to answer using the example of negative numbers or “magnitudes.”13 The essay is divided into three sections. The first contains a general explanation of what the concept of negative magnitudes entails. Here, Kant makes a fundamental distinction, one to which he will return throughout the essay, between “logical” and “real” contradictions. In a logical contradiction, two opposed predicates attached to an object cannot coexist, but in the physical world, numerous cases abound. As I will discuss in detail, Kant’s description of negative magnitudes is modeled on the notion of real contradictions, where two opposing predicates can exist; the primary image associated with the idea of a real contradiction in Kant’s essay is that of a physical body at “rest” when acted upon by two equal and opposing forces, whereby the word “rest” (Ruhe) is also the term used in statics to describe a body in equilibrium when acted

12 Historians of philosophy and science such as Henry Michael Southgate have shown that Kant and others made the mistake of trying to apply a principle of static mechanics to dynamical systems (where the concept of momentum becomes relevant). See Southgate’s article, “Kant’s Critique of Leibniz’s Rejection of Real Opposition,” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3.1 (Spring 2013): 91–134. 13 The title is sometimes translated as negative “quantities,” but I have decided to follow the standard English translation.

40  The Lever as Instrument of Reason upon by contrary forces. In other words, the primary logical distinction that governs Kant’s essay clearly connects to a mechanical model, and it is the purpose of the following chapter to show how this connection resonates in different aspects of Kant’s argument. The second section of Kant’s essay then tests out a few cases from philosophy where the concept of negative magnitudes might be useful, including feelings of pleasure and displeasure, as well as sins of commission and omission. The final section of the essay then reflects on how to move from the examples discussed to general statements about the usefulness of negative magnitudes in philosophy. To that end, Kant thinks in terms of a universal equilibrium of positions and oppositions and reflects on the difficulty of quantifying mental activities like the inception, cessation, and movement of thoughts. There is a tendency to be observed here, as Kant’s inquiry moves from more “personal” examples to an interest in the more immaterial and speculative regimes of psychic processes that, with reference to the mechanics of thinking itself, anticipates my later discussion of Herbart in surprising ways. Readers of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay usually devote their attention to interpreting Kant’s ideas either in the context of the existing schools of thought that shaped the philosophical discussions the first half of the eighteenth century, or in anticipation of Kant’s later work. Martin Schönfeld’s Philosophy of the Young Kant sees in Kant’s essay a direct challenge to the positions of the School Philosophy associated with the extremely influential Christian Wolff.14 Henry Michael Southgate takes a similar approach, claiming that Kant’s essay attempts to “block off the rationalist escape route” that is, a recourse to “stock metaphysical concepts,” as well as to argue for a Newtonian science.15 Frederick Beiser, on the other hand, positions the essay in a different constellation of intellectual concerns, and he sees in it the beginning of a thought process that will reach its maturity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, he writes, Kant showed that “the entire range of our experience could not be expressed or explained in strictly rational terms according to the principle of

14 In particular, Schönfeld discusses how Kant argued for a stronger distinction to be made between logical postulates and the physical world: “Perhaps the central assumption of the traditional logical rationalism was that logic mirrors the structure of nature—in other words, that logic was supposed to have its roots neither in social convention nor in psychological make-up, but in the ontological constitution of reality instead. This very assumption was the target of the critique of the Negative Quantities” (Schönfeld, Young Kant, 231). 15 Southgate, “Kant’s Critique,” 113.



The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant  41

contradiction.”16 Beiser writes that by demonstrating that “rather than differing only in degree, the spheres of reason and experience would differ in kind,” Kant “laid the foundation for his later distinction between reason and sensibility in the first Critique.”17 John Zammito, in his Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, also provides a summary of Kant’s positions (thereby underscoring the conceptual framework with which Kant’s readers have tended to approach the essay) when he writes that “it articulated a powerful argument for the discernment of a difference between the nominal and the real through differences in the respective theories of negation that attached to them,” “posed a fundamental challenge to metaphysicians to come up with a better account of causality,” and “gave vent to some of Kant’s sharpest castigations of academic philosophy.”18 Each of these readings engages directly with the philosophical content and historical context of Kant’s essay. What remains to be desired, however, is a closer attention to language: to Kant’s rhetorical choices, to his figurative language, to the peculiarity of some of his examples, as well as to a use of language that sometimes seems at odds with his stated objectives. To be more precise, despite the fact that Kant’s essay is dedicated—so its author tells us—to examining the application of mathematical ideas in philosophical terms emphatically stated to be “not mechanical,” because such a model is not adequate for describing those “cases of change” such as occur in the human soul,19 it is nonetheless completely infused with images, terminology, and ideas taken from mechanics. This includes obvious examples, such as the figure of the lever and the related concept of equilibrium, and less obvious ones, such as words like erwägen and aufheben: words whose roots can be traced back to the material instruments of the balance (Waage) and the lever (Hebel), respectively. Already the preface asserts that the “little observation” upon which the essay is based has potentially “important consequences”—a claim made in the spirit of the mechanical advantage of the lever if there ever was one, as Archimedes would perhaps agree. I therefore propose to read Kant’s essay with a different set of priorities and emphases in mind, by paying close attention to its language through a focus on the mechanics and conceptual apparatus associated

16 Frederick Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development, 1746–1781,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42. 17 Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development.” 18 John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 70. 19 See Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 233.

42  The Lever as Instrument of Reason with the lever. As we will see, the attention this chapter brings to bear on the overlooked mechanics of the essay actually responds directly to Kant’s stated project of applying a mathematical concept in new fields because of primary importance of the lever’s status as a figure of ratio and translation. I do not argue that the workings of the “soul” are, in fact, mechanical, but rather that the mechanical language of the essay will help perform some of the philosophical labor. The impact of a reading attuned to the rhetorical mechanics of the text is that, through the work of the lever and related concepts, the distinction between reason and experience Beiser insists upon is actually undermined. In other words, although I agree that the “Negative Magnitudes” deserves to be placed at the beginning of a genealogy, the family tree I describe reaches through Novalis to Schelling, Eschenmayer, and Herbart rather than to the later work of Kant. The first section of the chapter, “Balancing acts,” focuses on the language of connection (Verbindung) and relation (Verhältnis) in Kant’s essay and, recalling Gehler’s definition cited above, argues how the preconditions for thinking about the lever are established before the lever itself makes an appearance. The second section, “Quantified pleasure,” explores how the mechanical dynamics of the balancing act are imported into the essay and revised in the context of equilibrium. The third section, “Moral mechanics,” shows how each step in Kant’s argument carries with it a new aspect of the mechanical model (in this case, through the lever’s ability to define oppositions in terms of degree, rather than kind). The next section, “About thinking,” will then underscore the importance of mechanical principles as Kant shifts from the content to the structure of thinking and introduces a new temporal dimension to his examples. The final section, “Beyond the material,” takes its impetus directly from a suggestion Kant himself makes toward the end of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay. The collective gain of this chapter is not only to be measured in terms of a different perspective on Kant’s essay, but also in terms of laying the groundwork for an argument that is important for my project as a whole: Kant’s temporalization of the mechanical analogy with the lever to model thinking is the beginning of a trajectory that leads to the psychological theories of the nineteenth century.

Balancing Acts

In the introduction to his essay, Kant makes clear that, when testing out the concept of negative magnitudes in philosophical contexts, he will be guided by the concept of a “real” opposition, one that does not posit a logical impossibility: “Two predicates of a thing are opposed to each other, but not through the law of contradiction. Here, too, one thing cancels that which is posited by the other; but the consequence is



The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant  43

something (cogitabile).”20 In order to visualize the kind of real contradiction being described here in contradistinction to a logical contradiction, and to emphasize the positive nature of an act of negation, it stands to reason that Kant will first draw concrete examples from the physical world before testing out the same idea in more abstract scenarios. To illustrate a logical contradiction, he gives the example of an object in motion and at rest at the same time. For Kant, this is a logical impossibility according to the law of contradiction (der Satz des Widerspruchs) that claims that “A” and “not-A” cannot be true at the same time.21 (It also shows us that, in an Aristotelian spirit, Kant associates the equilibrium state with zero velocity; for Newton, however, it is certainly possible for an equilibrium state to occur at a constant velocity and there will be cause to return to the idea of “equilibrium in motion” at the end of the chapter.) In the case of real contradictions, such coexistence is certainly possible: two predicates associated with a thing can be opposed to each other without invoking the law of contradiction. Here, Kant provides the example of a ship at sea held motionless by two winds of equal strength that blow in opposing directions.22 The product of two canceling forces is still “something,” and he qualifies that statement by adding that the “consequence of such an opposition is rest, which is something (repraesentabile).”23 As I mentioned above, “rest,” in the sense Kant uses it here, is one of the most common concepts of static mechanics and is used to describe a state where a body or system is in equilibrium due to a balance of forces; it is, in fact, the concept upon which this entire branch of mechanics is based. When one imagines a body subjected to two equal and opposite forces, each acting as a “predicate,” it does not require a leap of the imagination to see that this example correlates precisely to a lever in a state of equilibrium around a fulcrum point. The logical distinction that governs the entirety of Kant’s essay is framed in mechanical terms.

20 Kant, “Negative Magnitudies,” 211. 21 See the entry by Laurence R. Horn on “Contradiction” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http:​// pla​to.st​anfor​d.edu​/arch​ives/​spr20​14/en​tries​/cont​radic​tion/​. 22 Iain Hamilton Grant remarks that “it is instructive that Kant’s sailing ship example pitches logical contradiction against opposing forces, since this tallies with Fichte’s practical–theoretical concept of positing as activity,” in Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 88. Grant connects the forces of real opposition to the striving of the I and not-I in Fichte’s model: “The I’s continuous forces and quanta of activity produce and form reality” (Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling). 23 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 211.

44  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Within the physical example Kant provides, the principle of connection is crucial, as is the fact that what is being posited is that the smallest constellation of a particular conceptual scenario. This constellation is defined by an arrangement of three things: two entities (call them predicates, forces, or what you will) acting in opposition upon a separate entity that displays the necessary “rigidity” (conceptual, physical, or otherwise) to keep this figure of thought from collapsing. Only then can one understand the “zero” of rest, a “relative nothing” (verhältnißmäßiges nichts) according to Kant, which is a direct translation of the “nihilum relativum” one finds in Kästner.24 According to the logic of a relative nothing, even a negative magnitude is “more” than zero because it is nonetheless a real magnitude, one that exists in opposition to the ones conventionally identified as positive. If we recall Gehler’s description of the lever as an object defined purely in terms of connectivity, we can see that Kant’s physical example of the object with forces acting in opposition upon it is essentially in the same state of equilibrium as a lever would be, if in somewhat simpler terms: it is an equilibrium of forces as opposed to an equilibrium of torque. What is interesting is that when Kant shifts his attention from an example taken from the physical world (opposing forces acting upon an object) to one that is mathematically grounded—an individual who has both credit and debt—the mechanical language continues and even intensifies. As complacent as we are with the thought of positive and negative magnitudes in “opposition” (Entgegensetzung) to each other, Kant writes, we should also insist upon understanding this opposition as a reciprocal relation (Gegenverhältniß) where the emphasis is once more on connection.25 The word Gegenverhältniß, which connotes a relation of oppositions, as well as semantically related words (Verbindung, Verhältniß) occurs frequently in this first section of Kant’s essay. With the emphasis on relation and connectivity, Kant constructs the metaphorical image associated with concept of negative magnitudes in such a way that is compatible with the singular object of the lever. We have our connection and we have our three points: through the concept of a relation of oppositions we can envision two affirmatives that are joined by a relation of opposition based on the

24 Note that Kant possessed the 1759 edition of Kästner’s Anfangsgründe der angewandten Mathematik. 25 The word Gegenverhältniß is fairly uncommon. Grimm’s dictionary simply defines it as a “gegenseitiges Verhältniß” and cites two sources, one of them Kant’s essay and the other Jean Paul’s aesthetics. Of the few (around five) printed examples I could find from the years preceding Kant’s text, it’s notable that two of them occur in the texts of Abraham Kästner and Crusius, both of whom Kant refers to in the “Negative Magnitudes” essay.



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equivalence of quantifiably comparable effects. No one would argue that debts and accumulated wealth are the same, but when we compare their effects, it makes sense to say that debt is a negative wealth. As is clear from the first basic rule (Grundregel) of “real contradiction” (also called “real repugnancy” or Realrepugnanz) formulated in the essay, Kant is interested in generalizing the principle at work here beyond the case of positive and negative numbers: A real repugnancy only occurs where there are two things, as positive grounds, and where one of them cancels the consequence of the other. Suppose that motive force is a positive ground: a real conflict can only occur in so far as there is a second motive force connected with it, and in so far as each reciprocally cancels the effect of the other.26 What is remarkable is that this description of real repugnancy,” for all that it seems as if it too should be situated directly within an example drawn from physics, comes in the wake of the discussion of abstract credits and debits. It reinforces the impression that the conceptual framework of Kant’s essay itself owes a debt to mechanical models. We can observe in this theoretical language—and not least of all in Kant’s recourse to the verb aufheben, used here in the sense of “to cancel”—the preconditions for the concretization of the object prior to its arrival in the text. The idea that the positive and negative are both, in a particular sense, “real” and positive affirmations correlates precisely to a visualization of the lever, which also relies on two real and positive sources of input to engage with each other around the fulcrum point.

Quantified Pleasure

The purpose of Kant’s essay as stated in the title—to test the viability of importing a concept from mathematics to philosophy (as Weltweisheit)—leaves quite a bit to the imagination as to which branch of philosophy this will entail. As we have seen, in the first section of Kant’s essay, his examples are drawn from the natural world, like the physical properties of objects, as well as from simple arithmetic cases where positive and negative numbers could be applied, such as debits and credits. The case of the individual who has both credits and debits to his name, which at first glance seems a rather arbitrary choice, becomes less so in retrospect when, in the second section of the essay, Kant turns his attention more directly to cases drawn from

26 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 215.

46  The Lever as Instrument of Reason psychology (here: Seelenlehre27) and moral philosophy. In other words, we will be shown the psychological dynamics of the individual in a state of debt, and encouraged to understand him as someone who has choices to make, whether in accordance with or in violation of a moral law. Having arrived, Kant will be in no hurry to leave this area of inquiry. In fact, each subsequent step of his argument will take up various examples drawn from psychology—without, however, leaving behind the mechanical thinking we have already observed. As a result, the mechanical models connected to the lever and related concepts will themselves be drawn into the same psychological framework. It is the primary reason why I chose Kant’s essay as the point of departure. We have observed above how Kant’s insistence on a “real” and “positive” negative (such as provided by the idea of “real repugnancy”) lends itself to a mechanical model and also considered the example where two equal and opposite forces of motion are directed toward a single object. In addition to that particular case, there is another one Kant takes up that bears directly on the present discussion. He also mentions the concept of physical “impenetrability” whereby one body resists the motive force of another through its sheer materiality, such as where a solid object is held in place by two opposing springs and the impenetrability of a body acts as its own repelling force, what Kant calls a “negative attraction.” Just as the example of the object with two forces acting upon it provided Kant with a point of reference for the discussion of credits and debits, in an analogous way Kant uses the example of impenetrability to generalize that forces of repulsion are as real as forces of attraction: not only to solidify the association of “real opposition” with the principles of mechanics but also to act as a backdrop for a more personal (or at least human) scenario. Here, Kant takes his example from the Seelenlehre with the question of whether aversion (Unlust) is simply an absence of desire (Lust) or whether it in itself could form a positive basis for desire diminishing. Can we speak of aversion as a negative desire in the same framework of real oppositions set up before? It should be noted that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, neither linguistic possibility was automatically assumed—the meaning of Unlust was far from fixed, although there are divergent points of view about the matter. Zedler’s UniversalLexicon, for example, states quite clearly that we are to distinguish between an “absence of pleasure . . . when we do not sense perfection”

27 Christian Wolff’s metaphysics distinguishes between empirischer (or erfahrender) Seelenlehre and vernünftiger Seelenlehre, the first referring to empirical psychology and the latter referring to rational psychology of the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries.



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and aversion as the “idea of imperfection, which is always something real.”28 In Adelung’s Wörterbuch, published some years after Kant’s essay, the first, admittedly more common, definition is “not merely an absence of desire [Lust], but also the perceived knowledge of something unpleasant”; the second definition, however, is simply the “absence of desire,” although Adelung acknowledges that this meaning is relatively rare in High German and usually has to do with a lack of appetite.29 These differences can be explained in part based on the function of the two reference works: Zedler engages with the philosophical milieu (and in particular: Wolff’s philosophy), whereas Adelung is more concerned with usage as well as the history of individual words. Such differences aside, the Un- prefix can be seen as the index of an ambiguity that causes the meaning to hover between the two modes of negative defined in Kant’s essay as deprivation and absence. Kant claims to rely upon his “inner sense” (innere Empfindung) that aversion is more than the mere absence of desire. He then justifies this impression with empirical examples drawn from possible experience— such as the sour taste of a medicine that we know to be good for us. The more relevant example for our purposes, however, is that of the Spartan mother. When she receives news of her son’s brave actions in battle, she naturally rejoices. The question is, what happens to her when this good news is followed by the report that her son has died for his fatherland? Kant decides to take a quantitative approach to analyzing the problem and assigns her pleasure the value “4a.” If Unlust is really nothing more than the absence of Lust, then her net feeling after receiving the bad news will still be “4a,” according to the equation Lust (4a) – Unlust (0) = 4a. In this scenario, the magnitude of her feeling of pleasure will be unaffected by her son’s death, which is false, according to Kant. If, however, we see that the degree of her pleasure has been reduced to “3a” after receiving the news, Kant says, then it is possible to calculate the magnitude of her aversion to be “a.” The scenario, as Kant describes it, allows us to conceive of it in the following way: the mother acts as the fulcrum point, one that is subject to the “effect” of the news (understood as an objective force, the sheer facts she receives). At the same time, her disposition (her “Spartan” character) is what influences how the news is taken. In this model, Kant would be thinking in terms of “torques,” or rotational

28 See Zedler, Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 50 (Leipzig and Halle: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1746), s.v. “Unlust” (col. 871). 29 See Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 4 (Vienna: B. Ph. Bauer, 1811), col. 876. To give a familiar example, one still equates an absence of appetite for eating with Unlust, according to Adelung.

48  The Lever as Instrument of Reason forces, since the magnitudes of “a” and “4a” vary, as would the distance between the fulcrum and the application of the force.30 In this scenario, the intuition supplied by mechanical theory, of torques in opposition to one another, aligns with the information about the initial and final condition of the Spartan mother and allows us to make assumptions about the psychic processes associated with the feelings of Lust and Unlust. Wolfgang Ritzel’s autobiography of Kant speculates that he might have adapted this example from Rousseau’s Émile, where another Spartan mother appears as emblematic of a “good citizen.” In Émile, the mother receives the news that all five of her sons have fallen in battle with anger—not over their deaths, but because the messenger has neglected to mention the most important part: whether the battle was ultimately lost or won. Ritzel comments that Kant has “humanized” his Spartan mother, but we can also see that Rousseau’s example fits neatly into the “false” category of a mother whose pleasure at the heroism of her sons is unadulterated by grief. Kant’s willingness to quantify feeling is not in itself remarkable— one can detect the emergence of such “psychometrics” already in Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica (Empirical Psychology) and Philosophia practica universalis (Practical Universal Psychology), published at the beginning of the eighteenth century.31 Wolff’s commentators have pointed out that he might have been influenced by what some refer to as the “personology” of Christian Thomasius, who quantified the amount of sensuality, ambition, love, and greed.32 In his Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott (Rational Thoughts about God), Wolff writes that aversion “is not a mere absence of pleasure, but rather something real in itself”33 and refers to pleasure and aversion in terms of degrees (Grade), or quantitative differences, without assigning numerical or relative values to specific cases that would allow for the calculation of a ratio.34

30 Thanks are due to my husband Gil for helping to clarify the operative concepts in this scenario. 31 Wolf Feuerhahn, “Entre métaphysique, mathématique, optique et physiologie: La psychométrie au xviiie siècle,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 193.3 (July 2003): 280. 32 See Robert J. Richards, “Christian Wolff’s Prolegomena to Empirical and Rational Psychology: Translation and Commentary,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124.3 (June 1980): 229, note 19. 33 Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott (Halle: Renger, 1751), 257. 34 Kant was not the only one to adapt Wolff’s discussion to a quantified understanding of affect. In a letter from Lessing to Moses Mendelssohn from 1757 that refers to the same sections from Vernünfftige Gedanken quoted above, Lessing quantifies aversion to an object. He does this once again in terms of degrees, for example, as “10” as opposed to “1” based on whether it is real or an imitation (Lessing offers the less example—borrowed from Aristotle—of a living



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Wolf Feuerhahn has traced this early history of psychometrics and shown that for Wolff it is a principle applicable to diverse phenomena, such as the measurement of our memory and our sense of freedom, as well as to desire and aversion.35 Of interest here is the way in which Kant tests out different modes of how to describe the relation of pleasure to aversion following the example of the Spartan mother. Although he does claim that aversion, like debt, is more than a mere lack and can easily coexist with desire (or credit), one could argue that this arithmetically driven model— though technically accurate—does not seem to capture the full spirit of opposition as well as a mechanical comparison would. Apparently, Kant shares this impression, because he then proceeds to map the experience of desire and aversion in terms of mechanical equilibrium and the related concept of preponderance: The lack of both pleasure and displeasure, in so far as it arises from the absence of their respective grounds, is called indifference (indifferentia). The lack of both pleasure and displeasure, in so far as it is a consequence of the real opposition of equal grounds, is called equilibrium (aequilibrium). Both indifference and equilibrium are zero, though the former is a negation absolutely, whereas the latter is a deprivation. The state of mind, in which pleasure and displeasure are equally opposed so that there is something which is left over from one of these two feelings, is the preponderance of pleasure or displeasure (suprapondium voluptatis vel taedii).36 In this passage we can witness even more clearly how Kant’s mathematical “test case”—the concept of negative magnitudes—relies upon the language and structure of static mechanics, although in this case the ideas are being applied to the mind (Gemüth) rather than the

snake as opposed to a painting of one). See Moses Mendelssohn, Sämmtliche Werke in einem Band (Wien: Schmidt, 1838), 843. Kant’s interest has little to do with aesthetics, however, and everything to do with the question of a mechanically inspired approach to describing psychological states. One can also refer in this context to König, who notes that “the conclusion, that ‘one can actually not call any quantities negative at all,’ was directed in particular against Christian Wolff, who in paragraph 18 of his Elements of Mathematical Analysis had defined negative quantities as ‘the non-presence of the true quantities, through which they are understood’” (König, Autonomie und Autokratie: Über Kants Metaphysik der Sitten. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 34. 35 Wolf Feuerhahn, “Die Wolffische Psychometrie,” in Die Psychologie Christian Wolffs, ed. Oliver-Pierre Rudolf and Jean-François Goubet (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 231. 36 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 220.

50  The Lever as Instrument of Reason physical world. According to Kant, a complete absence of desire or aversion may be thought of as indifference (Gleichgültigkeit, indifferentia). If there is a lack of desire and aversion, however, as the result of them being present in equal measure and canceled out (i.e., in the context of a “real opposition”), then one finds oneself in a state of equilibrium. Disequilibrium—or, more precisely: imbalance, understood as a state of “preponderance” (Übergewicht)—describes the state of mind (Der Zustand des Gemüths) wherein one or the other dominates. Kant thereby transposes the concept of negative magnitudes, via the structure of “real oppositions,” from the field of mathematics to the mind. With the introduction of the concept of equilibrium (Gleichgewicht), he also continues the theme of mechanics introduced with reference to the concept of impenetrability. In that case, Kant gave the example of two opposing springs that held each other immobile. Here, too, we have a situation comparable to mechanical equilibrium, whereby opposing forces completely negate one another. According to this description, the human mind can be understood in terms of quantifiable equilibrium states whereby nonmaterial entities, such as affects, are understood in numerical or quantified terms. Kant’s quantitative thinking about psychic processes may well have been developed through his reading of Christian Wolff, but it is the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Luis Maupertuis whom Kant mentions directly in the context of the psychometric musings of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay. Maupertuis’s Essay on Moral Philosophy (Essai de philosophie morale) attempts to describe the net happiness and unhappiness of an individual life in terms of sums of the good and the bad. Kant is dismissive of Maupertuis’s attempt: he questions the basis of comparison with the comment that “only feelings of the same kind . . . can feature in such calculations” and wonders how the varied circumstances of life could provide us with a unit for comparison.37 To be fair, Maupertuis is less interested in equilibrium states per se than in the sum total of happiness or unhappiness in the course of a life. At the same time, there are aspects to Maupertuis’s thinking that bear upon Kant’s essay more closely than Kant himself acknowledges. As Maupertuis measures instances of happiness and unhappiness, he considers two factors: duration and intensity. The former is relatively easy to measure because it corresponds to chronological time, but the latter lacks such a reference point. According to Maupertuis, however, they can still be relativized with regard to each other: “A double intensity, and a single duration, can make a moment equal to those

37 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 220.



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whose intensity would be single and the duration double.”38 That is to say, there is a logic of proportions, ratios, and balancing to be found in Maupertuis, even if the particular units of measurement can neither be precisely defined nor quantified on their own. When Kant complains that Maupertuis’s self-appointed task of quantifying the net happiness or unhappiness of life is “unsolvable .  .  . because only equivalent sensations [Empfindungen] can be summed up, but feeling seems to be very different according to the diversity of emotions in the very complex situation of life,” he also seems to neglect the fact that he has just come close to doing the same thing in the case of the Spartan mother. In other words, it does not seem strange to him to bring the distinct impressions of desire and aversion into a single equation, although the measurement and quantification implied therein forms the cornerstone of Maupertuis’s project as well. Part of the “messiness” Kant finds in the equilibrium model of Maupertuis has to do with the fact that human life is comparable to a multidimensional state, whereby “forces” of happiness and unhappiness act upon the psyche from many different directions. In comparison, Kant’s model of psychic equilibrium, as we saw in the case of the Spartan mother, is far more reductionist than that of Maupertuis. This same spirit of “reductionism” is also in keeping to the very common procedure of reducing a multidimensional state of equilibrium to a single dimension in order to simplify the calculation. Readers more familiar with the “later” Kant, such as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Critique of Pure Reason, might already have Kant’s rejection of psychology as an independent science in mind. As he states in the Metaphysical Foundations, “the empirical doctrine of the soul” must be disqualified: Because mathematics is not applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws, the only option one would have would be to take the law of continuity in the flux of inner changes into account—which, however, would be an extension of cognition standing to that which mathematics provides for the doctrine of body approximately as the doctrine of the properties of the straight line stands to the whole of geometry.39

38 “Une Intensité double, & une Durée simple, peuvent faire un Moment égal à celui dont l’Intensité seroit simple, & la Durée double (Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, “Essai de philosophie morale,” in Les oeuvres de Mr. de Maupertuis, vol. 2 (Berlin: Étienne de Bourdeaux, 1753), 233). 39 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7.

52  The Lever as Instrument of Reason These words remind us that what we have been observing thus far in the “Negative Magnitudes” essay has the status of atemporal snapshots, case studies lifted from life experience and relatively quantified without thought of actual measure or duration. Time has been absent from the equation and, at least up until this point, it has sufficed to observe that Kant’s mathematical experiment is equally one in applied mechanics. The examples Kant has to offer are nevertheless gradually leading toward mechanical descriptions of the human where the emphasis is increasingly on processes of thought: on function as opposed to individual forms or figures. When more attention is brought to bear on the functionality of the model, time’s role will become more evident.

Moral Mechanics

When Kant expands the scope of his philosophical test cases to see where the concept of negative magnitudes might be useful, he ultimately moves beyond desire and aversion to questions of moral law. In the course of this investigation, he anticipates that some readers will view his argument as somewhat trivial, merely a “juggling with words” (Krämerei mit Worten).40 These readers, according to Kant, miss the point, because they tend to forget that a correct understanding of how the moral law can be violated requires that we remember the distinction between the two kinds of negation: lack (Mangel) and deprivation (Beraubung). To understand why this distinction is important for Kant in the moral context, however, will require that we return to the mechanical model. We can begin with the question of violating moral law in cases where we either act wrongfully or fail to act when we should: Kant makes the familiar distinction between crimes of “omission” (Unterlassungsfehler) and “commission” (Begehungsfehler), noting their correspondence to the modes of negation defined by absence and deprivation, respectively. According to Kant, someone who fails to act, when nonaction is in contradiction to moral law, finds herself in active resistance to the law, such that the “zero” of her inactivity “is the consequence of a real opposition.”41 Such a “zero” has the same valence as a state of mechanical rest. It recalls the example Kant provided in the first section of the essay where two equal and opposing motive forces (Bewegkräfte) keep a ship motionless in the waters. In the present example of inactivity,

40 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 224. For those scholars who see connections between Kant’s essay and topics in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, it might be of interest that the only other time Kant uses this expression in his published writing is in the latter text as well. 41 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 222.



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any compulsion to follow the moral law has been countermanded by an equal and opposite force to disregard it. Kant suggests that such a case can be considered in contradistinction to the inactivity of an animal, whose activity or lack thereof does not make deliberate reference to a moral law. He uses the counterexample of nonhuman behavior to make an indirect commentary about the human and, so doing, he ratchets up the mechanical rhetoric another notch. The animal, writes Kant, was not driven by inner moral feeling to a good action. And the zero, the omission construed as a consequence, was not the product of its resisting that inner moral feeling, nor was it the result of the operation of a counteracting force.42 In this case, too, the English translation sanitizes some of the more specifically mechanical language. In the German, the “counteracting force” is the Gegengewicht (counterweight). Implied is that the model of weight and counterweight—the “moral feeling” versus the opposing force of disobedience—does apply for humans. As in the case of the Spartan mother, our knowledge of mechanics can be deployed for the understanding of psychic processes—the mechanical concept of equilibrium allows us to make assumptions about moral behavior. The conceptual apparatus of equilibrium and lever (or balance) functions here in such a way that it becomes the organizing principle. We can also see how such a visualization, which takes up both the terminology and the theory of static mechanics, without having to take recourse to the concept of mechanical advantage, is a far cry from stating, for example, that there is such a thing as a “lever of morality.” Instead, we have a scenario that strongly emphasizes the functionality of the lever: moral feelings and their counterweights occupy not only a conceptual or metaphorical space, they also imply activity and duration. The temporal dynamic to the model of the lever, only implied here, will be more fully revealed in the following section on sublation. First, however, there is one more aspect of Kant’s “moral mechanics” to consider, one that also relies on the model of the lever. It has to do with the claim Kant makes that “the sins of commission and the sins of omission do not differ morally from each other in kind, but only in magnitude.”43 Kant’s point here is that the logic of “real oppositions” he now investigates in the moral sphere relies on a process of analogy or equivalence whereby things that at first glance seem radically different (i.e., doing something as opposed to doing nothing) are in fact to be

42 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 221–22. 43 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 222.

54  The Lever as Instrument of Reason understood as connected “morally” if not necessarily “physically.” As distinct as a cold-blooded murder might seem from the hesitation to grasp the arm of a drowning man, from Kant’s moral point of view they are on the same scale. Nor is this scale an abstraction. Rather, it is something that is concretized by virtue of the same mechanical language that runs throughout the essay. Precisely at the moment when he repeats his point that sins of omission and commission are only to be distinguished by the “degree of action,” we see materialize that object which has already been implied both by the shifting weights of moral choices and by the figure of opposites connected by a scale of gradual difference. It is the mechanical lever: But, as far as the moral state of the person responsible for the sin of omission is concerned: all that is needed for the sin of commission is a greater degree of action. The situation is like that of a counterweight at the end of a lever: it exercises genuine force merely to maintain the burden in a state of equilibrium: there only needs to be a slight increase of force in order to actually shift the burden on the other side.44 There are several striking aspects to this passage. Some readers will take note of the fact that there is no intrinsic positive value attributed to this moral state of equilibrium. Rather, it is the state of wrongdoing (the sin of omission) that corresponds to the lever in equilibrium, and the transfer from one kind of wrong to another that disturbs the balance. In that regard, it is a testimony to the perfect neutrality of the conceptual apparatus of the lever that it does not succumb to cultural norms which would put equilibrium in a positive light and disequilibrium in a negative one. Another, more structurally defined feature is that the comparison with the lever is completely self-enclosed and does not require the appearance of an external hand to displace the weights. This might seem like an obvious thing to state, but it suggests that the lever is already to some extent implicated within an understanding of the human, whereby the body can be read as a kind of “meter” for the moral mechanics of the mind. We are still far removed from German Romanticism’s equation of the human with a fulcrum point within which the entire tension of the lever is captured. Instead, Kant’s example facilitates two observations. On the one hand, it demonstrates the lever’s ability to be adapted and recalibrated in various ways, such that the “zero” of rest responds to the particular demands of a situation. On the other hand, it shows how the lever breaks down the

44 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 222.



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illusion that opposites are categorically distinct by operating as a figure of translation or mediation. Visualizing the lever also entails imagining a scale where the “slight increase” is merely the differential or smallest possible conceivable unit in the process of mediating between one extreme and the other. Kant alludes to this potential for extrapolation when he refers to detestation as a “negative lust,” to hate as “negative love,” and to ugliness as a “negative beauty.”45 As counterintuitive as it might appear at first glance, these equations are structured upon kinship. They are to be understood as connecting scalar, rather than categorical, differences. And as much as Kant frames the language of these equations as a moral mathematics, a moral mechanics is really what is required to understand them fully.

About Thinking

By now, we have seen several examples of mechanical thinking in Kant’s essay, ranging from those drawn from the physical world to those taken from moral philosophy. As different as these regimes might seem to be, they share a particular structural feature. In each case, what is brought, either implicitly or explicitly, into the constellation of force and counterforce that defines the lever derives from an empirical context (whether the “data” in question comes from the physical environment or the contents of our thoughts). This scenario becomes a bit more complex when the dynamics of Aufhebung, a concept that also participates in the conceptual landscape of Kant’s essay, is taken into consideration. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the word Aufhebung is semantically related to the word for lever, Hebel: they share the stem heb- which means “to lift.” In its most literal sense, the work that a physical lever performs can be described as an act of “lifting up” (aufheben). Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon already notes that this word possesses multiple, contradictory meanings, some of which are worthy of further contemplation. These include the act of preserving something for future use and the act of removing something altogether (and the examples range from household economy to religious contexts). We can therefore see that, well before Hegel’s famous appropriation of Aufhebung as a way of mediating between the real and the ideal, it is a concept that merits special attention. In what follows, I will show how Kant deploys it in a very striking way, as a means of shifting the focus of his discussion from the contents of thinking to the structure of thought itself, all the while relying on the mechanical model to help make his case.

45 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 221.

56  The Lever as Instrument of Reason In response to the question, what happens when we stop thinking of a particular object, such as the sun, Kant writes, There exists at this moment in my soul, for example, the representation of the sun, and it exists in virtue of the power of my imagination. The next moment, I cease to think of this object. The representation which was, ceases to be in me, and the next state is the zero of the preceding one.46 Kant is clear that this “zero” is not the zero of absence, but rather once again the relative—though fleeting—zero of equilibrium. If, he insists, we allow the formula “a  –  a  =  0” to describe the progress of a mind that ceases to think about an object, then this equation is true when the following conditions are met: “Only in so far as an equal but opposed real ground is combined with the ground of a is it possible for a to be cancelled [aufgehoben].”47 The expression “a  –  a  =  0” therefore needs to be read as a sentence where the direction from left to right across the printed page indexes the temporality of the process, such that the zero is allowed to emerge at a particular time. With this example, Kant transfers the equilibrium point of static mechanics—that is, the fulcrum point of the lever: instead of being mechanically instantaneous, it becomes a time integral, and we can see more clearly here than in the prior examples that one of the functions of Aufhebung in Kant’s essay is to introduce a temporal dynamic into his mechanical thinking and use of the lever. This is a much different scenario than, say, the ship kept immobile between two equal and opposite forces; in that case, when a “zero” condition of equilibrium between weight and counterweight was reached, time was excluded from the equation—how long the ship was moored at sea was irrelevant information. For the purposes of my larger argument, I situate Kant’s temporalization of the mechanical analogy to model thinking at the beginning of a trajectory that leads to the psychological theories of the nineteenth century. What Kant describes in the narrowly circumscribed context of the replacement of one thought by another, Johann Herbart will expand upon as he tries to describe the production and repression of thoughts through more intricate equations of mechanical equilibrium. Even though Kant’s real interest lies in the heuristic exploration of human contexts, where the “forces” in question are psychic, rather than physical, it is remarkable that he never abandons the physical examples entirely but rather repeats them throughout the essay, using them as a

46 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 227. 47 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 228.



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foil and also as a persuasive tool for his more speculative comments. His argument transitions directly from the reminder that a body in motion will not cease moving partially or fully without an opposing force, to the following statement: But also, our inner experience of the cancellation [Aufhebung] of representations and desires which have become real in virtue of the activity of the soul completely agrees with this [physical nature, JH]. In order to banish and eliminate a sorrowful thought a genuine effort, and commonly a large one, is required. And that this is so is something which we experience very distinctly within ourselves. It costs a real effort to eradicate an amusing representation which incites us to laughter, if we wish to concentrate our minds on something serious.48 What Kant describes here is nothing more elaborate than the basic “material” of human social existence: in our environment, that which makes us smile or feel remorse, and the ways in which circumstances might also demand that we suppress these reactions. Life, then, for Kant would seem to be a series of equilibrium moments that are constantly emerging, being disrupted, and then emerging once again without any claims to permanence (and Chapter Three will show how German nature philosophy of the early nineteenth century takes up this idea and reframes it with a more prolonged reflection on the body, the lever, and the concept of equilibrium). This is not all Kant has to say on the matter of thinking, however: he has not quite taken the mechanical model as far as it is able to go. Although the concept of Aufhebung was useful in order to consider the progression of thoughts, Kant will reach to another word, one that has its own mechanically based etymology, when he turns to the problem of how we observe ourselves as thinkers. Kant is quick to acknowledge the difficulty involved in thinking about thinking: “What an admirably busy activity is concealed within the depths of our minds which goes unnoticed even while it is being exercised.”49 Such an observation is, of course, itself the product of a complex process that involves, among other things, an understanding of oneself as both observer and observed, whereby the former is a product of the latter. With such a constant exchange of thoughts, it is impossible to isolate and identify any one particular attempt of the mind to remove one of the thought images by replacing it with another. To rephrase the problem in mechanical terms: Kant finds himself hard pressed to define

48 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 228. 49 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 229.

58  The Lever as Instrument of Reason a subject position that would encompass both the lever and the hand that wields it. In the process of focusing his attention on this problem, the verb erwägen enters the discussion for the first time. The meaning of erwägen is to consider or to contemplate, but also to “weigh” in a figurative sense. At heart it is also a balancing act, an abstraction whose material correlate is the Waage (scale). The “contemplation” Kant refers to emerges precisely at the point where he puts aside the problem of how one thought ceases and another takes its place—a process that follows its own logic of equilibrium in successively occurring zero states—in favor of self-observation. In other words, precisely at the moment when the agent and lever positions collapse into one, Waage becomes erwägen. What is it, precisely, that Kant suggests we contemplate in this context? Contemplation, for the purposes of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, is a process by which we become aware of our own unconscious activities. We are astonished, he writes, when we contemplate (in Erwägung ziehen) the actions that take place in us without our notice when we read.50 The fact that ideas emerge and are replaced by others presupposes “opposed actions” (entgegengesetzte Handlungen) that are not necessarily accessible to our inner experience. Kant continues with further reference to the act of contemplation: If one considers [in Erwägung zieht] the grounds which form the foundation of the rule which we have here introduced, the following point will be instantly noticed: in what concerns the cancellation [Aufhebung] of an existing something, there can be no difference between the accidents of mental natures and the effects of operative forces in the physical world. These latter effects, namely, are never cancelled [aufgehoben] except by means of a true, opposed motive force [entgegengesetzte Bewegkraft] of something else. And an inner accident, a thought of the soul, cannot cease to be without a truly active power of exactly the self-same thinking subject.51 This passage is remarkable for the clear parallel it draws between physical and psychic forces, something that Kant’s contemporaries, such as Moses Mendelssohn, also found noteworthy: in his Letters Concerning the Latest Literature (1765), and with direct reference to the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, Mendelssohn comments that one difference between the interplay of forces in nature and their use as metaphor to model mental activities is that the former rely upon an

50 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 229. 51 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 229.



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outer force and the latter on an inner force that is contained in the mind.52 The act of contemplation, however, seems to mediate between the physical and the psychic spheres when it allows for at least the illusion of an external point of view to be maintained when it takes the mind as its object. There is, Kant plainly states, “no difference” between the forces that might cause a bodily object to change direction or stay in place, and those “inner accidents” that act upon our thinking, causing thoughts to come and go.53 Once again, it is possible to use mechanical theory to make assumptions about psychic processes. One can use the same kind of logic as before—thinking about forces in equilibrium—but now add a different layer of thinking that takes into account a temporal sequence. Of interest here is the integrated effect of different forces over time, and it would perhaps be more accurate to refer to them as coordinates (which is the corresponding concept from physics that would take the temporal dimension into account). Enabled by the analogical structure of physical and psychic forces, contemplation as erwägen is Kant’s response to the introduction of time into the equation. The one who contemplates is the reader who also examines the process of reading, the one who sees in the physical world the basis for a comparison to (and a distinction from) the realm of intellectual activity. These observational acrobatics are accompanied by a balancing act inherent in both the root and process of erwägen: just as the concept of equilibrium is grounded on the material object of the scale, contemplation as erwägen observes a system in a series of equilibrium states over time through an observation of the changes in its component parts.

Beyond the Material World

Toward the end of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, Kant returns yet again to the problem of how to distinguish between negation as absence (Mangel) and as privation (Beraubung), highlighting the difficulty through a contrast between the material and immaterial. The material world allows us to witness the real opposition of positive grounds with our own eyes. Because we are Newtonians, rather than Aristotelians, by training we do not judge objects on the basis of their movement. Instead, we envision forces of attraction and repulsion at play, whether an object is in motion or at rest. From the perspective of physical forces, unless one considers a vacuum, the zero of absence is never an option. In the middle of these musings, and with reference to the visible evidence of

52 Moses Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, vol. 21, letter 324 (Berlin and Stettin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1765), 170. 53 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 229.

60  The Lever as Instrument of Reason forces in the physical world, Kant invokes the lever for the second time in the essay, although we will need to look beyond the standard English translation in order to find it: It is in exactly this fashion that the weights on the arms of scales are at rest, if the weights are placed in the scale-pans in accordance with the laws of equilibrium. This concept can be extended far beyond the limits of the material world.54 The English translation leaves out an important detail: that the weights are placed on the scale “according to the laws of equilibrium on the lever” (nach den Gesetzen des Gleichgewichts am Hebel). The concept to be extended beyond the material world may be that of equilibrium, but its motivating image is inseparable from the lever. It would seem, then, that the lever is much more than just a simple machine. As a conceptual apparatus positioned to translate between the material and immaterial worlds, it is a physical instrument of weighing and lifting that becomes a figurative illustration of the concept of equilibrium. The lever’s manifold abilities to transpose, transfer, and translate that we have observed throughout this chapter are referenced here once more in the very act of transferring a concept—mechanical rest or static equilibrium—past the limits of the material world. The lever is therefore both the embodiment of an idea and the very instrument by which that idea can be promoted beyond its original context. One might have the impression that, with this most recent theoretical reflection on the lever, we have moved beyond the idea that it is connected to certain aspects of the human in Kant’s thinking; such an impression could not be further from the truth. Even as he muses about the ability of the lever to function in material and immaterial contexts, Kant invokes the example of the “most learned man”: If you ask a man of even the greatest learning at a moment when he is relaxing and at rest [ruhig] to recount something to you or to share part of his knowledge of things with you, you will find that he knows nothing in this state, that he is empty, and that he has no definite thoughts [Erwägungen] or judgements. But stimulate him by asking him a question or expressing a view of your own, and his learning will reveal itself in a series of activities. And the tendency of that succession of activities will be to make both him and you aware of his understanding of things.55

54 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 236. 55 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 236.



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Kant’s example seems, at first glance, calculated to tease his readers, because it is not clear at all whether this most learned man, in his state of rest, is meant to embody the absence of thought or something akin to mechanical equilibrium, where thoughts, like physical forces, are balanced. Asked simply to speak of himself—to reflect upon himself as thinker, as Kant has just done—he appears empty, devoid of thought, without the capacity for contemplating his own state of mind. It seems that, in this case, the interlocutor must be the one to tip the balance, as it were. Then, in the wake of the interlocutor’s judgments, the most learned man will be able to articulate his own; and what is more: the “tendencies” of these thoughts possess a direction. They construct a discursive continuum between the two the two individuals and emphasize the shared understanding of two separate minds. We have come a long way from the irritating narrow-mindedness of the Spartan mother, who only cares for grief or glory, and have moved into a realm of psychological activity where the content is of relatively little importance. It doesn’t matter what our interlocutors say—we really don’t care what they think. More important is the fact that their words, when directed at us, create an imbalance. In physical terms, Kant has substituted his one-dimensional machine (the Spartan mother) with a (masculine!) multidimensional one. The silence of the learned man, at first indecipherable as the zero of “something” or “nothing,” reveals itself as an unstable point of rest. This point presumably corresponds to more complex activity than the Spartan mother was capable of, because it requires only the slightest provocation to resume motion in a new, unexpected direction. Kant’s learned man might have already caused readers to recall Heinrich von Kleist’s 1805 essay, Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden On the Gradual Perfection of Thoughts while Speaking). The first-person narrator of Kleist’s essay almost seems to be a latter-day spokesman for Kant’s learned man: he has knowledge but cannot necessarily articulate it. He needs the provocation of conversation rather than the open-ended questions of an academic examination in order for his thoughts to emerge and refine themselves through speaking. Other similarities, while perhaps coincidental, are still worth commenting upon: much like Kant at the beginning of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, the narrator of Kleist’s text identifies himself as a reader of Euler and Kästner. It is difficult to avoid the temptation of an anachronistic (though not entirely illogical) reading, one that would point us toward an autobiographical interpretation. Just as the narrator in Kleist’s text can be read as a fictional voice for Kleist himself, one wonders whether the “most learned man” might not be an incarnation of Kant. If that were indeed the case, then the mechanical descriptions of the human we have, until now, been reading

62  The Lever as Instrument of Reason as intradiegetic would have the potential to take on an extradiagetic dimension. This would be of interest because it provides even more evidence for the ability of this mechanical model to encompass both the lever and the hand—and thereby reconstruct the subject position— through a self-referential gesture that invokes the philosopher within a philosophical text.

Conclusion

In this discussion, I have used Kant’s “Negative Magnitudes” essay as a case study to open my inquiry into how the lever can be used in ways that both go beyond its origins in classical mechanics and challenge traditional metaphorical associations. I have shown that the lever and its mechanics, as taken up by Kant’s essay, embrace a broad conceptual apparatus that addresses historically important ways of defining psychological, moral, and social aspects of the human. We see this in a number of different contexts. One is the development of a psychometrics that expands from individual to social contexts, where human interaction is understood as a series of disrupted equilibrium moments. Another is in the pressure brought to bear on concepts such as equilibrium and contemplation that has shown how they have the ability to move between the material and intellectual regimes. Each of these topics will reappear, in different configurations and with various points of emphasis, throughout the rest of the book. Meanwhile, a new narrative of the lever is in the process of unfolding as well, one whose elements bear marked affinities to an “absolute metaphor” in Blumenberg’s sense as the lever was used both as a model and a point of orientation for questions about the human. The end of this discussion, which only touched upon the problem of a subject position defined in terms of the lever’s mechanics, also serves as the point of departure for the next step of my argument, which will trace the conceptual evolution of German Romanticism’s radical equation of the human as lever.

Two The Levers of German Romanticism

Atheist is whoever has no sense for mechanics.1 Friedrich Schlegel

Part One: The Tool of Tools

It is a little-known fact that two original thinkers who have come to stand for Early German Romanticism—Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)—were mechanically minded. This chapter will show that Schlegel and Novalis were not only skilled with levers and well-versed in mechanical theory, they used their levers to connect several of the influential movements we associate with European modernity with the purpose of constructing a new vision of the human. These movements include Cartesian philosophy and its understanding of the cogito as point; the history of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury physics, in which the lever plays a fundamental role; as well as two schools of philosophy active at the end of the eighteenth century: the philosophy of the subject as articulated in the work of Fichte, and the German Naturphilosophie advanced by Friedrich Schelling and others. For all that Aristotle might have identified the hand as the “tool of tools” due to its necessity for all acts of “manual” labor,2 for the latterday thinkers whose work informs this study, it is the mechanical lever as an instrument of reason, rather than of the hand, that deserves such a status.

1

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas Verlag, 1963), 230. 2 Aristotle, de anima, Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968; Reprint 2002), 149 (431b24).

64  The Lever as Instrument of Reason The observations contained in this chapter are based on a wide array of notes and literary “fragments” written by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel around 1800. These notes have been mined by scholars in the past for a number of different purposes: most notably, to analyze the Romantic concept of time,3 to understand Romanticism’s theory of the subject,4 and, more recently, to explore Romanticism’s interest in scientific theories and terminology.5 This latter field has learned to reject the artificial limitations imposed by the “two cultures” debate, as well as the formalism inherent in thinking purely in terms of “literature and science,” in order to embrace a wide range of topics limited by neither disciplinary nor historical boundaries. I would like to briefly situate the analyses in this chapter in relation to this field before proceeding. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine’s edited volume, Romanticism and the Sciences (1990), is indicative of a moment in the field’s emergence still marked by a need for self-legitimation. It contains language that, from today’s perspective, can seem somewhat dated (see the numerous references to “men of science”). After 2000, such concerns for legitimacy tend to be relegated to prefaces or footnotes, as we can already observe in Michel Chaouli’s innovative reading of Schlegel in The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (2002) and Robert J. Richards’s Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002). These books have helped to open channels for further research, whether with regard to a particular scientific field or topic, or within a broader cultural context.6 To this we could add Frederick Beiser’s comment in The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (2003) that one 3 Groundbreaking in this area of Romanticism Studies was Manfred Frank’s book, Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik (München: Winkler, 1984). 4 For further references on the philosophy of the subject in the years immediately prior to Early German Romanticsim, see Dieter Henrich, Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus. Tübingen – Jena 1790– 1794 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004) as well as Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). 5 See also my book, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge, 2009). 6 Michel Chaouli, for example, argued that the science of chemistry around 1800 provides the “crucial conceptual model” for a radical transformation of literary poetics (Chaouli, Friedrich Schlegel and the Laboratory of Poetry (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2002), 2). Robert Richards advocated for complexity when he wrote that it is “impossible .  .  . to understand either the more overt or the very subtle ways romanticism shaped biology in the nineteenth century without coming to understand the romantic mode of being and thought” and its “heterogeneous constitution” (Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life. Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5).



The Levers of German Romanticism  65

needs to remember what constitutes “normal science” around 1800 in the first place or risk succumbing to stereotypes that are “deeply anachronistic.”7 In my opinion, such anachronisms are symptomatic of approaches where popular dichotomies such as “literature and science” are allowed free rein without being anchored in careful, historically contextualized readings.8 Recently published monographs by Stefani Engelstein, Christine Lehleiter, and Leif Weatherby, among others, show that such interdisciplinary work, which transcends the individual disciplines of the history of science, philosophy, and literary studies, is entirely possible.9 The questions and thinking that inform this chapter have certainly been encouraged by the increased scholarly attention given to connections between German Romanticism and the sciences during the past years. At the same time, this chapter also responds to a perceived gap. Still required is a greater diversity of themes and focal points in the research on German Romanticism and science. It is possible that the emphasis on the familiar concepts of life, nature, and organicism has effectively generated a blind spot where other topics of interest await discovery,10 and one of these topics in particular is the basis of this chapter. Just as Romantic fragments and aphoristic writing betray a pervasive interest in organic models of generation, they also demonstrate a persistent interest in mechanics. The same notebooks in which one finds ample evidence of Schlegel’s and Novalis’s procreative poetics

7 Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (2003): 83. 8 Outdated ways of thinking have a way of lingering, however. In Frederick Burwick’s Romanticism: Keywords (2015), one can find the entry on “science” nestled between “satire” and “sensibility,” but Burwick does not do more than state that literature bears witness to scientific ideas. 9 Christine Lehleiter’s Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014) takes a close look at the scientific discussions around inbreeding, cross-breeding, and the inheritance of madness in order to explore how selfhood was conceptualized around 1800. Stefani Engelstein’s Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) is also interested in genealogy, but focuses on the “sibling” as a term that questions the “margins of identity” not only in literature and philosophy but also biology and the sciences of human population diversity, among other discourses. Weatherby’s Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016) takes up the deceptively simple concept of the “organ” and traces its emergence in late-eighteenth-century life sciences as well as its philosophical trajectories as metaphor. 10 The one chapter on science in the most recent edition of the Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), for example, also focuses entirely on the life sciences.

66  The Lever as Instrument of Reason also served as a testing ground for their experimental (and sometimes radical) thinking about the relationship between the lever and the human. Many of the relevant notes are connected to their plans for an encyclopedia project. Others are found in notebooks of philosophical and literary ideas, including those notes connected to excerpts from works by Fichte, Schelling, and Eschenmayer, among others. Schlegel and Novalis borrow from each of these different philosophers and synthesize diverse philosophical approaches and scientific perspectives on the lever in order to create something new. Upon encountering the word “lever” in this context, the first thing that comes to mind might just be German Romanticism’s fascination with those complicated lever-figures known as automata, such as one finds in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Achim von Arnim. Hoffmann’s Olympia does not make her debut in The Sandman until 1816, however, and in the years around 1800—the focus of this chapter—the specter of the uncanny that seems so often to accompany the mechanical human form is absent from Schlegel’s and Novalis’s own mechanical meditations.11 As in the prior chapter on Kant, the emphasis in the present one will be on two central problems: to define the conceptual apparatus of the lever in the context of German Romanticism and to analyze what, precisely, this apparatus is mobilized to do. Why do Novalis and Schlegel join concepts from the wide-ranging fields of the Romantic encyclopedia project under the sign of the lever? How are we to understand their equation of the human ego with the lever’s fulcrum point, both with reference to Romantic theories of the subject and within the history of mechanics? As the chapter charts the terrain of a Romantic interest in mechanics and mechanical topics, it will show how Novalis and Schlegel channel their mechanical thinking into various practices of construction in which the lever and its related concepts are implicated. Part of what defines the Romantic approach to the lever is that Novalis and Schlegel are just as interested in the construction of levers as they are in those things that levers enable them to construct. Their theoretical reflections on the lever, and their willingness to use it as an instrument of reason, are informed by an awareness of its ability to serve the construction of knowledge as well as an ongoing inquiry as to what a lever actually is. The Romantic lever is never transparent in a Heideggerian sense of 11 For insights into the automaton in Hoffmann’s work, see Lienhard Wawrzyn, Der Automaten-Mensch: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung vom “Sandmann” (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976). For a more recent, and broader, perspective on the significance automaton in European culture, see John Tresch’s Romantic Machine. Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).



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being “ready to hand.” Instead, because of their increased awareness of the tool as tool, Schlegel and Novalis designate the lever as an object of philosophical inquiry in its own right. With these concerns in mind, the first part of this chapter will describe German Romanticism’s use of the lever as tool and pay close attention to the epistemic environment in which it operates. The second section will then argue that, just as we saw with Kant, Romantic thinking about the lever and its related concepts is very much invested in modeling different aspects of the human. Here, one will observe a peculiar collapse of the distinction between tool and agency. Much in the Archimedean tradition, the lever is still used to augment human power, but the critical difference is that the lever is no longer conceived of as external. Instead, I will show how it becomes part of how Novalis and Schlegel conceptualize the human in the first place. Of central importance in this context is the interest they devote to the hypomochlion, or fulcrum point. Consequently, the third part discusses Novalis’s equation of the hypomochlion with the human and Schlegel’s emphasis on the constructive potential of this particular mechanical point. It shows how Schlegel and Novalis synthesize their scientific and philosophical work on the lever into groundbreaking thinking about the human as individual as well as the processes of the human psyche.

Philosophical Problems and Mechanical Thinking

To understand how German Romanticism appropriates the lever for itself requires a sense of how the lever has been taken up by philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Certain key moments of this history have already been described in the introduction to this study. There, I emphasized the ways in which the lever was central to theoretical reflections about the possibility of a common principle joining each of the simple machines, and I also framed the question of how the lever might be useful in discourses beyond classical mechanics. The chapter on Kant then contributed to this historical perspective, with reference to the ways in which the lever, as a physical and a mathematical object, could navigate between material and immaterial contexts. The current chapter adds to these historical perspectives by providing further information that bears directly on Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking. Even though much of research on German Romanticism and scientific thinking has emphasized its connection to the life sciences emerging around 1800, often overlooked are its affinities to a different tradition, usually referred to as “mechanical” or “corpuscular” philosophy, terms that are themselves notoriously difficult to define. When conceived of in relation to texts such as Robert Boyle’s The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1666), mechanical philosophy can be

68  The Lever as Instrument of Reason understood as an approach which, in the words of John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704), “endeavours to explicate the Phaenomena of Nature from Mechanical Principles.”12 Rejecting the Aristotelian viewpoint that there are particular forms and qualities that dictate the tendencies of objects in the natural world, the mechanical philosopher holds that, as Daniel Garber writes, “everything, be it terrestrial or celestial, natural motion or constrained, must be explained in terms of the size, shape and motion of the parts that make it up, just as the behavior of a machine is explained.”13 Garber also emphasizes the importance of the Cartesian idea, as expressed in the Principia philosophiae, that such an understanding of the machine-like functioning of the universe allows for our comprehension of one part to be extrapolated to the whole: In this way, the image of the macrocosm and the microcosm, central to chymical philosophies and Renaissance naturalism, found its way into mechanism after a fashion. For the mechanical philosopher, as for the chymist and the Renaissance naturalist, what happens at one level reflects and is reflected by what happens at every other level.14 The willingness and ability to think across scale exhibited by the mechanical philosophers is also a key element of the Romantic approach: as Schlegel later observes, every universe has its hypomochlion or fulcrum point. One significant historical precedent to German Romanticism is the interiorization of the Archimedean point associated with Descartes. As we saw in the Introduction, Descartes’s invocation of a “firm point” is not only important as a key moment in the history of philosophy by virtue of advocating a strong rationalism; it is also of great importance

12 See Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, Cambridge Histories Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 13 Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 44. 14 Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 44. Daniel Capecchi has also observed that the seventeenth-century concept of mechanism “associated nature with a great machine, a clock, an old concept that in the seventeenth century replaced the animistic Renaissance idea of nature as a big animal” and “eliminated philosophy from physics, replacing it with mechanics, the world of efficient causes of material kind, where all is explained by means of body and motions (and forces).” See Capecchi, Path to Post-Galilean Epistemology: Reinterpreting the Birth of Modern Science (New York: Springer, 2017), 230. For a different perspective, one can consult Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature, which opens with the observation that “there is nothing inevitable about seeing the world as a kind of machine” (Dear, Intelligibility, 15).



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for the history of the Archimedean point, which is inextricably linked to that of the lever. Even though Descartes refers to an image attributed to Archimedes where the human, the lever, and the point upon which the lever rests are distinct from one another, for his own purposes, he believes to have found this “immovable” point in a philosophy based on the concept of the ego as res cogitans. Descartes thereby relocates the Archimedean point to a position within our own minds, and this development will continue to inform further thinking about both the Archimedean point and the lever in German Romanticism. The second historical precedent comes from the history of science. Francisco Meli’s book, Thinking with Objects, documents how Kepler, Bernoulli, Huygens, and many other scientists and mathematicians used the lever as a model in order explain problems such as oscillation and collisions. In the case of the Italian scientist Giovanni Borelli, we learn that the lever was a central element in his attempts to describe planetary motion. Meli writes that Borelli was, in part, influenced by Kepler, not just in his attempt to bring together physics and astronomy but also in his claim that the satellites’ trajectories are elliptical and that the sun pushes the planets with a lever, as it were. Borelli conceived orbital motion as if it were taking place on a rotating lever moved by the rotating sun.15 These two examples remind us of the ability of the lever to be integrated into thought experiments adapted to vastly different scales—from the punctuality of the ego to the vastness of the cosmos. In them, we also see how the lever and connected concepts (such as the fulcrum point) can be de- and reconstructed and thereby adapted to different conceptual problems. Textbooks of early modern mechanics describe a handful of “simple machines” and speculate as to the degree to which each might connect to the same mechanical principles associated with the lever. The examples from Descartes and Borelli indicate that, more so than the pulley, the inclined plane, and the other machines, the lever has proven over time to be remarkably versatile as an instrument of philosophical as well as scientific thinking.16 Like the scientists and mathematicians 15 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 194. For further information on Kepler’s use of the lever, see also Alexander Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (Methuen: London, 1980), 190. 16 Michael Wheeler reminds us that one needs to be quite precise, however, when focusing on Descartes’s use of “machine” and “mechanism” because these terms are historically variable. Wheeler has shown that when Descartes refers

70  The Lever as Instrument of Reason who come before them, the German Romantics also test out the idea, to what degree various things can be thought of in terms of the lever. They use it to model relationships between concepts, to describe processes of generation of both the individual and the universe, and, more generally, as a way of reconciling potential contradictions of philosophical thinking. To be sure, grouping Schlegel and Novalis in a history that includes Descartes and Borelli, and to situate German Romanticism within the trajectory of mechanistic philosophy in general, might seem like a peculiar idea. Marshall Brown likely spoke for many when he wrote in The Shape of Romanticism (1979) that the German Romantics “advance beyond the mechanistic world view,”17 casting that particular worldview in a pejorative light. In the most recent edition of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism devoted to Romanticism, we find that little has changed.18 In that volume, the word “mechanical” only appears in contexts where it is used derogatorily and the word “mechanics” occurs just once in a fleeting reference to Newton.19 In particular, Joel Black’s essay, “Scientific Models,” deals exclusively with Romanticism’s interest in organic models taken from the life sciences and Naturphilosophie, without mentioning other scientific interests that might not fall directly under the purview of theories of organic phenomena. Of course, there are exceptions, although the most notable is situated within the French context. John Tresch’s Romantic Machine (2012) confronts old biases in Romantic scholarship against all things mechanical and advances new perspectives. His study unfolds around the central premise that Romanticism and mechanism have more connections than previously acknowledged. To argue his case, he considers both the “machines” themselves and, with great attention to historical detail, the social context within which they emerged. As Tresch’s reading demonstrates in the French context, and as I have argued in earlier essays devoted

to these terms, he might mean a “material system that unfolds purely according ot the laws of blind physical causation,” a material system that fulfills the above requirements but “to which in addition certain norms of correct and incorrect functioning apply” or, in some cases, one that fulfills a special purpose. See Michael Wheeler, “God’s Machines,” in The Mechanical Mind in History, ed. Philip Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008), 307–08. 17 Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 33. 18 See Joel Black, “Scientific Models,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 19 Black, “Scientific Models,” 115.



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to the German context,20 there is very little reason, especially from the point of view of Early German Romanticism, to subscribe to a reading that privileges the organic to the exclusion of the mechanical. By the same token, I would like to underscore that a focus on the mechanical is by no means a rejection of organic models: in Romanticism’s case, the “mechanistic world view” has not been not abandoned, but simply reconfigured. If anything, one of the most surprising discoveries of this study is the way in which aspects of the “organic” and the “mechanical” are able to coexist.

The Levers of Novalis and Schlegel

The chapter on Kant’s “Negative Magnitudes” essay introduced Gehler’s definition of the lever from the Physical Dictionary (Physikalisches Wörterbuch), which is important for Schlegel and Novalis as well. Readers will recall how Gehler, whose discussion of the lever was taken by Erxleben and Kästner,21 defines it as “a fixed and inflexible connection of three bodies—or three points—two of which turn around the third, the fulcrum.”22 This definition does not take into account the size of the lever, nor is it concerned with material constraints. Instead, it offers us a virtual lever that is pure connection and, as such, akin to those rhetorical operations that also forge connections by collecting disparate units under a single sign. The chapter on Kant also developed the idea of the lever as a conceptual apparatus that could be mobilized to respond to a particular philosophical problem. This “apparatus” could incorporate the mechanical theory associated with the lever as well as related concepts, such as static equilibrium and the succession of equilibrium states over time. What was true for Kant holds for Schlegel and Novalis as well: the lever is extremely adaptable and can be reconstructed in order to respond to the intellectual interests of the person who is wielding it. Although Novalis’s and Schlegel’s levers—and how they use them—do have several things in common,

20 See, for example, my essays, “The Poet as Artisan. Novalis’ Werkzeug and the Making of Romanticism,” German MLN 121.3 (2006): 617–30; “From Romantic Tools to Technics: Heideggerian Questions in Novalis’ Anthropology,” The Aesthetics of the Tool: Technologies, Instruments, and Figures of Literature and Art, special edition of Configurations 18.3 (Fall 2010); and “In the Spirit of ‘Clever Inventions and Constellations’: The Mechanics of Romantic Systems,” in Romantic Circles, Praxis Series, ed. Mark Canuel (Spring 2016), online. 21 Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Anfangsgründe der angewandten Mathematik (Göttingen: Verlag der Wittwe Vandenhoek, 1780) and Johann Christian Polycarmp Erxleben, Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1787). 22 Gehler, Physicalisches Wörterbuch, vol. 2, 565.

72  The Lever as Instrument of Reason the discursive environments in which they emerge are not identical. To make that distinction clear, the remaining pages of Part One will be devoted to (re)constructing the lever based on Novalis’s and Schlegel’s aphorisms before turning in Part Two to the problem of how these levers are used in relation to the human. For Novalis, mechanics is not just a science.23 Knowledge of mechanics brings with it a different way of observing and constructing relations with the objects in our environment. He certainly had plenty of experience in that regard, given the fact that he was appointed as saline assessor after leaving the Freiberg mining academy in May 1799 and held the position until his death in March 1801. During that time, he was primarily concerned with two projects: the inspection of the saline facilities in Dürrenberg, Kösen, and Artern, and geognostic observations (including regional land surveys).24 In the few professional documents that remain from this time period, it is clear that levers were not just objects of theoretical reflection for Novalis, but also part of his daily work-life, as the following note indicates: Application of the simple lever—with a water tank on the long end in the theory of mining machinery. Water would fall successively first in the tank of one lever, then in the tank of the other. Each could, however, lift the other along with it after the emptying of its water. If need be, one could mount several levers among one another—which would then receive water from one another.25 In his introduction to Novalis’s technical and professional writings, Gerhard Schulz reminds readers that Novalis described his literary writing as a relatively “minor matter” when compared to his professional work and he also suggests that there was more of a reciprocal relationship between the two than the early scholarship on Novalis ever cared to acknowledge.26 Schulz’s observation merits much more consideration than it has received, and the focus on the

23 For more information on how mechanics related to Novalis’s professional career and its duties, see Gerhard Schulz’s overview in Novalis, Schriften 3, 697–712. 24 Erik Hansen, Wissenschaftswahrnehmung und –umsetzung im Kontext der deutschen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 248. 25 “Anwendung des einfachen Hebels—mit einem Wasserkasten am langen Ende in der Bergmaschinenlehre. Das Wasser fiele successive bald in den Kasten des Einen Hebels—bald in den des Andern, nach Ausleerung seines Wassers wieder mit in die Höhe heben. Allenfalls könnte man mehrere Hebel untereinander anbringen—die das Wasser von einander bekämen” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 739). 26 See “Einleitung” to Novalis, Schriften 3, 697.



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mechanical lever in this study allows the true extent of this reciprocal relationship to be acknowledged.27 A note from the “mathematical notebook” dated June 23, 1798, begins with the following observation: the “study of machines forms the mechanic—and accustoms the mind to clever inventions and constellations.”28 This sentiment echoes one found in Galileo’s Discorsi, where he writes that visits to the shipyard of Venice offer ample opportunity for philosophizing to an enquiring mind, especially that part of enquiry invoking mechanics; since here all types of instruments and machines are constantly being put to work by a great number of artisans, some of whom, partly .  .  . through their own observations and their own experiences, are necessarily greatly expert and highly intelligent.29 Galileo and Novalis clearly understand that the study of machines encourages an advanced knowledge of mechanics; and for Novalis, if there is in addition a poetic quality to be found in the mechanical arts, then it has something to do with creative juxtapositions that create or reveal surprising affinities. As we have seen, such productive juxtaposing is well within the purview of the lever as a mediator of differences. A knowledge of machines also means that the simple concepts we encounter can be seen for their mechanical and mathematical potential. In the same mathematical notebook, Novalis asks and answers this very question: “What is a point—a line—a surface etc., a body—(they are points of rest,—hypomochlia, axes, spheres.)”30 To say that we can observe in Novalis’s aphorisms an inclination to see the objects of our world in terms of a potentially “mechanical” environment—understood in the most general sense as an environment conducive to unusual couplings, constructed within a spirit of instrumentality—is still only half of the

27 One can also refer to Schulz’s more recent biography of Novalis from 2012, Novalis: Leben und Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011). 28 Novalis, Schriften 3.50. Thomas Grosser also glosses this passage when he comments that Novalis’s interest and expertise in machines served as “schooling for a plan-oriented type of intelligence, capable of innovation.” See Grosser, Identität und Rolle. Kontext, Konzept und Wirkungsgeschichte der Genieästhetik bei Novalis (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991), 112. Grosser, whose emphasis is on the concept of genius, does not refer in detail either to mechanics or to the lever in his study, however. 29 Quoted in David Speiser, Discovering the Principles of Mechanics 1600–1800, ed. Kim Williams and Sandro Caparrini (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 21. 30 Novalis, Schriften 3, 64.

74  The Lever as Instrument of Reason picture, however. We still need to understand the particular role the mechanical lever has to play. Novalis’s most thought-provoking statements on the lever emerge during his reading of Carl August von Eschenmayer’s Säze [sic] aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt (“propositions from nature-metaphysics applied to chemical and medicinal topics” (1797)). Eschenmayer (1768–1852) studied medicine in Tübingen and Göttingen, and he eventually returned to Tübingen to become professor of medicine (1811) and later, practical philosophy (1818).31 Today, he is better known for his nature-philosophical writings than his medical work, even if he usually appears as a footnote in studies devoted to those philosophers whose writings he most rigorously engaged, including Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. His eventual clash with Schelling—in which the lever has a surprising role to play—will be discussed in the following chapter on Naturphilosophie. For Novalis, at least, Eschenmayer’s willingness to use metaphysical arguments in pursuit of connections between chemistry, the study of electricity, and medicine earned him the status of a kindred spirit. Eschenmayer himself envisioned the Propositions as a guidepost for future thinking about how to apply nature-philosophical ideas more broadly. Because the text of the Propositions does not itself accomplish the task but merely points the way, Eschenmayer acknowledges its status as fragment (Bruchstük [sic]) and encourages his readers by adding: “One can take propositions from a system and apply them completely unsystematically to objects of experience, without their most meritorious aspect falling by the wayside.”32 Novalis seems to have taken this programmatic statement to heart because, as he read Eschenmayer’s text, he selected various passages of interest about the lever and added his own commentary. It is here, however, that one encounters a problem with the critical edition of Novalis’s writings that needs to be addressed before moving forward. The editors have formatted the notes collected under the heading “Kant and Eschenmayer Studies” by using a relatively small font to denote excerpts from Eschenmayer’s Säze and a larger font to indicate Novalis’s comments, for example: The lever’s laws of explanation [p. XIII]

31 For a short biography, see the entry “Eschenmayer, Adolf Karl August (1768– 1852),” in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn (New York: Continuum, 2010). 32 See Carl August Eschenmayer, Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt (Tübingen: Jakob Friedrich Heerbrandt, 1797), iv.



The Levers of German Romanticism  75 /One should not speak of quantities, but rather of strengths and weakness of motion / Motion is mixed from mass and velocity / elasticity /. The result is the same—from a single mass and doubled force—and from doubled mass and a single force.33

I will provide the German text for this and following few citations in order to give a more precise sense of Novalis’s language, his formatting, and the degree to which he adopts and modifies Eschenmayer’s own text: Erklärungsgesetze des Hebels [S. XIII] / Man sollte nicht von Größen, sondern von Stärken und Schwächung der Bewegung reden. / Bewegung ist aus Masse und Geschwindigkeit / Schnellkraft/ gemischt. Der Erfolg ist gleich—von einfacher Masse und doppelter Kraft—und von doppelter Masse und einfacher Kr[aft].

There are interesting details contained in this excerpt. One is that Novalis turned to Eschenmayer, as opposed to a more canonical source from classical mechanics, when looking for an explanation of the law of the lever. Another concerns Novalis’s interest in the most basic laws of motion, and the fact that he is engaged in making connections between various physical concepts, such as Geschwindigkeit (velocity) and Schnellkraft (elasticity). The problem is that the critical edition gives us the impression that Novalis faithfully transcribed Eschenmayer’s text and interspersed his own thoughts along the way. When one compares the small print of Novalis’s “excerpts” with the text of Eschenmayer’s Propositions, however, it quickly becomes apparent that there are discrepancies. Some are fairly trivial. For example, in the following passage from Eschenmayer, which we can understand as the “source” of the one from Novalis excerpted above, we see that Eschenmayer uses the verb zusammengesezt (composed) instead of gemischt (mixed), makes no mention of Schnellkraft (elasticity), and frames the ratios between mass and velocity in somewhat different terms (though to the same mechanical effect). I include the German quotes as well to make the comparisons easier to follow:

33 Novalis, Schriften 2, 381.

76  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Now the quantity of motion is composed from the mass and its velocity and a half mass with doubled velocity has the same relation as an entire mass and a single velocity. (Nun ist die Grösse der Bewegung zusammengesezt aus der Masse und ihrer Geschwindigkeit, und es verhält sich eine halbe Masse mit einer doppelten Geschwindigkeit gleich mit einer ganzen Masse und einer einzelnen Geschwindigkeit.34) Consider the case of other excerpts in Novalis’s notes, however, such as this one: The longer the arm of the lever, the greater the velocity of the force moving its end. Consequently, for the establishment of equilibrium—a stronger mass must hang on the shorter arm, or press upon it—in order to compensate—More

intensity opposed to greater extensity. [p. XIV/XV] (Je länger der Arm des Hebels, desto größer die Geschwindigkeit der das Ende desselben bewegenden Kraft .  .  . Mithin muß zur Herstellung des Gleichgewichts—am kürzeren Arm eine stärkere Masse hängen, oder darauf drücken—um so zu kompensiren—Mehr Intensität gegen größere

Extensität. [S. XIV/XV]35) One is hard pressed to find the corresponding passage in Eschenmayer’s text on pages xiv and xv, which are indicated, or elsewhere.36 It would therefore be more accurate to designate Novalis’s “excerpts” as paraphrases that deviate to varying degrees from Eschenmayer’s language, and which already bear the imprint of Novalis’s thought processes. For example, when Novalis suggests that we think about the “strength and weakness of motion” (von Stärken und Schwächung

34 Eschenmayer, Säze, xiv. 35 Novalis, Schriften 2, 381. 36 In Hans-Joachim Mähl’s preface to this section, one can read the following with reference to the Eschenmayer studies: “Die Auszüge sind trotz ihrer knappen Zusammenraffung eng an die Vorlage angelehnt und enthalten nur gelegentlich selbstständige Zusätze des Novalis, die durch Normaldruck hervorgehoben worden sind. Diese beziehen sich vor allem auf die Vorrede” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 332–33). Although the statement that Novalis’s excerpts stay close to Eschenmayer’s phrasing and “only occasionally contain independent contributions by Novalis” leaves some room for interpretation, it does not go far enough to indicate to the reader that these “quotations” of Eschenmayer need to be compared quite closely to the original.



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der Bewegung) in relative terms as opposed to as quantities, we can see that he follows through with his own suggestion when he repeats the word “stark” in the context of a “stronger mass” (stärkere Masse) in the excerpt quoted above. In other words, the excerpt has been influenced by the rhetoric of the commentary. Given that Novalis’s reception of Eschenmayer is slightly more complicated than the critical edition suggests, the following questions arise: Which aspects of Eschenmayer’s writings on the lever are most germane to the discussion at hand and to what degree do Novalis’s interventions either pick up on certain ideas of Eschenmayer’s or point to a new perspective of the lever? In the chapter on Kant, we saw that there were various ways of thinking about the lever in the context of eighteenth-century physics and mathematics. These definitions either emphasized the materiality of the lever (as “bar” or “stick”) or distanced themselves from it to emphasize the lever’s immateriality, such as we saw in Gehler’s definition of the lever as pure “connection.” In Eschenmayer’s Propositions, rather than describing the lever as a fixed relation between three points or bodies, Eschenmayer conceives of the lever in terms of force and motion: We can imagine to ourselves the arms of a lever with their forces as two magnitudes of motion, and regard the hypomochlion as the point in which both magnitudes work against each other. Since the arms of the lever represent lines whose separated endpoints cannot be moved, without at the same time moving the points at the center of motion, the moments in which the forces of the lever work upon the hypomochlion, are therefore the same even with every inequality in the lengths of the arms.37 The forces Eschenmayer describes refer to the lever’s moment of torque or Drehmoment, the force of turning. The mechanical “moments” (Zeiten) of the lever arms refer to the product of the length of the arm multiplied by the force applied to it. When the moments on either side of the fulcrum point are the same, the lever is in a state of static equilibrium. Novalis’s comments that “one should not speak of magnitudes [Größen]

37 “Wir können uns die Aerme eines Hebels mit ihren Kräften als zwei Bewegungsgrößen vorstellen, und das Hypomochlion als den Punkt ansehen, in welchem beide Grössen gegeneinander wirken. Da nun die Aerme des Hebels Linien vorstellen, deren entfernte Endpunkte nicht bewegt werden können, ohne daß zu gleicher Zeit auch die am Centro motus gelegene[n] Punkte der Linien bewegt werden, so sind die Zeiten, in der die Kräfte des Hebels auf das Hypomochlion wirken, auch bei jeder Ungleichheit der Länge der Aerme dennoch gleich” (Eschenmayer, Säze, xv)

78  The Lever as Instrument of Reason but rather of strengths and weaknesses of the motion,”38 and that the law of the lever should be conceived of in terms of “more intensity as opposed to greater extensity,”39 pick up on a tendency already noticeable in Eschenmayer and develop it further.40 This tendency de-emphasizes the lever’s “visibility”—that is, as an object best represented by lines, bodies, and proportionate magnitudes of weight or distances from the fulcrum point—in favor of a more abstract constellation of forces. It might not sound like such a significant idea from a purely mechanical point of view, but from a philosophical (as well as rhetorical) point of view, it makes quite a bit of difference whether one refers to actual quantities or relative strengths and weaknesses: whether the lever is defined in terms of its “parts” or in terms of forces. With this change—which entails a departure from the geometric visualization of the lever—comes greater mobility for the lever as object of comparison. Other notes reinforce the move toward an understanding of the lever simply in terms of force, such as the following ones from the “Physical Fragments”: Mechanics comprehends statics and mechanics in the stricter sense. Change of location is not essential to motion. Weight is the product of the neutralization of forces, or motions. Mechanics does not have to do with bodies but rather with weights. . . . Neutralized forces are called weights. The lever must, it seems to me, be explained according to laws of celestial mechanics—according to laws of attraction. The attraction is not direct, but rather in relation to a third point—centrally. (On the central points)41 38 Novalis, Schriften 2, 381. 39 “Mehr Intensität gegen größere Extensität. Mithin muß zur Herstellung des Gleichgewichts—am kürzeren Arm eine stärkere Masse hängen, oder darauf drücken—um so zu kompensiren,” (Novalis, Schriften 2). 40 For more information about the important role “intensity” plays in Englightenment and Romantic thinking, see Erich Kleinschmidt, Die Entdeckung der Intensität. Geschichte einer Denkfigur im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004). Kleinschmidt notes how Novalis’s reading of Eschenmayer facilitated the application of the concept of “gradation” to force (Kleinschmidt 25, n. 43). 41 “Die Mechanik begreift die Statik und Mechanik im strengern Sinn. Ortsveränderung ist der Bewegung nicht wesentlich. Die Schwere ist das Produkt der Neutralisation der Kräfte, oder Bewegungen. Die Mechanik hat nicht mit Körpern sondern nur mit Gewichten zu thun.  . . .   Neutralisirte Kräfte heißen Gewichte [sic]   Der Hebel muß, wie mich dünkt, nach Gesetzen der himmlischen Mechanik erklärt werden—nach Gesetzen der Anziehung. Die Anziehung ist nicht



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The above aphorism recalls the use of the lever in astronomical contexts, as Meli discusses with regard to Kepler. Eventually, Novalis goes so far as to imagine a lever that is almost completely disembodied, and the same tendency becomes more evident in other notes when he writes that “the lever is absolutely without rigid lines and point of support to be explained from the theory of force in general—the central forces in general”42 where “central forces” refer to centripetal and centrifugal forces.43 According to the scientific idea underlying this aphorism, we can define what the lever does just as adequately with the concept of force alone as we can when we rely on Gehler’s definition of a fixed, inflexible connection of three bodies or points. What, exactly, does Novalis want to convey with his willingness to do without the traditional image of a mechanical lever in equilibrium around a fulcrum point? What is to be gained from a lever described simply in terms of opposing forces? It is not as if we can do away with points altogether. Here, it might be helpful to refer to the work of Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), whose Analytical Mechanics (Mécanique analytique) was published in Berlin in 1788.44 In the preface to the Analytical Mechanics, Lagrange summarizes one of the most significant features of his project as follows: No figures will be found in this work. The methods I present require neither constructions nor geometrical or mechanical arguments, but solely algebraic operations subject to a regular and uniform procedure. Those who appreciate mathematical analysis will see with pleasure mechanics becoming a new branch of it and hence, will recognize that I have enlarged its domain.45 Craig Fraser situates this turn away from diagrams within a larger trend in the eighteenth century that emphasized “extending the domain of analysis and algorithmic calculation” and “reducing the dependence of advanced mathematics on geometrical institutions and geometric aids.”46 When Lagrange derives his general equations of motion, he directe, sondern in Beziehung auf einen dritten Punct—centralisch (Über die Centralpuncte),” Novalis, Schriften 3, 77. The editors date the initial drafts of this manuscript to September or October 1798 (for their discussion, see Novalis, Schriften 3, 31). 42 “Der Hebel ist schlechthin ohne starre Linien und Unterstützungspunct aus der Lehre der Kraft überhaupt—den Centralkräften überhaupt zu erklären” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 470). 43 See Gehler, Physikalisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Centralkräfte” for a description of these terms. 44 Mécanique analytique, 2 vols (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1788–89). 45 Lagrange, Analytical Mechanics, 7. 46 Fraser, Preface to Analytical Mechanics, vii.

80  The Lever as Instrument of Reason bases his thinking on the principle of virtual work which was already in place and could describe the “simple” machines of the lever, pulley, and inclined plane.47 In this regard, Novalis’s suggestion that we think of the lever in terms of “forces” rather than “rigid lines” seems quite in keeping with a turn away from visual diagrams, and we can see how such a development might have ramifications in other intellectual contexts as well. For example, instead of invoking the lever in the established tradition of a visual metaphor (along the lines of a “lever of reason,” such as one finds in Kant and elsewhere), we are left with an abstraction that can less easily be visualized. Instead, Novalis distills from the mechanics of the lever a particular rhetorical figure, that of transition and the preservation of opposites. Novalis expresses a similar idea in Das allgemeine Brouillon [The general brouillon] when he describes a “new deduction of the lever, from the point of lifting etc. through centrifugal force.”48 Taken together, these notes emphasize to what degree Novalis abandons a formal description of the lever in favor of its derivation from the concept of force. Any lingering distinctions between physical and mathematical levers based purely on the criterion of materiality also become irrelevant when there is increasingly less of a “body”—imagined or otherwise—to consider. Novalis’s notes on Eschenmayer allow us to witness this transformation in thinking directly, as in the following note where the concept of force takes over the arms of the lever in a peculiar way: The hypomochlion is the point of coincidence of the proportional members. The longer the arm of the lever, the greater the velocity of the motive force of its end. / more free room for motion [Spielraum] of the force absolute in itself—greater armature of force.49 Through the replacement of the lever “arm” with an “armature” of force, Novalis tests out a philosophical idea through a play on words. The degree to which his philosophical thinking is connected to his knowledge of the lever becomes even more apparent when,

47 Fraser, Preface to Analytical Mechanics, ix. 48 “Neue Deduktion des Hebels, aus dem Hebepuncte etc. durch Centrifugalkraft,” Novalis, Schriften 3, 442–43. 49 “Das Hypomochlion ist der Punct des Zusammentreffens der Proportionsglieder. Je länger der Arm des Hebels, desto größer die Geschwindigkeit der das Ende desselben bewegenden Kraft. / freyerer Spielraum der an sich absoluten Kraft— größere Armatur der Kraft/” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 381).



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with reference to his physicist friend Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Novalis constructs an analogy between “Ritter’s way of handling physics” and “my idea about the principle of personality in every substance,” something he equates with the force of the lever’s fulcrum.50 The selfawareness contained in this aphorism suggests Novalis’s thinking about the lever is more in line with a philosophical approach (or “way” of doing something) than an isolated interest. A laconic note, “About the Lever,”51 found just a few pages later than the aphorism cited above raises similar questions, namely: To what degree a reflection on the lever’s instrumentality might be connected to how it facilitates a more general approach to thinking about certain problems of philosophical interest. These are questions that ultimately have to do with the individual, as the notion of a “personality in every substance” and the formulation of equilibrium in terms of “intensity and extensity” suggest. The Romantic equation of the lever and the individual will be addressed in the final section of this chapter. Novalis and Schlegel share a keen interest in the lever and its usefulness for philosophical thinking, but they take advantage of this simple machine in different ways. Whereas Novalis’s aphorisms engage more directly than Schlegel’s with mechanical laws governing the lever, and he thinks “about the lever” in such a way as to generalize from contemporary physical theory, Schlegel’s approach can best be described as the exploratory creation of levers themselves, which in turn aligns well with Meli’s discussion of the heuristic value of levers for the mechanical theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is the functional property of the lever, which is after all a machine for our use, that allows Schlegel to operate it as an instrument of thought, as in the following two aphorisms that appear contiguously:

1. Activity (Thätigkeit) and receptivity (Leiden) completely relative.

Substance absolute, only the fulcrum in the (philosophical) lever.52

2. Only through a continuous ever repeated disruption is life possible.53

It is worth emphasizing that even though Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis were no strangers to mathematical notation, there are relatively few

50 Novalis, Schriften 3, 574.135. 51 Novalis, Schriften 3, 625.436. 52 “Thätigkeit und Leiden ganz relativ. Die Substanz absolut, nur d[er] Ruhepunkt in dem [philosophischen] Hebel” (Schlegel, KFSA 18, 419). 53 “Nur durch eine fortdauernde immer wiederholte Störung ist Leben möglich” (Schlegel 18.419).

82  The Lever as Instrument of Reason diagrams in their aphorisms, none of which concern the lever. Perhaps this is due to their focus on the hypomochlion and their interest in defining the lever as a problem of relative motion and the exchange of forces. They preserve the notion of lever as a figure of proportion or ratio found in Gehler’s definition, but replace rigid connections with the relativity of motion, allowing concepts more mobility to shift the terms under which their balance might be constructed. In other words, by freeing the lever from rigidity in multiple ways—whether understood as a fixed relation or a diagrammed form—and by factoring in disruption as a permanent companion of the (philosophical) lever— we see that early German Romantic thinking allows for a peaceful or at least non-contradictory coexistence of mechanical figures with the tropes of organic life. The previous chapter on Kant showed how the apparatus of the lever was used as a way of making or revealing connections between concepts. Like Kant, Schlegel constructs such a conceptual lever in order to bring activity, receptivity, and substance into relation with one another. The content of the aphorism, however, has greater resonance with the terminology of Fichte and Schelling. In Fichte’s philosophy, Thätigkeit (activity, understood as the nonquantified self-positing of the subject in its most basic sense) and Leiden (passivity or suffering,54 as a quantitative negation) exist in a process of constant reciprocation. As Iain Hamilton Grant describes it, the I and the not-I “do not merely coexist, but interact as positing and posited,” such that “a maximum of the one  =  a minimum of the other.”55 The self-positing activity of the subject is limited by an equally “positive” state: “The opposite of activity . . . is called passivity. Passivity is positive negation, and is insofar opposed to the merely relative [negation].”56 Kant’s use of the lever was facilitated by an understanding of “negative magnitudes” as “positive,” though existing in relative tension with those magnitudes typically understood as positive numbers. In the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Entire Theory of Science) from 1794, Fichte refers to the “striving” (Streben) of the I and not-I in terms of forces and devotes a paragraph to arguing that not only their independent striving but also the possibility of equilibrium between both must be posited.57

54 Fichte underscores the fact that Leiden is not to be understood as a “painful sensation” and must therefore be abstracted from its usual connotations. See Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Leibniz: Christian Ernst Gabler), 135. 55 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 85. 56 “Das Gegentheil der Thätigkeit . . . heisst Leiden. Leiden ist positive Negation, und ist insofern der bloss relativen entgegengesetzt” (Fichte, Grundlage, 66). 57 Fichte, Grundlage, 282.



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Grant has also shown that the discussion of negative magnitudes in Kant, which “pitches logical contradiction against opposing forces,” also “tallies with Fichte’s practical–theoretical concept of positing as an activity.”58 He writes, “Since the forces the I expresses as active and resistant (I and not-I) have their sources in the I’s infinite striving, then by the principle of continuity .  .  . there is no point at which forces are not operative” and adds that “the I’s continuous forces and quanta of activity produce and form reality.”59 We can see, then, that Schlegel’s construction of the lever of Tätigkeit and Leiden is therefore not a replica of a preexisting lever found in Fichte, but an attempt to bring a constellation of concepts and ideas already found in Fichte’s philosophizing about the subject in line with his own thinking. The concepts found in Schlegel’s lever do not just relate to a construction of the subject, however. They are also drawn from key terms in the emerging life sciences and Naturphilosophie. While Fichte offers a point of reference, whereby the emphasis is on the tension between the I and the not-I—the basic activities of the self-positing ego, Schelling offers a second one that is somewhat more in tune with the scientific context around 1800. The idea expressed in Schlegel’s two aphorisms—that life consists of a balance between activity and passivity that is, however, constantly disrupted—is consistent with what one can find in Friedrich Schelling’s nature philosophy. To make the connection between the mechanics of the lever and organic processes of life even clearer, I would add that when the two aphorisms cited above are read together, they provide a mechanical model for an organic principle, a lever in a state of constant motion. The fulcrum is a locus of alternation, the point that embodies the interplay of forces on either side. Much like the points of indifference between magnetic poles—which are also privileged points in Romantic thinking60—it serves as a model

58 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 88. 59 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 88. See also Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, where he makes a comparison to mathematics, where one abstracts from quality in order to focus on quality. It is “completely indifferent,” he writes, “whether I call steps forward or steps backward positive quantities” (Fichte, Grundlage, 133). 60 The concept of indifference was important for German Naturphilosophie around 1800. It is commonly associated with Schelling’s discussion of magnetism in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the Von der Weltseele (1798). See also Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799), where he describes a state of indifference as one where natural phenomena exist with the forces acting upon them in balance. For further reference, readers can consult Bernhard Rang’s Identität und Indifferenz. Eine Untersuchung zu Schellings Identitätsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 2000). Schelling’s use of indifference can in turn be traced back to the work of Dutch scientist

84  The Lever as Instrument of Reason for negotiating a relationship between opposing concepts, as a figure of dynamic opposition. The suggestion that life or living is a process of repeated disruptions is, as Gabriel Trop has proven, a fundamental part of Schelling’s concept of equilibrium in nature.61 Schelling’s On the World Soul (1798) argues that there is an equilibrium to life that must constantly be disturbed and re-established. In fact, in the same passage where Schelling makes this claim, he also uses the lever as a metaphor when he names oxygen and hydrogen (or “phlogistic material”) the two “negative principles of life in the animal body,” comparing them to “weights on the lever of life”; they are two principles whose local disequilibrium allows for the large-scale maintenance of life itself.62 The significance of the lever in German Naturphilosophie will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Three. For the moment, the important thing to keep in mind is that Schlegel’s designation of the lever as “philosophical” constructs a theoretical relationship that complies with mechanical law. And though the units of his lever are relatively more abstract than Schelling’s hydrogen and oxygen, the building blocks of life itself, there is a shared emphasis on movement and process (as opposed to the figure of the lever in static equilibrium). The examples cited above are not isolated cases in Schlegel’s writings, where one can find blueprints for additional levers. These levers are constructed from the key concepts that haunt Schlegel’s literary and

Anton Brugmans, who describes a plane of indifference between the two poles of the magnet. This is an antiquated concept of the magnet, which was replaced by magnetic fields after Ritter’s death (and later by quantum theory). See Brugmans, Philosophische Versuche über die magnetische Materie (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1784) and also Klaus Stein, Naturphilosophie der Frühromantik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 12–13. 61 See Gabriel Trop’s recently published essay “Affirmative Disequilibrium: Hogarth, Schiller, Schelling, and Goethe,” in Statics, Mechanics, Dynamics: Equilibrium around 1800, ed. Jocelyn Holland and Gabriel Trop, Germanic Review 92 (2017). Trop writes that about Schelling’s Naturphilosophie that it construes life as an oscillation between mutually exclusive conceptual gestures: life as part of the order of nature and life as a disruption of the order of nature, both of which together imply a second-order systemic organization in which contradiction functions as an internal motor” (Gabriel, “Affirmative Disequilibrium,” 183). 62 “Die beyden negativen Principien des Lebens im thierischen Körper sind daher phlogistische Materie und Oxygene (gleichsam die Gewichte am Hebel des Lebens), das Gleichgewicht beyder muß continuierlich gestört und wiederhergestellt werden,” Schelling, Von der Weltseele—Eine Hypothese der Höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus, ed. Jörg Jantzen und Thomas Kisser (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2000), 198. This stands in contrast to the Hippocratic tradition, which associates disease and disequilibrium.



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philosophical notebooks from the years 1800 and 1801, where one can find such statements as the following: Act and hypothesis form a lever, belief is the hypomochlion63 and Religion is the X of the encyclopedia—philology the hypomochlion. Art, mythology, poesie the positive arm, philosophy, history the negative.64 In these cases, we can see that the lever serves as a model or template that offers a way of articulating possible connections between various concepts within certain constraints. According to the logic of the lever, it should make a difference that “belief” serves as a hypomochlion or fulcrum point, rather than “act” or “hypothesis,” because by granting it this status Schlegel also posits that belief in some way mediates between the other two. Such an example also illustrates why it is necessary to think beyond a metaphorical usage of the lever. After all, it would be glaringly inadequate simply to describe the first aphorism as a “lever of act, belief, and hypothesis” in order to try to understand what Schlegel and other thinkers are doing when they construct the apparatus of the lever in the first place. When Schlegel writes that the lever is of the “utmost importance” for the theory of construction, he underscores its significance in more ways than one.65 Certainly, no mathematician or engineer would dispute his claim, but Schlegel’s notion of construction has less to do with bricks and mortar than it does with conceptual labor. Just as other formulas found in Schlegel’s notebooks draw upon the language and symbolism of differential calculus, we see that the logic of the lever allows for abstract concepts to be treated as discrete quantities, and positioned into relationships—without, however, losing their dynamic potential or status as constructions-in-progress. If we think of the lever as a “model,” then it is one that arrives with a strong sense of its own functionality already embedded within the larger conceptual apparatus. The broader implication of constructing and thinking with levers is that one can also identify both local and global lever effects: in other words, once the 63 “Der Act und die Hypothese bilden einen Hebel, der Glaube ist das Hypomochlion” (KFSA 18, 404.1002). 64 “Relig[ion] ist das X der Encykl[opädie]—[Philologie] das Hypom[ochlion]. K[unst]. Myth[ologie], [Poesie] der positive Arm, [Philosophie], Hist[orie] pp der negative” (KFSA 18, 391.845). 65 “Zur Theorie d[er] Construction der Hebel äußerst wichtig” (KFSA 18, 170.550).

86  The Lever as Instrument of Reason relationships are constructed (e.g., between mythology and poesy in the last of Schlegel’s aphorisms cited above), they will continue to bear upon our broader understanding. Schlegel alerts us to the fact that there might be more of a connection between mechanics and the construction of the encyclopedia project than previously assumed when he mentions these concepts in tandem,66 but the construction of the conceptual levers has an even greater ramification: once constructed, the lever effects continue to operate beneath the surface of the encyclopedia project, even when the lever or its component parts are not directly mentioned. Now that we have a better sense of how Novalis and Schlegel approach the mechanical lever in their writing, it is time to focus on a particular object acts as a common denominator in their thinking: the hypomochlion.

Part Two: The Point of Points

The examples discussed in Part One of this chapter have shown that, based on the status of the mechanical lever in the notes and aphorisms of German Romantic thinkers Schlegel and Novalis, the lever has every right to replace the hand as a “tool of tools” in its use as an instrument of reason. Part Two now shifts the focus to that singular point that defines the lever, the fulcrum point or “hypomochlion,” to show how this “point of points” is at the heart of German Romanticism’s interest in the lever. To understand what makes the hypomochlion the most important point for Schlegel and Novalis, however, requires taking a step back in order to gain a better understanding of Romantic thinking about the point in general. It is in Romanticism’s theoretical writing about the point that we can observe foundations being laid for the innovation with the hypomochlion.

The Romantic Point

There are two basic aspects to what Schlegel and Novalis do with the mathematical concept of the point. The first concerns how they use the point to construct trajectories in the history of philosophy. This is a question of points in motion that can be charted and visualized with temporal and spatial coordinates. The second aspect has to do with the importance of the point for the Romantics’ own project. It has just as much to do with points in motion as it does with those at rest and— what should now come as no surprise—reveals itself under the sign of the mechanical lever whose “conceptual apparatus,” as discussed in Chapter One, also includes the notion of static equilibrium. As we will see, Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking about the point connects to long-standing debates in theology, philosophy and the natural

66 See, for example, KFSA 18, 440.140.



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sciences that, collectively, comprise the point’s conceptual history.67 The Romantic point synthesizes these different traditions: not only through reflections on the “constructive character” of philosophy in general, but also by drawing on the specific topics in the history of the point as part of Romanticism’s own construct of individuality, and this is where the hypomochlion becomes of utmost importance. Readers of Euclid will recall that the point was evident enough to forgo explanation. The definition with which the Elements of Geometry begins—“a point is that which has no part”68—suffices for the point to take part in the construction of the circles, parabolas, ellipses and hyperbolas that comprise the remainder of the thirteen-book treatise. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who are also fond of constructing, definitions, formulae, and levers, as we saw above, use points and geometrical forms to plot conceptual trajectories. Romantic statements on the point can be both general, not always distinguishing between mathematical and physical points, and quite specific, given that they include other points of interest around 1800 (such as the Fluchtpunkt or vanishing perspectival point of the work of art and the punctum saliens William Harvey observes in chick embryos). For both Schlegel and Novalis, the point is something that can easily, perhaps too easily, be mobilized, to the degree that its inherent obviousness (or status as an original intuition) becomes more elusive. Even after he summons the point to do the work of history, science, theology, and philology, Schlegel can still ask “Does one know what a point is?”69 However, when one looks through Schlegel’s and Novalis’s widely dispersed statements about points, it is possible to identify certain tendencies that could fall under the rubric of what Novalis fleetingly describes as a “philosophy of the point,”70 and these tendencies will be instrumental

67 The history of the point prior to Romanticism has been summarized by Friedrich Kaulbachin in the entry “Punkt, Punktualität,” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), col. 1711–14. The entry begins with Aristotles and Zenon and ends with Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, but it leaves out Romanticism altogether. 68 “Σημειον εστιν, ον μερος ονΘεν” Euclid’s commentators have observed that, unlike his predecessors, Euclid chooses not to define the point, line, and surface by the subsequent term (e.g., that the point is the end of a line). For further information on the historical context of this definition, and other possible translations, see Thomas Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements (New York: Dover, 1956), 155. 69 “Weiß man was ein Punkt ist?” (KFSA 18, 229.427). 70 “Philosophie des Punkts” Novalis, Schriften 3, 151.500. In his book, Die Poetisierung der Wissenschaften bei Novalis (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), Johannes Hegener reads this quote in the context of the Romantic theory of the fragment. He observes that it is the characteristic structure of the fragment to collect “everything into a

88  The Lever as Instrument of Reason in understanding their work on the fulcrum point of the lever. The idea that we can think of the trajectories taken by Romantic thinking about the point in terms of “tendencies” comes from Schlegel himself. One of his better-known aphorisms states that “whoever has a system is just as spiritually lost as he who has none. One has to combine both.”71 This is, however, only the second half of the aphorism. Before the question of a system is even raised, Schlegel claims that “every philosopher also has his line—tendency, just as his (salient) point and his cycle.”72 These figures have a rhetorical function: they provide Schlegel with a way of circumventing the contradiction of having a system and having none, and they also work historically, allowing him to determine the affinities between different philosophers over time. Georges Lemaître, one of the early proponents of the idea that the universe is expanding, whose name is often mentioned in conjunction with the “Big Bang” theory, imagined the initial state of the universe as a “primeval atom.”73 Schlegel, for whom the construction of the world is as much a poetic as physical phenomenon, thinks of this same state as a single point from which an infinity can emerge: Were space full, then time would stand still—that is the 1/0 in the progression of nature. Also once more a chaos but a much higher, completely formed [one]. The first chaos is only a point.—From chaos and allegory the world to be constructed. History of nature from that 0/1—1/0.—74

71 72

73

74

point” so that, as Novalis writes, they are both “undetermined” and “absolutely capable” (Novalis, Schfriften 2, 540.68, quoted in Hegener 334). For further references to the problem of the point in the critical literature on Romanticism, see Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (1979); and Martin Dyck, Novalis and Mathematics, 58–61. “Wer ein System hat, ist so gut geistig verloren, als wer keins hat. Man muß eben beides verbinden” (KFSA 18, 80.614). “Jeder [Philosoph] hat auch seine Linie—Tendenz wie sein punctum s[aliens] und seinen Cyclus” (KFSA 18, 80.614). See also Brown’s comments on the Romantic use of the word Tendenz, with its joint connotations of tension and striving (Brown, Shape of German Romanticism, 46). Georges Lemaître expresses this idea on several occasions. In “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,” published in Nature (May 9, 1931), he imagines a scenario where “the world has begun with a single quantum,” at which point space and time have no meaning: “They would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta”—an idea which, in contradistinction to Sir Arthur Eddington, he finds “not at all repugnant” compared to the “present order of Nature” (Lemaître, “Beginning of the World,” 706). “Wäre d[er] Raum voll so würde die Zeit still stehn—das ist das 1/0 in d[er] Progreß.[ion] der Natur. Auch wieder ein Chaos aber ein viel höheres, durchaus



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The first chaotic point of this aphorism is the beginning of the world and the world’s construction through allegorical narrative. Schlegel designates this point as zero, and the history which unfolds from it is one whose end limit, the end of time, is an infinity thick with simultaneous points, marked by a neat inversion of zero and one. As evident as Schlegel’s equation of a beginning point with zero might seem to be—in particular, given the Romantic fascination for the figure of creatio ex nihilo75—only relatively recent developments in mathematics and mechanics make his claim credible in the first place from a numerical perspective. Wolfgang Schäffner has shown how, until the seventeenth century, the Euclidean point of geometry was associated not with zero, but with one. This correlation had to do with a prevailing distinction between arithmetic as the science of discontinuous magnitudes and geometry as the science of continuous magnitudes in place since Aristotle. According to this way of looking at things, in arithmetic the “one” was considered the beginning of all numbers, without itself being considered a number. Schäffner discusses how, according to the older model, in the same way as the point was the beginning of all geometry, the number one was the origin of all numbers. Neither of them was itself a part of its domain, but rather its indivisible limit and origin.76 Schäffner explains how the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin, in his 1585 work Arithmétique, is in part responsible for changing the status of the point. Stevin’s Arithmétique begins by defining the concept of “number” as that “through which the quantity of a thing is expressed” and claiming that one is also a number.77 Importing the idea of continuous

gebildetes. Das erste Chaos ist nur ein Punkt.—Aus Chaos und Allegorie die Welt zu construiren. Geschichte der Natur von jenem 0/1—1/0.— --” (KFSA 18, 421.1226). 75 The principle of creation ex nihilo as Schöpfung or Schaffung aus Nichts has an important role to play in early Romantic thinking, where it is linked to a gesture of poetic originality (though not, however, to a single act of creation) and where it also thrives in connection to points such as the punctum saliens in William Harvey’s embryological work. For more information, refer to my essay “Lucinde: The Novel from ‘Nothing’ as Epideictic Literature,” Germanischromantische Monatsschrift 54.2 (2004). 76 See Wolfgang Schäffner, “The Point: The Smallest Venue of Knowledge in the 17th Century (1585–1665),” in Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 60. 77 Schäffner, “The Point,” 59.

90  The Lever as Instrument of Reason magnitudes from geometry into arithmetic, he insists that the one, as basic arithmetical unit, is divisible into parts and should no longer to be considered just a unit of counting. As a consequence of the change in definition, the long-standing equivalence between the one and the geometrical point was broken. The one is understood to be divisible, the point is not, and Stevin affirms that the indivisibility of the point could only correspond to the zero.78 In Signifying Nothing, Brian Rotman describes the zero in terms of a “meta-sign in relation to the system that generates it.”79 Because it is both a number and a “sign about numbers,” he writes, it exists both within and externally to the numerical system.80 This background information about the zero’s special dual status shows that there is a historical precedent for the primitive ambivalence of the point as limit and origin in Schlegel’s aphorism cited above on the history of nature as an oscillation between 0/1 and 1/0, an ambivalence between being something and being nothing indexed by its theoretical position as starting limit and its value of “nothing.” It also shows that Schlegel relies on a modern equation between geometric and arithmetic magnitudes, or spatial and temporal magnitudes. The function of allegory in that same aphorism, though by no means self-evident, seems to be to inscribe the zero of the point into a language of world, history, and nature. The human “construction” of the world though allegory that Schlegel describes as the “history of nature” between a zero point and infinity appears in other fragments as the basic formula of philosophical projects: There is a [mysticism  +  critique]/0—like Fichte’s point. Every [philosopher] has, must have such a point. In Spinoza’s case it 78 Stevin writes: “What does the point have in common with the number one? Certainly nothing at all, since two units result (as is said) in a number, but two or even a thousand points will not result in a line. The unit can be divided into parts . . . but the point is indivisible; the unit is part of the number, but the point is not a part of the line. Therefore, in relation to the number, the unit is not the same as the point in relation to the line. What, then, corresponds to the point? I say it is zero” (quoted in Schäffner, “The Point,” 60). 79 Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 11. Rotman’s argument is actually much broader: he shows how the introduction of the zero in mathematical discourse, the initial use of the vanishing point in perspectival painting, and the invention of imaginary money are all events of seismic nature for their respective semiotic systems. Each of these three signs, according to Rotman, has a “natural closure” with regard to the original system (he gives the example of how the special status of the zero led to the invention of the algebraic variable that can potentially stand in for all numbers) (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28–32). This “closure” of the system within a “meta-sign,” in turn, “accompanies a self-conscious form of subjectivity” (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28). 80 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 14.



The Levers of German Romanticism  91 was probably [mysticism + ethics + logic]/0, since Spinoza is of an extremely ethical nature. A progressive philosopher has other inciting points, that not infrequently really limit him, towards which he adjusts himself pp—thus Descartes for Spinoza, Kant for Fichte pp. Around such points then remain dark places in the system. The mixture of the new and the old here often so indissoluble up until the standstill of all understanding, as in similar cases in the realm of ethics. The first point can also be polemical, as with the Skeptics.81

In this aphorism, Schlegel suggests that the point operates both historically and ahistorically within every system. Every system has its own unique point from which it emerges (his example is Fichte), but there are also those points—Schlegel calls them “inciting points” (veranlassende Puncte)—that apply limits to their immediate philosophical context (like Descartes for Spinoza, Kant for Fichte). These other, historically inflected points not only place real constraints on each new system, they also define “dark places” within it that have a peculiar status. Given the repeated abbreviation “pp” (per procura), one could also say that the older philosophers are present in the new system “by proxy.” They designate moments of cognitive stasis: an irresolvable conflict of understanding between old and new that manifests itself as the “standstill of all understanding,” a lacuna in the historical progression of thought. The irony of the aphorism, that the “progressive” philosopher integrates radically “non-progressive” elements within the system, is effectively a paradox that the aphorism describes and performs at the same time. These elements, defined as the simultaneity of old and new, are analogous to the condition of the temporal standstill we have already seen defined as a thickening of points and the stopping of time. The particular dual historical and ahistorical status of the point as described by Schlegel also reinforces its similarity to the mathematical zero according to Rotman’s description of it as a sign both internal and external to the system that generates it. Schlegel’s innovation is to reframe the point’s dual status in terms of

81 “Es gibt eine [Mystik  +  Kritik]/0—wie Fichtes Punkt. Jeder [Philosoph] hat, muß einen solchen Punkt haben. Bei Spinosa war es wahrscheinl[ich] [Mystik  +  Ethik  +  Logik]/0, da Spinosa eine äusserst ethische Natur ist. Ein progreßiver [Philosoph] hat andre veranlaßende Punkte, die ihn nicht selten real beschränken, an die er sich accomodirt pp—so Descartes für Spinosa, Kant für Fichte pp. Bei solchen Punkten bleiben dann im System dunkle Stellen. Die Mischung der Neuen und d[er] Alten hier oft so unauflöslich, bis zum Stillstehn alles Verstandes, wie in ähnlichen Fällen im [ethischen] Gebiet.—Der erste Punkt kann auch polemisch sein; so beim Skeptiker” (KFSA 18, 80.609).

92  The Lever as Instrument of Reason a historical trajectory and thereby generate a “poetics” of the point by creating a narrative that remains in tune with its problematic dual status.

From Point to Lever: The Romantic Fulcrum

Schlegel and Novalis’s fascination with the point includes both its conceptual history as an object of mathematical and philosophical interest and its potential to be instrumentalized for their own purposes. What remains to be seen, however, is how these aspects of the point connect to their thinking about the fulcrum. As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, Novalis and Schlegel are familiar with the lever as both a mechanical object and as a philosophical tool. They of course knew about Archimedes as well as the trope associated with him: that the history of the lever is a history of the individual’s exercise of power. This was a view Schlegel and Novalis shared, although they articulated it in ways that Archimedes could not have imagined. How they conceive of the relationship between the lever and the individual is much more indebted to theories of the subject in the late eighteenth century, and it is here that the fulcrum plays a crucial, indeed “pivotal” role. In the same aphorism where Schlegel writes that the lever is of “utmost importance” for a theory of construction, he continues: Every universe for example has its hypomochlion as well as its point of indifference.—Every universe also has its temperature and certain basic chords. Chord apparently takes place only on the positive arm, temperature only on the negative [arm]. Both are however already a return to the center. The human for example an animal chord but a vegetable temperature…82 The importance of this note lies in the constellation of universe, hypomochlion, and human. In fact, this note does more than gather these concepts together in a novel way; it also performs an act of construction in a literal sense. Here, the Romantic ability to think with great ease across orders of magnitude is harnessed within a meditation on the construction of man as lever that connects the material and the immaterial: animal and the vegetable, sound and heat. The hypomochlion is central to this scenario: it is the point to which

82 Jedes Universum z.b. hat sein Hypomochlion wie seinen Indifferenzpunkt.— Jedes Universum hat auch seine Temperatur und gewisse Grundaccorde. Accord findet offenbar nur am positiven Arm, Temperatur nur am negativen Statt. Beide sind aber doch schon eine Rückkehr zum Centrum. Der Mensch z.b. ein animalischer Accord aber eine vegetabilische Temperatur (KFSA 18, 170–71.550).



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opposites return and also the one in which they are sublated, much like the point of indifference. This understanding goes against the original sense of the word. According to A. G. Drachmann, the term “hypomochlion” comes from the Greek ibumahliun, meaning “that which is placed under the lever.”83 For Schlegel and Novalis, however, the hypomochlion is by no means external to the lever. Instead, it has been completely internalized, something which we can observe in other notes as well. Schlegel has not quite finished with his analogy, however. He continues by marshaling the particular mechanics of the lever to strengthen his comparison. Just as the hypomochlion is that point where opposing forces cancel out, Schlegel writes: “Perhaps the center in every universe is doubled, in the literal sense heterogeneous, One from two, two at the same time from different orders.”84 Just as the point and the zero associated with it transverse two different orders, so too is the hypomochlion a fundamentally heterogeneous entity. The components of the heterogeneity are adaptable to context. Above, we saw the examples of chord and temperature, but the intrinsically doubled nature of the fulcrum recalls the irreducible “dark places” seen before in the mixtures of old and new coexisting within a philosophical system.

Constructing the Hypomochlion

So far, we have seen how Schlegel and Novalis construct levers to perform the work of the encyclopedia project and how they grant the fulcrum a special status. There are also occasions, however, when Schlegel and Novalis simply refer to a fulcrum point without a lever, which raises the joint questions: Are there precedents for this phenomenon in mechanical theory and how are we to understand it in the context of Romantic thought? Evidence for this development can be found in the following three notes by Schlegel: Philology is perhaps constructed from the negative arm of philosophy or of logic and from the positive [arm] of poesie, that is, classical. Are these both the X or the hypomochlion—or that which is indifferent?—The hypomochlion of poesie is the fantasy,

83 Drachmann, Mechanical Technology, 52. 84 “Vielleicht ist das Centrum in jedem Universum doppelt im eigentl[ichen] Sinne heterogen, Eins aus zweien, zwei zugleich aus verschiednen Ordnungen” (KFSA 18, 171.550). Compare with: “Das Construiren d.h. die Dualität gleich in d[er] Einheit zu deduciren, unmittelbar aus d[em] Mittelpunkt” (KFSA 18, 414.1113).

94  The Lever as Instrument of Reason the [hypomochlion] of philosophy reflection. They therefore have it in themselves; not so philology.85 Religion is the X of the encyclopedia—philology the hypomochlion. Art; mythology, poesy the positive arm,—philosophy, history pp the negative.86 History is the equator, philology the hypomochlion, through saturation with indifferent poesy and philosophy philology becomes, in the breath of religion, history.87 Criticism along with rhetoric and grammar everything only [becomes] hypomochlion. In itself it is not free art. Logic only transition between physics and morality[.] Only morality can constitute.88 This cluster of notes, collected in a manuscript given the title “On Rhetoric and Poesie” by Schlegel’s editors that dates from the end of 1799, allows us to see how Schlegel develops this aspect of his thinking about the lever and its fulcrum point as a sequential progression that emerges right before our eyes. The heuristic quality of this enterprise is evident in the tentative tone and questioning of the first note, where Schlegel seems neither to be sure what might be constructed from the lever of philosophy (or logic) and philology, nor if the lever is even the correct framework for the question, given that he also refers to the concept of indifference, which is usually associated with magnetism. At the end of the note, however, he allows for the hypomochlion to be associated with a single concept, such as poesy or philosophy. These concepts “have it in themselves.” They are, 85 “Die [Philologie] wird viell[eicht] aus d[em] negativen Arm der [Philosophie] oder d[er] [Logik] und aus d[em] positiven d[er] [Poesie] construirt i.e. d[em] Classischen. Sind diese beiden das X oder das Hypomochlion—oder das [Indifferente]?—Das Hypomochlion der [Poesie] ist d[ie] Fantasie, d[as] d[er] [Philosophie] die Reflexion. Sie haben es also in sich selbst; nicht so die [Philologie]” (KFSA 18, 391.844). The editors of the Schlegel edition insert “dem” in front of “Classischen,” but this adjective seems to modify “Poesie,” in which case “der” would make more sense. 86 “Relig[ion] ist das X der Encykl[opädie]—[Philologie] das Hypom[ochlion]. K[unst]; Myth[ologie], [Poesie] der positive Arm,—[Philosophie], Hist[orie] pp der negative” (KFSA 18, 391.845). 87 “Historie ist d[er] Aequator, [Philologie] das Hypomochlion, durch Sättigung mit [indifferenter] [Poesie] und [Philosophie] wird [Philologie] im Anhauch der Rel[igion] zur Historie” (KFSA 18, 392.864). 88 “[Kritik] nebst [Rhetorik] und [Grammatik] alles nur zum Hypom[ochlion]. Ansich ist nicht freye Kunst. [Logik] nur Uebergang zwischen [Physik] und Moral Constituiren kann nur die Moral” (KFSA 18, 392.869).



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in a word, self-contained levers, simply defined by their relation to the fulcrum points of fantasy and reflection. The second note still relies on the conventional idea of a lever as two arms on either side of a fulcrum point. In the third, however, we see philosophy and poesy joined once again at the fulcrum point, with no reference to the arms of the lever. Instead the fulcrum point is also the focal point of all intellectual activity of the lever. The fourth aphorism focuses exclusively on the hypomochlion. In other words, the construction of the hypomochlion is the construction of the lever. It is the symbolic embodiment of the conceptual work that the lever does. We can witness this tendency elsewhere as well, as when Schlegel writes that “mythology is only the hypomochlion of poesie.”89 Conspicuously absent from Schlegel’s notes is any mention of a hand or agency external to the functioning of these simple machines. Schlegel is no Archimedes: there is no fantasy of an ideal point from which to displace the world. Any “advantage” gained by the conceptual levers of his notes would seem to be reabsorbed into operational dynamics of the machines rather than attributed to an external individual. Through their focus on the hypomochlion, Schlegel and Novalis emphasize the work it does as a point of mediation on the lever itself as well as how it embodies the dynamic cancellation and maintenance of opposing forces. When Novalis refers to the “inner heterogeneity” of the lever as one of its defining features,90 this is both an acknowledgment of a mechanical fact and an allusion to the lever’s philosophical utility. To think with Luhmann, one could also imagine that the hypomochlion encompasses a distinction and neutralizes it at the same time. In that regard, it also shares the special status of the “zero” as described by Schäffner and Rotman as both participatory within and external to a system. If there is a “zero” associated with the hypomochlion, however, then it is to be understood as a “mechanical” as opposed to arithmetic zero. It is the zero of forces sublated in a state of static equilibrium. In his notes on Eschenmayer, Novalis writes, Equilibrium—Complete sublation of heterogeneous forces by one another—so that they are no longer an object, neither for mathematical construction nor for the analysis of experience.91

89 KFSA 16, 293.486. 90 “Der Hebel ist ein künstlicher mechanischer Körper—daher mit innerer Heterogeneïtaet” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 109). 91 “Gleichgewicht—Gänzliche Aufhebung heterogener Kr[äfte] durch einander— so daß sie weder für die mathematische Construction noch für die Analysis der Erfahrung ein Gegenstand mehr sind. Im Hypomochlion = 0 ist ein absol[utes] Gleichgewicht. [S. 22/3]” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 383).

96  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Like the lever itself, the hypomochlion emerges in Romantic thinking as a figure of unity and heterogeneity and in this excerpt we can observe how Novalis has abstracted the hypomochlion from the context of lever and posited it as an object of contemplation in its own right. Novalis calls attention to the fact that the hypomochlion, when circumstances are conducive to a state of equilibrium, has a way of disappearing. It is no longer an object and quite literally becomes our blind spot—the placeholder for that which is no longer visible. The Romantic attention given to the hypomochlion, however, falls neither in the category of “mathematical construction” nor in the category of “analysis” in a technical sense. Schlegel and Novalis can therefore use its liminal status for their own purposes. When Schlegel writes, as we saw above, that the hypomochlion of poesie is fantasy, or that the hypomochlion of philosophy is reflection, or even that such things as criticism, rhetoric and grammar can be made into hypomochlia, he uses a mechanical construction. This construction allows the hypomochlion to flicker into visibility in the moment it is named as such and do the work of conceptual joining, before disappearing into the greater apparatus of the encyclopedia project. Through this process, we can observe the conditions that allow for the coexistence of a heuristic mechanical framework with key concepts associated with the organic thinking of Romanticism. The purpose of this section has been to highlight the idiosyncrasies in Schlegel’s and Novalis’s writing on the point while, at the same time, examining ways in which they connect to a tradition of philosophical inquiry that has struggled with this simple yet elusive concept. To be sure, the connection between the Romantics and the philosophical tradition is at times difficult to pin down: Schlegel’s and Novalis’s narratives of philosophical points seem to harbor their own “dark places” with reference to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates on the point. This does not amount to a reinvention of the concept, however. Rather, Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking takes up several common problems in the historical debates on the point and reworks them in ingenious ways. Questions pertaining to the distinction between mathematical and physical points, the relation of the point to motion, and the usefulness of the point in the conception and demarcation of a subject position each have their role to play in Romantic musings on the point. In particular, there are two scenarios which concretize the otherwise scattered “philosophy of the point” to which Novalis alludes: the first is the figure of the trajectory generated by an “inciting” point; the second is the figure of the mechanical lever. Each of these scenarios raises—if at times indirectly—the question of individual power, and each of them can be seen as a response to a potential paradox about the point’s dual status of being inside and outside at once. For Schlegel,



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this leads to the positing of locations of hybridity within the system, described in terms of doubled historicity and ahistoricity. For Novalis, the mechanical lever becomes a locus where the individual is effectively replaced by a balance of forces, an idea that takes the old Archimedean topos in a new light while at the same time recalling the ambivalence of the mathematical and the physical point.

Part Three: Pointing toward the Human

We have seen in the first two parts of this chapter how Schlegel and Novalis integrate the lever into their network of concepts and also how they grant the hypomochlion or fulcrum point special attention. In this final section of this chapter, I will show how Schlegel and Novalis connect the hypomochlion to various aspects of the human. This connection between the human and the hypomochlion should make more sense now that examples from German Romanticism’s “philosophy of the point” have provided the relevant context: for example, Schlegel’s notion that the mathematical point is also a conceptual beginning point of a philosophical construction serves as a reminder of how closely the paths of human intellectual history and the history of nature are intertwined. What is it, however, that makes the fulcrum so special? In order to appreciate its unique role, I will refer to just one additional point by way of comparison. Like the fulcrum, this point exists at the intersection of mechanical thinking, cultural practices, and, indeed, is for Schlegel and Novalis connected to concept of life itself. It is the focal point of geometry and optics. The optical focus, also known as the “burning point” (Brennpunkt) in the eighteenth-century German context,92 is in its simplest manifestation that point where rays of light gather which have been refracted (or “broken”) by a lens. When Kant proposes, first in the precritical writings and then again in the Critique of Pure Reason, that there is such a thing as an imaginary focus which can be used as a reference point for the joint activity of the reason and understanding, he makes his case by drawing heavily from optical metaphors.93 The understanding is what joins the manifold in the object through the use of concepts, and it is the job of reason to join the manifold of concepts through ideas. When these

92 See, for example, the definition offered in the Physikalisch-Chemisches Handwörterbuch für Gehlerte und Ungelehrte, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1799): “So nennt man in der Physik den Ort, in welchem die Brenngläser und Brennspiegel die auf die fallenden Strahlen vereinigen” (380). Note that the entries in this reference work were compiled from dictionaries by Gehler’s and Macquer’s. 93 See the Appendix on the “Regulative Use of the Ideas” in the Critique of Pure Reason.

98  The Lever as Instrument of Reason ideas do not have any basis in possible experience they are described as transcendental; they cannot provide us direct access to particular objects through concepts, but they do play an important (even “indispensably necessary”) role in regulating our faculty of understanding by directing it toward particular goals. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that the transcendental ideas have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point, which, although it is only an idea (focus imaginarius)— i.e., a point from which the concepts of understanding to not really proceed, since it lies entirely outside the bounds of possible experience—nonetheless still serves to obtain for those concepts the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension. Now of course it is from this that there arises the deception, as if these lines of direction were shot out from an object living outside the realm of possible empirical cognition (just as objects are seen behind the surface of a mirror).94 Kant describes this illusion as necessary and unavoidable for the acquisition of knowledge. Transcendental ideas help us direct the aims of understanding “beyond every given experience” such that it “wants to take the measure of its greatest possible and uttermost extension.”95 The position of the focal point, in this case, is conceived as beyond experience, but is integrated into the subject’s cognitive processes. When German Romanticism takes up the concept of the optical focus, it also emphasizes the point’s potential to become something more than a mathematical coordinate. In one fragment, Novalis draws a connection between light and gravitational force, on the basis that each has its own focal point. Just as warmth is produced by the gathering of rays in an optical focus, he writes, so too can energy, action, and life be the product of a gravitational focus. The German Romantics mine the metaphorical potential of the focal point as that place where a physical process occurs: the emergence of heat and even “life” from light—the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. Novalis’s observation that “man is a focus of the aether” is a logical extension of this idea.96 Early German Romanticism does not go so far with the focus as to make it

94 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 591. 95 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 591. 96 Novalis, Schriften 3, 449.942.



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a metaphor for attention,97 but one can observe a certain symmetry: whereas the focus is permitted to transform from the mathematical to the physical (and, eventually, to become a metaphor for human activity), attention, as a psychological process, is decomposed into physical forces and qualities (diffusion, division, formative power, energy, extent and even “thickness,” etc.).98 When we look at how Kant and the German Romantics use the optical point, there are clear differences to be observed: whereas Kant locates his “focus imaginarius” beyond experience, yet integrated within the subject’s cognitive activities, the Romantics allow the focal point to align more directly with man. Despite these differences, there is also an affinity underlying the Kantian and Romantic focus which has to do with the way in which they invest it with a certain ambivalence and allow it to serve as a transitional point, although the terms of such ambivalence receive different nuances in each case. For Kant, the focus is an intermediary point between the unknown and the known, between the empirically inaccessible and the intellectually imaginable. And for Schlegel and Novalis, whose thinking relies more heavily on the mechanical theory of the focus, it is also a point of great potential that heralds the emergence of life from matter. If we turn back now to the problem of the fulcrum point or hypomochlion, several differences to the focal point become apparent. The most obvious has to do with the fact that the fulcrum point, unlike the focus, is not simply to be understood as a “part,” whether of the subject or the human individual, but rather comes to stand in for the whole. Descartes left us with the idea that the one “firm point” foundational for philosophy is the one we establish by virtue of the certainty we have in our own cognitive activity. Novalis, who is attuned to the mathematical and scientific nuances of the point, has his own understanding of the “pointlike ego” (Punctähnliches Ich), but he and Schlegel are willing to go even further in their thinking when it comes to the fulcrum point.99 In no uncertain terms, Schlegel aligns the hypomochlion directly with the individual when he writes, “Hypomochlion [is] only symbol, the true is hovering [schwebend]; the

97 One could, however, connect the Romantic thinking about the optical point to a broader discussion of attention and distraction in the eighteenth century dominated by the psychology of Christian Wolff and structured around the concepts of attentio, reflexio, and collatio. John Zammito has commented that Attentio (“attention”) was the beginning of knowledge in that it discriminated something from an obscure background, introducing what school-philosophical language called ‘clarity’” (Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 52). 98 Novalis, Schriften 3, 395.672. 99 Novalis, Schriften 3, 442.904.

100  The Lever as Instrument of Reason active free human is his own hypomochlion.”100 It is a statement with strong affinities to the phenomenology of technology that emerges in the twentieth century. One is reminded, for example, of Don Ihde’s discussion of embodiment relations, which refer to the “doubled desire,” as he calls it, for “total transparency and total embodiment” and “for the technology to truly ‘become me.’”101 That this note is found in close proximity to those from the Philosophical Fragments where Schlegel writes that every universe has its own hypomochlion and that the center of every universe is “doubled.”102 It testifies to the fact that the model we are working with here is one defined by extreme flexibility, rather than rigidity. The equation of the ego and the fulcrum point has implications that extend from the human microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. And it bears keeping in mind that, where mechanical theory is concerned, the hypomochlion or fulcrum point is the figure of unified duality. In the state of static equilibrium, it is the point where opposing forces are sublated. This idea accounts for the above statement that the hypomochlion of the universe is “doubled,” just as it accounts for Novalis’s blanket statement in The General Broullion: “The true dividuum is also the true individuum.”103 In the rest of the chapter, I will give a sense of the far-reaching implications of the human as hypomochlion in various aspects of Romantic thought.

Implications for the Concept of Agency

What does it mean, precisely, for the individual to be its own hypomochlion, and to what degree might we connect this idea to the mechanical theory discussed above where the lever is conceptualized without rigid arms, simply in terms of force? We are far removed from those contexts where human strength—whether physical or intellectual—is augmented through the use of the lever. This scenario, where the individual is fulcrum and lever at once, is comparable to the status of the “zero” as described by Rotman, where it exists both as sign and meta-sign in the numerical system. The Romantics translate this idea into mechanical terms, so that the human is both instrument and agent. With his designation of human as hypomochlion, Schlegel also rewrites the Archimedean fantasy of wielding a mighty lever. For Schlegel, the freedom of being human is self-sufficiency, that is, the freedom from being indebted to any external instrument or agency for 100 “Hypomochlion nur Symbol, das wahre ist schwebend; der thätige freie Mensch ist sein eigenes Hypomochlion” (KFSA 18, 171.560). 101 Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld. From Garden to Earth (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 75. 102 Schlegel, KFSA 18, 171. 103 Novalis, Schriften 2, 450.



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the augmentation one’s own power. Far from being a philosophically conservative maneuver, however, the identification of the individual with the hypomochlion suggests a state of unlimited potential. The fact that the status of hypomochlion is granted to the active “free” human should not be disregarded, because what is implied is a collapse of two orders that have traditionally been considered in contradistinction from one another: the concept of freedom, on the one hand, and the mechanistic determination, on the other. In its sheer punctuality, Schlegel seems to gift his human-hypomochlion unlimited potential to increase, expand and develop in any way whatsoever. The removal of the instrument, along with the internalizing of instrumental agency, brings things down to a punctual scale where these two orders exist in perfect ambivalence.

Implications for the Archimedean Point

What happens when the human is equated not only with the hypomochlion, but also with that most privileged of hypomochlia, the Archimedean point? It is a question that can be approached from various angles. The first concerns the concept of freedom which Schlegel has already marked as essential to the human-hypomochlion connection. Using Fichte once again as a reference point, we can see that in his Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Knowledge), the connection between the human and Archimedean point is articulated within philosophical thinking about the subject. Fichte, though well aware of the impracticality—an indeed, impossibility—of ever occupying the Archimedean point, nevertheless invokes this context in connection with freedom. He claims that the theoretical construction of the Archimedean point is an exercise of utmost value for two main reasons: as an example of the freedom of the mind and in the service of the argument that there exists no science apart from us. Even as he introduces the central concept of his treatise, that of a Wissenschaftslehre, he makes the somewhat anachronistic (though essentially valid) remark that Archimedes was able to calculate the requirements for a machine with which to displace the earth from its orbit even with the knowledge that he would never be able to escape the earth’s gravitational field.104 In other words: the Archimedean point allows the fiction of imagining a subject position that is distinct from ourselves, however closely we 104 References in this passage are to Fichte’s 1794 essay, “Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie,” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. J. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit und Comp, 1845), 29–81; 46. Edgar Landgraf and I also refer to this passage in the introduction to our collected essays on the Archimedean point. See Holland and Landgraf, “Introduction,” 55.

102  The Lever as Instrument of Reason are bound to it. For Fichte (and for those twentieth-century thinkers who, as we saw in the introduction, considered the challenge of developing “protocols” for scientific language), the freedom of thought is clearly more important than the acknowledgment that such a project is theoretically predisposed to fail: theoretical utility outweighs the practical impossibility. As Edgar Landgraf and I have observed in our introduction to a collection of essays on the Archimedean point, we can witness a related example in Early German Romanticism. In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis illustrates the aporetic structure of the subject position—the theoretical conundrum of observing oneself, which is essentially the same as recognizing oneself as both agent and instrument—when Heinrich discovers the book of his own unfinished life. Another angle takes a much different perspective, one that imagines the genesis of the Archimedean point as the emergence of self-observation: 784. (Basis of Cohesion—of the connection etc. of thoughts— observation of the thought and procession of images (Bildergang)— their changes—mixtures etc. Dos me pu sto in the interior— formation of an observer—of an independent organ—an organ that specifies all affections relatively—the relations of whose dimension, motion and production correspond to the similar relations of the tangents.)105 The phrase dos me pu sto refers to the (apocryphal) words of Archimedes’s call for firm ground upon which to stand or to rest his lever. To Schlegel’s equation of the human and hypomochlion—and to the fundamental aporia of the Romantic subject to be both subject and object—Novalis adds philosophical detail. In this vision, the fulcrum point is a locus of connection and cohesion. Its duality derives from being both the observer and the observed, a nodal point that witnesses the emergence of self-observation. Taking a step back, we can see that Schlegel’s and Novalis’s appropriation of the Archimedean point is far from straightforward. In their fragments and encyclopedia project, they exhibit a willingness

105 “(Grund der Cohaesion—des Zusammenhangs etc. der Gedancken— Beobachtung über den Gedanken und Bildergang—ihre Veränderungen— Vermischungen etc.   Dos me pu sto im Innern—Formation eines Beobachters—eines unabhängigen Organs—eines Organs das alle Affectionen verhältnißmäßig angiebt— dessen Dimensions, Bewegungs und Produktionsverhältnisse den ähnlichen Verhältnissen der Tangenten correspondiren.)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 421.784).



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to push the model of human “punctuality” as far as it can go. One can admire, for example, the hypertrophic Cartesian flair in Novalis’s assertion that we are “personified, all-powerful points,”106 which goes far beyond a simple comparison of humans as “pointlike.”107 Schlegel would likely concur: as humans, we have the ability to recognize ourselves as the personified trajectories of history, and as the living blueprints of the world as it has emerged from its point of departure.

Implications for Mental Equilibrium States

As the introduction to this study and the chapter on Kant have shown, the concept of equilibrium is an indispensable part of the conceptual apparatus attached to the lever and the fulcrum point, both in mechanical and extra-mechanical contexts. Schlegel and Novalis also incorporate equilibrium into their conceptual vocabulary and consider the compatibility of this mechanical term with intellectual activity. In Romantic writing on equilibrium, then, we can observe yet another way in which the conceptual apparatus of the lever participates in the construction of the human around 1800. Novalis’s notes and fragments on equilibrium draw from multiple sources joined by a common interest in applying the language of mechanical equilibrium to philosophical and poetic contexts. Earlier in the chapter we have already considered examples from Eschenmayer and Fichte and Eschenmayer. We saw, in the case of Fichte’s subject philosophy, that his description of the relationship between the I and not-I lends itself to comparisons of forces in balance. In his notes on Fichte, Novalis records the philosopher’s idea of a “pure ego” (reinen Ich) that brooks neither change nor opposition, permitting only rest and identity and which only allows for division with regard to a subject: The ego is absolutely unity—the subject absolutely divided— reciprocity of the ego in itself—it wants unity, it wants to be divided. In the pure ego .  .  . no change—no opposition—no continuity—standstill—rest [Ruhe]—identity—With relation to

106 Zur Welt suchen wir den Entwurf—dieser Entwurf sind wir selbst—was sind wir? personificirte allmächtige Puncte” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 541.74). 107 The perspective underlying Novalis’s idea of the self as point and blueprint of the world is a relatively modern development that echoes Leibniz’s synthesis of two philosophical positions according to Michel Serres: whereas for Aristotle and Descartes the world was a point, and for Pascal and Bruno in every point there was potentially a world, Leibniz sees “in every real and different individual, the Universal.” Michel Serres, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 739.

104  The Lever as Instrument of Reason the subject its character—activity conditioned by rest [durch Ruhe bedingte Thätigkeit]—must be a manifold.108 Even the best-known accounts of Fichte’s philosophizing on the subject and Novalis’s relation to Fichte have tended to downplay the fact that the language Fichte uses to describe the original unity and division of the ego is the same that is used to describe mechanical states of absolute and relative equilibrium.109 The chapter on Kant illustrated how mechanical concepts of rest and equilibrium played an important role in his essay on negative magnitudes, where they were used to describe the activity of the thinking individual in contexts where moral decisions were made, an idea we had occasion to revisit earlier in this chapter as well. Now, however, as we explore the various consequences of the human-hypomochlion connection, we are in a better position to appreciate Novalis’s unique contribution to this discussion. When Novalis takes up the concepts of consciousness, equilibrium, and rest, rather than describing the mechanics of intellectual activity as a simple conflict of opposing forces, he is more interested in imagining the environment of the mind where such decisions are made in the first place. And even though there are numerous references to equilibrium in Novalis’s work, one aphorism, found in his notes for an encyclopedia project, stands out above the others: The temper [Stimmung] of the consciousness—of representation of every kind is the temper of crystallization, of the formation— and manifold-making—thus held rest—static force—rationalizing (equilibrizing) force—proportional force of evolution—a constant quantity in the shifting alternation (point of rest on the lever).110

108 “Das Ich ist absolut Eins—das Subject absolut getheilt—Wechselwirkung des Ich in sich selbst—Es will Eins, es will getheilt seyn. Im reinen Ich allein ist beydes absolut—der Character des Absoluten ist—keine Veränderung—kein Gegensetzen—kein Fortsetzen—Stillstand—Ruhe—Identität—In Beziehung aufs Subject muß sein Character—durch Ruhe bedingte Thätigkeit—Ein Mannichfaltiges seyn” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 133.44). 109 See especially Dieter Henrich, “Fichtes ursprungliches Einsicht” (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1967), translated by D. R. Lachterman as “Fichte’s Original Insight,” Contemporary German Philosophy 1.9 (1982), and Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Origins of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth MillanZaibert (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). 110 “Die Stimmung d[es] B[ewußt]S[eyns]—des Darstellens aller Art ist die Stimmung des Krystallisirens, der Bildung—und Vermannichfachung— also gehaltne Ruhe—statische Kraft—rationalisirende (equilibrirende) Kraft— proportionlle Evolutionskraft—eine beständige Größe im veränderlichen Wechsel (Ruhepunkt am Hebel)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.836).



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The tone of the aphorism is much closer to a nature-philosophical model of the consciousness than it is to Fichte’s discussion of the ego. Even though it indexes various modes of growth (mineral, organic, and mathematical), these differences collapse in light of the aphorism’s essential analogy between representation and relative equilibrium. We are far from a scenario of absolute equilibrium and very much in a vibrant, living state of equilibrium where they are allowed to emerge, to change, and to persist, all the while held in check. In this note, Novalis has taken his new understanding of the lever as a sheer interplay of forces without “rigid lines” and combined it with the equation of the individual with the hypomochlion (or “point of rest”), while at the same time making clearer than ever that these ideas have something to contribute to our description of mental processes. As in the mechanical–theoretical descriptions, the object of the lever has become almost unnecessary—and even the hypomochlion is parenthetical—such that in the above quote we are left with a balance of forces that create a particular Stimmung (which could be thought of as a “mood” or a “disposition”). The images of rest, of forces in harmony, or of controlled and balanced mobility, stand in stark contrast to those cited at the beginning of the chapter in which the point explodes into geometrical figures of infinite scale, and they also stand in contrast to the traditional metaphorical usage of the lever that this study distances itself from. The notion that the hypomochlion acts as a model of transition between mathematical and mechanical abstractions on the one hand and the organism on the other, as the aphorism suggests, is also illuminating with regard to other aphorisms from the same manuscript where Novalis tests out the lever’s exemplary balance in transitional moments. A neighboring aphorism, for example, refers to Kielmeyer’s concept of a balance of compensating forces in the living organism: “Kielmeyer’s idea about the transition of one force into the other—(of its successive and simultaneous existence.) (Synthesis of the antique and modern).”111 And a second aphorism from the same manuscript page envisions the transition from child to man through designated points that could chart the change within a greater continuum.112 As fleeting

111 “Kielmeyers Idee vom Übergang einer Kraft in die Andre—(von ihrer Successiven und Simultanen Existenz.) (Synth[esis] d[er] Antike und Moderne)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.838). Novalis refers here to Kielmeyer’s theory of a compensation that maintains a balance of forces in the living organism. The synthesis of old and new recalls the “dark places” of the philosophical systems as described by Schlegel. 112 “Inpunctationsmanier der Bezeichnung der Veränderungen des Stätigen. z.B. Übergang des Kindes zum Manne. Bezeichnung des Übergangs (d[er] Seele,) mit Puncten” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.833).

106  The Lever as Instrument of Reason as these examples are, they show how Novalis integrates the lever and hypomochlion such that they act indirectly, taking part in a larger process.113 We can also see that, in general, Novalis distills a particular rhetorical figure from the mechanics of the lever, the figure of transition and the preservation of opposites, which already has an established currency in his scientific and philosophical work as the well-known phenomena of galvanic chains and the Voltaic pile.

Implications for the Production of Language

The originality in Novalis and Schlegel’s use of the lever and hypomochlion lies in how they chart new terrain by underscoring their essential relationship (and even identity) with both the human and intellectual activity: through the genesis of an organ of self-observation, in the “temper” of consciousness and, as the next example shows, even in the formation of language: The theory of relations belongs to algebra—or the natural history of quantities. (The verbs [Verba] are the actual word forces [Wortkräfte]—the so-called nouns [Substantiva] have emerged from verbs—and the verbs have emerged from nouns. Motion and rest [Ruhe]— Variable—constant x. All rest [Ruhe] is figure.)114 There are various points of reference that could be invoked in order to orient oneself with regard to this aphorism. One could, for example, refer back to an idea discussed above that Schelling first articulates in the Ideas and then repeats in the World Soul (a text also read and noted by Novalis), where he claims that forces of attraction and repulsion are necessarily in equilibrium in individual bodies, which is why they keep their form, and that this necessity is felt only in opposition to the possibility of equilibrium being destroyed. One could also revisit the passage in the World Soul where Schelling adds that the only reason we perceive of matter in space

113 The lever therefore belongs to the “indirect tools” of Novalis’s oeuvre and what has alternately been called his “indirect technique” (Liedtke) and “indirect construction” (Gaier). See Ralf Liedtke, Das romantische Paradigma der Chemie (Paderborn: Mentis, 2003); Ulrich Gaier, Krumme Regel (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970). 114 “Die Lehre v[on] d[en] Verhältnissen gehört in die Algeber—oder die Naturgeschichte der Größen.  (Die Verbe sind die eigentlichen Wortkräfte—die sog[enannten] Substantiva sind aus Verben entstanden—und die Verba aus Substantiven entstand[en]. Bewegung und Ruhe—Veränderliche—constante x. Alle Ruhe ist Figur.)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 400.691).



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is because of its striving for equilibrium: physical bodies are visible to us because they achieve a relative equilibrium. These ideas help substantiate Novalis’s understanding of active rest—that is, relative equilibrium—as figure. The second tradition this aphorism recalls, if more subtly, is connected to Kant’s use of algebraic notation to quantify emotions. Both Kant and Novalis use algebraic ideas and notation to quantify and create relations (in Kant’s case, between feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and in Novalis’s case, between words that are not physical objects but are effectively treated as such). Novalis then takes up both of these ideas from the perspective of the formation of language. In his vision, words stabilize into figures: not just rhetorical figures, but actual forms. We can also observe a certain interplay between the function of nouns and verbs and their integration into this mode of equilibrium. As suggested by the German, nouns (Substantive), however abstract they may be, are rooted in the notion of substance. Verbs, in German (as was the case in Novalis’s day), are also known as Zeitworte because they express change and temporality; this aspect is deemphasized by Novalis’s use of the Latin Verba. Novalis plays with such superficial distinctions, noting that both verbs and nouns have the ability to transmute, each into the other, and it is this linguistic phenomenon that underscores the analogy with mechanical equilibrium as a figure that can join the material and immaterial. Novalis thereby uses equilibrium to consider questions of perception not only from the point of view of consciousness, in the tradition of Fichte, Schelling, or Eschenmayer, but also from the point of view of a most fundamental poetics, the emergence and balance of words themselves.115 Such a quantification of language, as a way of navigating between the world of objects and the consciousness, also anticipates how Herbart quantifies thoughts for the purpose of describing equilibrium conditions in the mind.

From the Individual to the Social

The examples from the past few pages have shown how Schlegel’s and Novalis’s equation of the human and the hypomochlion establishes a model flexible enough to be transferred to any number of other contexts. Just as the lever itself is supremely adaptable and able to mediate and structure relationships of equivalence between the most far-

115 In addition to the two cases discussed above, there are other aphorisms by Novalis that take up the concept of equilibrium from the point of view of poetic production: in one case, “wit” [Witz] is defined as both a consequence of equilibrium’s disruption and as the instrument of its reestablishment (Novalis, Schriften 2, 424.30); in another case, Novalis refers to a perfect genius (a loose translation for “eine vollendete, genialische Constitution”) where the inner and outer senses are in equilibrium (Novalis, Schriften 2, 454.93).

108  The Lever as Instrument of Reason flung concepts, so too does the hypomochlion capture the same spirit in nuce. And just as we have also seen how the lever is an instrument of reason that can be useful in scales of magnitude that extend from the microcosm to the macrocosm, in the concluding pages of this chapter, I would like to demonstrate that a further implication of the lever’s structural adaptability is witnessed in Early German Romanticism when it proves to be not useful for modeling aspects of the social as well as the individual. Even as the German Romantics emphasize the self-sufficiency of the individual as fulcrum, through its very nature of united “dividuality” they allow for a transition between the individual and the society. With this thought in mind, one could pursue the relationship between the mathematical and the physical point even further in the context of Romantic political thinking. Novalis’s suggestion that we are “personified, all-powerful points” eventually makes this very transition from the individual to the political unit of the family when one reads the same aphorism to the end: “Only insofar as man conducts a happy marriage with himself—and makes up a beautiful family, is he at all capable of marriage and family.”116 When he writes about marriage, he says that this institution is to politics “what the lever is for the theory of mechanics” and that “the state is comprised not of individual people, but rather of pairs and societies.”117 For Novalis, then, the basic unit of the functioning state is not simply the personified point, or the individual as hypomochlion, but a lever whose two arms connect the disparate conditions of woman and man. It is striking that the lever in this description conforms to Novalis’s idea of a balance of forces with no rigid lines and points. In this model, the relation of the individual to the machine-state is not simply one of part and whole, which would be the case of the point-individual who is part of either the greater mechanical clockwork or an organism. Instead, the disposition of the pair stands in for the state as a whole, but the pairing of “formed” man and “unformed” woman suggests that the levers of this particular mechanism move in a dynamic compensation and transfer of forces. One could also contextualize this perspective with reference to Novalis’s view on monarchy as articulated in Faith and Love. There he writes that monarchy is “a true system, because it is bound to an

116 “Nur insofern der Mensch also mit sich selbst eine glückliche Ehe führt—und eine schöne Familie ausmacht, ist er überhaupt Ehe und Familienfähig. Act der Selbstumarmung” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 541.74). 117 “Die Ehe ist für die Politik, was der Hebel für die Maschinenlehre. Der Staat besteht nicht aus einzelnen Menschen, sondern aus Paaren und Gesellschaften. Die Stände der Ehe sind die Stände des Staats - Frau und Mann. Die Frau ist der sog[enannte] ungebildete Theil” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 470.1106).



The Levers of German Romanticism  109

absolute middle point; to a being, which belongs to humanity, but not to the state.”118 His description of an “absolute middle point,” which situates it at the intersection of two orders, captures a similar tension as the one described in the hypomochlion. Like the zero which is “metasign in relation to the system that generates it,”119 the King, although he belongs to humanity, “is no citizen of the state, and no state official.”120 In his way, Schlegel also imagines scenarios where the lever concept as attached to the individual is integrated into social contexts. In his well-known poetological text, Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation about Poesy), for example, where a group of friends gathers to discuss various ideas in a congenial setting, we see the lever mediating differences of opinion, much as it did in the context of the encyclopedia project’s conceptual labor. When Ludoviko proposes to put forth his ideas about whether or not poesie can be taught and learned, Antonio agrees that this is a worthwhile topic: Antonio: Let us hear it. I hope we shall find in what you are about to offer a contrast to Andrea’s “Epochs of Literature.” Thus we shall be able to use one point of view and one force [eine Ansicht und eine Kraft] as lever for the others and discuss both the more freely and incisively, and again return to the greatest problem whether or not poetry can be taught and learned.121 In this passage, the lever performs two rhetorical functions: it acts as metaphor for a particular point of view (Ansicht) and offers a model for

118 “Die Monarchie ist deswegen ein ächtes System, weil sie an einen absoluten Mittelpunct geknüpft ist; an ein Wesen, was zur Menschheit, aber nicht zum Staat gehört” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 489). 119 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 11. Rotman’s argument is actually much broader: he shows how the introduction of the zero in mathematical discourse, the initial use of the vanishing point in perspectival painting, and the invention of imaginary money are all events of seismic nature for their respective semiotic systems. Each of these three signs, according to Rotman, has a “natural closure” with regard to the original system (he gives the example of how the special status of the zero led to the invention of the algebraic variable that can potentially stand in for all numbers) (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28–32). This “closure” of the system within a “meta-sign,” in turn, “accompanies a self-conscious form of subjectivity” (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28). 120 Novalis, Schriften 2, 489. 121 “Antonio: Lassen Sie uns hören. Ich hoffe, wir finden in dem was Sie uns geben wollen, einen Gegensatz für Andrea’s Epochen der Dichtkunst. So können wir dann eine Ansicht und eine Kraft als Hebel für die andre gebrauchen, und über beyde desto freyer und eingreifender disputiren, und wieder auf die große Frage zurückkommen, ob sich Poesie lehren und lernen läßt” (KFSA 2, 311).

110  The Lever as Instrument of Reason social discourse through the image of different perspectives leveraging one another as the conversation progresses.

Conclusion

The equation of the hypomochlion with the individual has implications for our understanding of German Romanticism. In the wake of the mechanistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, and the perception that Romanticism distances itself both from this philosophy and from related figures of thought, the incorporation of one of the most important concepts from mechanics into a model of the subject should not be underestimated. At the same time, it seems clear that the presence of the hypomochlion is no real threat to the organic models that inform Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking. Instead, Romantic system-organs, when examined in terms of their smallest components, begin to resemble a mechanical assemblage where the fulcrum of the lever is the figure that defines the smallest possible—and paradoxically also the largest possible—unit. This suggests that a more nuanced view is required to understand precisely how a mechanical concept can be useful when we move beyond the individual. Perhaps it is the elementary quality of the hypomochlion as a figure of individual duality that has allowed it to exist under the radar. Whereas an overt system of multiple levers would invariably recall older, contested models of the clockwork universe, a single lever—or even less than that, a single hypomochlion (and if Novalis has his way, perhaps even less than that: a mere tension of forces)—allows for mechanical theory to function uncontested in a less restrictive environment. Although relations of part and whole are central to Romantic thought, the hypomochlion possesses a unique mobility. It bridges the conceptual work of the encyclopedia project and Romantic theories of the subject, and is equally at home as a model of consciousness, as a description of the individual, as a conceptual link between concepts drawn from different disciplines, and as a figure of cosmological reach. As the embodiment of agency without instrumentality, the hypomochlion is indebted to a model of the lever built upon pure relationality. Without a hand to direct it, it becomes organic and self-guiding even as it remains a figure of unified “dividuality.” In other words, the hypomochlion’s defining feature is the preservation of a distinction that allows it, with absolute succinctness, the potential of becoming a system unto itself.

Three The Contested God of Naturphilosophie

This lever is the god of nature philosophy, and it cannot aspire to another one.1 Carl von Eschenmayer

Introduction

The previous chapter revealed German nature philosophy (Naturphilosophie) to be an important—and also surprising—source for Early German Romanticism’s work on and with the lever, as Schlegel and Novalis appropriated it as an instrument of reason. Given that the extent of Friedrich Schelling’s and Carl von Eschenmayer’s engagement with the lever extends far beyond what we have witnessed thus far, it would be a mistake to relegate them—or nature philosophy itself—to the historical background of this study. The purpose of this chapter is therefore twofold: first, to explore the often-surprising ways in which Schelling and Eschenmayer integrate the lever into their philosophical thinking and, secondly, to show that, for all the peculiarities of the nature-philosophical lever, there are clear connections to be made to both the Romantic and Kantian levers, connections that once again implicate the lever in models of the human. Unlike the all-powerful ego-levers of German Romanticism, however, we will see that there are limits to how far this connection between the human and the lever can be pushed from the nature-philosophical point of view. In fact, the very question of the limits of the lever’s usefulness lies at the heart of a

1

See “Eschenmayer an Schelling. Ein Sendschreiben über dessen Abhandlung: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit,” in Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche, ed. Friedrich Schelling, vol. 1.4 (Nürnberg: Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1813), 38–78, 62.

112  The Lever as Instrument of Reason debate between Schelling and Eschenmayer that will ultimately lead to its death and, as the following chapter will show, a possible apotheosis. Before proceeding, I would like to briefly explain what connotations “nature philosophy” has in the German context for readers who might be unfamiliar with the term. This task is complicated by the fact that there was no single understanding of nature philosophy as the term was used around 1800.2 Much depends on individual philosophers’ mathematical inclinations, on the degree to which they balanced ideas drawn from the empirical tradition with more speculative thinking, and on whether or not they accepted the dynamic description of nature outlined in Kant’s metaphysics. However difficult it may be to provide a succinct overview,3 there are nonetheless a few basic ideas that will suffice as background to help underscore the lever’s peculiar role within this philosophical movement. One concise formulation of the state of Naturphilosophie just prior to Schelling’s arrival on the scene can be found in J. S. Beck’s Grundriß der critischen Philosophie (Outline of the Critical Philosophy) from 1796. In this text he identifies two strands of Naturphilosophie: the dynamic and the mechanical.4 Whereas the first strand relies upon “the difference of the connection of the original forces of expansion and attraction,” that is, 2 One should not think of Naturphilosophie in terms of a single, well-defined movement, but rather various “nature philosophies” that coexist around 1800, each with a different emphasis. Or, as Joseph Esposito writes, “In a technical sense there was no ‘school’ of Naturphilosophie. For one thing, Schelling’s writings never achieved a final, polished result necessary for use by devoted followers. Also, Schelling himself moved into other fields, leaving the movement leaderless. However, there were those to a greater or lesser degree familiar with Schelling’s work, who accepted the mandate of Naturphilosophie to seek interrelations among natural phenomena and to eventually bring about a unity of nature and culture.” Joseph Esposito, Schelling’s Idealism and the Philosophy of Nature (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Press, 1977), 137. 3 Kenneth L. Caneva likely speaks for many when he writes that defining nature philosophy is not always “historiographically useful,” although he does admit that it can be “rendered in terms of a rough set of its principal and most characteristic concepts and assumptions.” Kenneth L. Caneva, “Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance,” Hist. Sci. xxxv (1997): 35. 4 For further information, one can also refer to the entry “Naturphilosophie” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. There one learns that through the end of the eighteenth century, the philosophy and science of nature—naturalis philosophia and scientia naturalis—were used interchangeably. At that time, however, questions arose about the foundation of a study of nature: to what degree should one base it on speculative, metaphysical claims, on mathematical premises, and/or on empirical observations?   See Friedrich Kaulbach, “Naturphilosphie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 535–60, 546.



The Contested God of Naturphilosophie  113

the model that forms the basis for Kant’s description of matter, for the second strand, “the varying figure of the absolutely hard first particles (atoms) is . . . the principle, from which the specific variation of matter is derived.”5 With the arrival of Schelling and Eschenmayer, we see not a rejection of these two models, but rather an attempt, through a project Schelling refers to as a “speculative physics,” to understand objectoriented theories of nature as existing within the same continuum as theories of the ego (a goal which was, in essence, more compatible with the Kantian understanding of a nature philosophy based on forces of expansion and contraction). As controversial as it was to suggest that we see, in the natural world, patterns and structures that mirror those of the human psyche, Schelling’s embrace of these very ideas also caused him to be revered—almost literally—by many. One could take as an example Dr. August Friedrich Hecker, for whom Schelling was a divine “creator” (Schöpfer) and Schelling’s nature philosophy “the divinity of the universe . . . far above the common circles of empiricism and scholastic dust.”6 There will be a reason to return to questions of nature-philosophical “divinity” at the end of the chapter, although the apotheosis in question will not be Schelling’s own. For now, it is more useful to supplement the perceptions of nature philosophy by Schelling’s contemporaries with more recent perspectives in order to have a sense of how the kind of nature philosophy associated with the work of Schelling and Eschenmayer is perceived today. Günter Zöller writes, in mechanical terms sympathetic to my own study, that Schelling’s philosophy of nature was “conceived as the systemic counterweight to KantianFichtean transcendental philosophy and its idealist derivation of nature from the mind” that preferred the “realist approach of deducing mind from nature.”7 For all their differences, Schelling and Eschenmayer shared the belief that the phenomena of the natural world as well as the laws describing them—such as the law of equilibrium—correlated to the phenomena of the psyche. In this idea, we can already glimpse a hint of what is to come where the lever is concerned. According to such an analogy, it is not a stretch to imagine that those same instruments that have long championed the rule of human artfulness over nature could also be applied to the psyche.

5 6 7

Jakob Sigismund Beck, Grundriß der critischen Philosophie (Halle: Renger, 1796), 108–09. Dr. August Friederich Hecker, Annalen der gesammten Medicin als Wissenschaft und als Kunst (Leipzig: C. Salfeld, 1810), 104. Günter Zöller, “Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer,” in Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208.

114  The Lever as Instrument of Reason It is also helpful to bring to this discussion an idea proposed by Frederick Beiser, who phrases the chief concern behind nature philosophy in compatible, if somewhat different terms. Beiser’s argument has to do with the way the “romantics”—which for him include Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hegel—confront the perceived philosophical options available to them in terms of Cartesian dualism or materialism. Their solution, he argues, was to return to the concept of matter as living force (vis viva).8 The advantage of this concept was that it could surmount “the dualism between the subjective and the objective while still accounting for the differences between them” because one could now speak in terms of “different degrees of organization and development of a single, living force.”9 The following pages will make clear how this powerful idea is intimately connected to their use of the lever in Schelling’s and Eschenmayer’s writings. As was the case in the prior chapters, the following reading of the nature-philosophical lever will also need to move beyond a simple description of its presence in the writings of Schelling and Eschenmayer to address the more challenging questions of what the lever is and what function it serves. This requires close attention to language and rhetorical figures that goes against the grain of how German nature philosophy has traditionally been understood. Thomas Broman has assessed some of the difficulties involved in Schelling’s reception as being divided into groups that focus either (1) on concepts such as polarity to argue for the “fruitfulness of some of its doctrines for the later development of science,” without nature philosophy itself being “taken seriously as a natural science,” or (2) on nature philosophy as “part of the history of transcendental idealism in German philosophy and the philosophy of science.”10 The problem with each of these approaches, he argues, is that they perceive of the language of Schelling and his followers as a problem: as something that must be “penetrated” in order to get to the “doctrines beneath it.”11 He writes that it is precisely here . . . in the handling of the language of Naturphilosophie, that I believe historians have gone most seriously astray. For all its maddening, metaphorical inscrutability, the language is not something to be “decoded” and thereby swept

8

Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32–33. 9 Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” 33. 10 Thomas H. Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine 1750–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 90–91. 11 Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 91.



The Contested God of Naturphilosophie  115 aside. . . . [Naturphilosophie] redefined the role of language in the scientific enterprise.12

This point of view is quite compatible with the approach I take as well. As was the case in the chapter on Kant, where close attention was paid to his rhetorical choices in the essay on negative magnitudes, in this chapter I show how the lever is no simple metaphor for Schelling and Eschenmayer, but rather an instrument of reason in its own right that operates within a conceptual apparatus that should be familiar by now.13

Eschenmayer and the Lever of Naturphilosophie

Although Carl Eschenmayer14 is one of the chief proponents of German nature philosophy, his reception has tended to be overshadowed by Schelling’s, and he is still largely unknown outside of Germany, where increasing attention has been paid to his work in recent years.15 One of the most thorough overviews of Eschemayer’s life is by Walter Wuttke, who relates that Eschenmayer was born in Neuenbürg in 1768 and began his philosophical studies in Tübingen in 1783. His father’s death forced him to abandon these pursuits; at the request of a relative he moved to Lyon to acquire the necessary skills for becoming a merchant. The outbreak of the French Revolution once again interrupted his plans, at which point he transferred first to Stuttgart and then to Tübingen, where he finished his advanced studies in the faculty of medicine in 1796. From 1797 he worked as a doctor in Kirchheim and Sulz, but in 1811 he was called back to Tübingen to become professor of medicine

12 Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 91. 13 Jason Wirth’s book, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, expresses a similar idea in somewhat different terms. According to Wirth, Naturphilosophie is “like doing philosophy in accordance with nature (not as an elective philosophical topic . . . ). Not therefore a kind of philosophy, or a topic within philosophy, but rather a gateway into the originating experience of philosophizing.” See Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 2015), 17. 14 For reasons unknown, Eschenmayer’s name has remained an unstable entity throughout history. His German Wikipedia page lists him as “Carl August von Eschenmayer (auch: Adolph (Adam) Karl August (von) Eschenmayer)”; the English page as following: “Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer” (originally Carl; July 4, 1768–November 17, 1852). In contemporary criticism, one will see both C. A. Eschenmayer (Beiser) and K. A. Eschenmayer (Snow), along with other variations. 15 See Cristiana Senigaglia’s recent publication, Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte: Erlangen 1806 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2016).

116  The Lever as Instrument of Reason and philosophy, a position he held for the next twenty-five years.16 The stations of Eschenmayer’s professional life only provide half the picture, however. His intellectual interests cannot be summarized as easily. As is also the case with Schelling, Eschenmayer’s intellectual pursuits evolved over time and led him in various directions. Jörg Jantzen characterizes Eschenmayer’s development as one “that moves in a strangely intricate way between philosophy and practical medicine, between speculative theology, psychiatry, and spiritism.”17 In this case, the information provides a sense of the diverse factors that shaped Eschenmayer’s intellectual trajectory, but it does not answer the central question of the present study: why does the mechanical lever accompany Eschenmayer from his influential treatise from 1797, the Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt (Propositions from Nature Metaphysics, Applied to Chemical and Medicinal Objects), all the way through a treatise on psychology published some twenty years later? As a first step toward describing the lever of nature philosophy, we can consider Eschenmayer’s Propositions, which offers us the first prolonged look at the lever in this field. Not only does this treatise attempt, as Durner and others have shown,18 to ground the natural sciences in dynamic principles, partially as a response to Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) from 1786, it also offers an unusually protracted view of nature-philosophical thinking about the lever. It even understands its own “intellectual burden” in mechanical terms, such as when Eschenmayer describes in the preface what he hopes to achieve with his treatise:

16 One can find the above information on pages 258–59 of Walter Wuttke’s “Materialien zu Leben und Werk Adolf Karl August von Eschenmayers” in Sudhoffs Archiv 56.3 (1973): 255–96. 17 Jörg Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling. Die Philosohpie in ihrem Übergang zur Nichtphilosophie,” in Religionsphilosophie und speculative Theologie. Der Streit um die göttlichen Dinge (1799–1812) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), 74. 18 See Manfred Durner, “Die Naturphilosophie im 18. Jahrhundert und der naturwissenschaftliche Unterricht in Tübingen: Zu den Quellen von Schellings Naturphilosophie” in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 73 (1991): 100; Paul Ziche, Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie Schellings und Hegels (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1996), 212–16 and 218–20; and Manfred Durner, “Theorien der Chemie,” in Wissenschaftshistorischer Bericht zu Schellings naturphilosophischen Schriften 1797–1800 in the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, series 1, supplementary volume to volumes 5–9, ed. Manfred Durner, Francesco Moiso, and Jörg Jantzen (StuttgartBad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1994).



The Contested God of Naturphilosophie  117 As to what completely concerns the achievement of the challenge itself, it is too big for the half of a human life. If we assume that the direction of the path which we should take in the natural sciences is correctly determined for us, but the burden which we should displace is too big for the forces of an individual, then nothing remains but the joining of several forces. If several forces are combined to a total force, then the path, which the burden takes, is the diagonal line.—If the direction of the diagonal is determined, then the relation of the angles under which the various forces work together must also be determined. In other words, the moments [required], in order to find such a relation, could be the subject of this text.19

Here, Eschenmayer combines two mechanical ideas: the problem of individual as opposed to mechanical advantage, and a situation where multiple forces are applied to a particular object (which was usually diagrammed as a parallelogram of forces). Eschenmayer modestly admits that, on his own, he is inadequate for the job of “displacing” the intellectual burden he has tasked himself with. For that reason, he writes, his treatise should be read as a fragment (Bruchstük),20 and only through the combination of his work and that of others will this group lever be able to displace the load it has taken on. With the addition of extra forces, however, comes the need for more complex calculations to see what path (or “diagonal line”—the vector sum of the combined forces) the burden will follow. This as-of-yet uncalculated path is the direction projected for Naturphilosophie in the years to come. To organize his thinking, Eschenmayer divides his treatise into propositions relating to chemistry, mechanics, and pathology. The most significant statements on the lever occur, as one would expect,

19 Was vollends das Leisten der Forderung selbst betrifft, so ist sie für die Hälfte eines Menschenlebens zu groß. Gesezt, die Richtung des Wegs, den wir in der Naturwissenschaft nehmen sollen, seye uns von der Philosophie aus richtig bestimmt, aber die Last, die wir fortwälzen sollen, für die Kräfte eines einzeln zu groß, so bleibt nichts übrig, als die Vereinigung mehrerer Kräfte. Wenn mehrere Kräfte zu einer Totalkraft zusammengesetzt werden, so ist der Weg, den die Last nimmt, die Diagonallinie.—Ist nun die Richtung der Diagonale bestimmt, so muß auch das Verhältniß der Winkel, unter denen die verschiedene [sic] Kräfte zusammenwirken, bestimmt seyn. Etwa die Momente, um ein solches Verhältniß zu finden, könnte der Gegenstand dieser Schrift seyn” (Eschenmayer, Säze, vi). I include most of the German quotations for Eschenmayer in this chapter, since there is neither an English translation nor an updated German edition. 20 Eschenmayer, Säze, vi.

118  The Lever as Instrument of Reason in the section on mechanics, but equilibrium, which previous chapters have shown be an integral part of the lever’s “conceptual apparatus,” is a constant theme throughout. Eschenmayer also makes a case in the preface for the exemplarity of the lever as defined by its ability to transcend simple categorical definitions. Citing the concept of irritability (Reizbarkeit), one of the central phenomena in the discussion of organic life around 1800,21 he suggests that the reason why this concept was even introduced in the first place was because of the perceived difficulty in bringing animal motion under the same laws as the mechanical ones found in the theory of the lever: “One does not consider,” he writes, “that these laws are themselves applied and stand under the condition of even higher laws, which metaphysics demonstrates.”22 Eschenmayer then proceeds to explain the lever’s law of equilibrium, first in terms of the equivalence of two quantities of motion (Bewegungsgrößen) composed of mass and velocity, and then in terms of force and mechanical moments.23 Eschenmayer demonstrates to his readers the remarkable adaptability of the lever and its ability to bring different concepts (such as mass and velocity, or spatial distance and force) into relationships of equivalence. The section in Eschenmayer’s treatise devoted to chemical propositions—simply titled “something for chemistry”—introduces a fundamental idea that will prove central to his discussion of the lever in the following section on mechanics. The “something” Eschenmayer has in mind for chemistry is to strengthen its connection to dynamics, beginning with the basic idea that “the existence of matter can be thought simply through the assumption of two original forces—these forces are the forces of attraction and repulsion.”24 This idea is central to Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy, and Jörg Jentzen and others have discussed how both he and Schelling understood all materials of nature as the quantified modification of these forces, extending over a scale

21 For a quick overview of the competing perspectives and suggestions for further reading, see the entry on Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland in The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 362–65. 22 “Man bedenkt nicht, daß diese Geseze selbst angewandte sind, und unter der Bedingung noch höherer Geseze stehen, die die Naturmetaphysik darlegt” (Eschenmayer, Säze, xiii). 23 See Eschenmayer, Säze, xiii–xv. 24 “Die Dynamik belehrt uns, daß sich die Existenz der Materie blos unter der Annahme der Konkurrenz zweyer ursprünglichen Kräfte denken lasse – diese Kräfte sind die Attractions- und Repulsionskraft” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 2).



The Contested God of Naturphilosophie  119

that reaches from 1/∞ (a maximum limit for the force of attraction) to ∞ (a maximum limit for the force of repulsion).25 Without suggesting that we reduce the concept of matter to force, Eschenmayer encourages us to think of matter in terms of degrees, such that “a degree of matter” would be “a quantity of the relationship in which the forces of attraction and repulsion stand toward each other.”26 The various possible ratios of these two forces, quantified onto a scale, would then correlate to all the different materials in existence.27 To illustrate his point, Eschenmayer provides his readers with this diagram:

Figure 3.1  Scale depicting various “degrees of matter,” based on the respective ratios of positive and negative forces. Source: Eschenmayer, Propositions, 12. Year: 1797. In the diagram, A  =  the force of attraction and B  =  the force of repulsion.28 Each member of the series represents a different quantitative possibility that, in turn, corresponds ideally to a different material found in nature. Jörg Jantzen has traced the ideas represented in this diagram back to a dispute between Eschenmayer and Schelling on the construction of “qualities.” He connects Schelling’s Kantian-influenced understanding of qualities as “various modifications of the basic forces

25 See Jantzen, Naturphilosophie nach Schelling, 155. Jentzen refers to Schelling’s 1797 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, where Schelling writes that “alle Qualitäten” are to be observed “nur als verschiedne Modifikationen und Verhältnisse der Grundkräfte.” Jentzen accidentally omits the words “und Verhältnisse” from his quote, but for our purposes they are of the utmost importance: it is precisely the notion of ratio and relation that lays the groundwork for a productive comparison with the lever. 26 “Qualitäten der Materie sind daher Grade und ein Grad Materie ist irgend ein Grössenverhältniß, in welchem die Attraction und Repulsion zu einander stehen” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 37). 27 See also the letter from Eschenmayer to Schelling written in Kirchheim, July 21, 1801, in Aus Schellings Leben, vol. 1, 1775–1803, ed. Gustav Leopold Plitt (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869), 336–43. 28 In Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie Schelling und Hegels, Paul Ziche shows how the concept of “line” is used to model the concepts of identity and difference for both Schelling and Hegel (Ziche, Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle, 200). In particular, he describes how the “line of cohesion” (Kohäsionslinie) in Schelling’s work was applied to both the magnet and the mechanical lever. Ziche does not refer to Eschenmayer in this context.

120  The Lever as Instrument of Reason [i.e., of attraction and repulsion J.H.]” to Eschenmayer’s diagram, which is, according to Jantzen, an attempt to encompass Schelling’s idea “through a kind of mathematical progression, which in particular expresses gradation.”29 Jantzen also reminds us that, already in the Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Draft of a System of Nature Philosophy) from 1799, Schelling expressed his dissatisfaction with mathematical representation of quality.30 Eschenmayer has no such qualms, however: even in his later work, he will continue to use quantitative thinking, no matter how speculative the context. Returning now to the Propositions, we can see that Eschenmayer keeps the ideas underlying this diagram as well as other quantitative figures as a point of reference, even as he shifts his focus from chemical to mechanical propositions: If it is the business of dynamics to develop the concept of matter with regard to the category of quality, and if the application of those propositions to chemistry showed us that this science has to do with degrees of reality, then it is left to the business of mechanics to demonstrate these degrees of reality in relation to one another in order, where possible, to find the laws of their equilibrium.31 Chemical affinity, then, should be understood as the process through which matter, in its qualitative relations (as expressed by the diagram above), strives for equilibrium. According to Eschenmayer, the laws of mechanics can be applied to this same theory when we understand mechanical equilibrium as the opposition of two “degrees of reality.”32 To clarify this idea, he takes recourse to the lever: Here one only refers to a relative equilibrium, in which the effects of two forces are not cancelled, but rather thought of as equal. An absolute equilibrium exists where two forces are completely cancelled, so that they no longer remain an object for mathematical construction or for analysis. Symbolically, we can conceive of an absolute equilibrium on the lever. As long as force [Kraft] and burden [Last] are somehow distributed on the arms of the lever,

29 Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling,” 74–75. 30 Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling,” 76. 31 “Wenn es das Geschäfte der Dynamik ist, den Begriff der Materie in Rücksicht auf die Kategorie der Qualität zu entwickeln, und die Anwendung jener Säze auf Chemie uns zeigte, daß diese Wissenschaft es mit den Graden der Realität zu thun hat, so bleibt jetzt noch das Geschäfte der Mechanik übrig, diese Grade der Realität in Relation zu einander darzulegen” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 21). 32 Eschenmayer, Säze, 22.



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a calculation of the magnitude of motion also takes place, but if I think of force and burden joined in the hypomochlion, then the magnitude of motion  =  0. This is the absolute mechanical equilibrium, which is no longer an object for the mathematician.33 Given that the lever and the concept of equilibrium are able to act as a conceptual bridge between the fields of chemistry and mechanics, it is difficult to overemphasize the centrality of the lever and its law of equilibrium to Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical thinking.34 Even concepts which, at first glance, would seem to have little to do with the mechanical theory of the lever are drawn into its orbit. For example, when Eschenmayer thinks about the balance of attractive and repulsive forces in various materials, he transposes these concepts to the relation of elasticity (which increases in relation to the force of repulsion) and mass (which increases in relation to the force of attraction): “Thus a material of single mass and double elasticity would maintain equilibrium with a material of doubled mass and single electricity.”35 He then makes his comparison more explicit: “Since elasticity behaves precisely as velocity did in the above proposition, from which the law of the lever was derived, both of them must therefore be able to be returned to one another, and to deliver the same results in their application to mechanical or dynamic quantities.”36 To drive the point home, Eschenmayer introduces the example of water temperature.

33 “Es ist hier aber nur von einem relative Gleichgewicht die Rede, in welchem die Wirkungen zweier Kräfte nicht als aufgehoben, sondern nur einander gleich gedacht werden. Ein absolutes Gleichgewicht ist da, wo zwei Kräfte ihre Wirkungen ganz aufheben, so daß sie weder für die mathematische Konstruktion noch für die Analysis der Erfahrung ein Gegenstand mehr sind. Wir können uns symbolische Weise ein absolutes Gleichgewicht am Hebel denken. So lange Kraft und Last auf irgend eine Weise an den Aermen des Hebels vertheilt sind, so findet auch eine Berechnung der Grösse der Bewegung statt, so wie ich aber Kraft und Last im Hypomochlion vereinigt denke, so ist die Grösse der Bewegung = 0. Diß ist das absolute mechanische Gleichgewicht, das für den Mathematiker kein Gegenstand mehr ist” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 22–23). 34 Ziche has also noted that Eschenmayer turns often to the lever in his discussion of chemical and magnetic phenomena and that it has achieved “the role of a general illustration of the eschenmayerian method of construction” (Ziche, Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle, 214). 35 “Es wird daher eine Materie von einzeler [sic] Masse und doppelter Elastizität mit einer Materie von doppelter Masse und einzeler [sic] Elastizität das Gleichgewicht halten” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 24). 36 “Da sich die Elastizität eben so verhält, wie in dem obigen Saz [sic], aus welchem das Gesez des Hebels abgeleitet wurde, die Geschwindigkeit, so müssen sich beide auf einander zurükbringen lassen, und in ihrer Anwendung auf

122  The Lever as Instrument of Reason “Every temperature of water between its boiling point and freezing point can be understood as having emerged from two different temperatures, of which the one is larger, the other smaller, than the middle temperature.”37 Because every temperature can be understood as a composite of the weight of the water and the “degree of elasticity of the warmth,” it can therefore, “according to the analogy with the lever, be called a quantity of motion, and the middle temperature can be seen as a common hypomochlion, against which two such quantities of motion are working.”38 If one recalls the proposition associated with the mechanical lever that says in the case of equal weights and velocities that the distance from the fulcrum point must also be the same, then, Eschenmayer argues, it must also be true that in the case of equal masses of water, the negative and positive degrees of elasticity are also in equilibrium: “Thus the mechanical law of the lever can be applied precisely to dynamic quantities.”39 Here, too, Eschenmayer provides another diagram to illustrate his point:

Figure 3.2  Scale depicting equilibrium in terms of temperature. Source: Eschenmayer, Propositions, 27. Year: 1797. On the left of the diagram, one can imagine a quantity equivalent to two quarts of water at 32 degrees (the freezing point). On the right, there

mechanische oder dynamische Grössen gleiche Resultate liefern” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 25). 37 Eschenmayer, Säze. 38 “Jede Temperatur ist zusammengesetzt aus dem Gewicht des Wassers und aus dem Elastizitätsgrad der Wäreme und kann daher nach Analogie mit dem Hebel eine Bewegungsgrösse genannt werden, und die Mitteltemperatur kann als ein gemeinschaftliches Hypomochlion angesehen werden, gegen welches zwei solche Bewegungsgrössen hinwirken” (Eschenmayer, Säze). 39 Eschenmayer, Säze, 26.



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is one quart of water at 212 degrees (the boiling point). The numerical average of 32 and 212 is 122, but the diagram illustrates how, when these two quantities of water are mixed, then, according to the law of the lever, because of the difference in volume, the middle temperature will actually be 92, which is where the fulcrum point is marked on the diagram. What, then, can we learn from Eschenmayer’s levers? We could begin with the simple observation that, to judge from the Propositions, Eschenmayer is more willing to use diagrams than Schlegel and Novalis were. At the same time, it is important to ask what, exactly, the diagram is supposed to represent. Eschenmayer’s diagrams do not depict a particular object or piece of laboratory equipment. Instead, the diagrams visualize a philosophical idea as well as a theoretical outcome. That means they also have a heuristic function akin to the tendency of Blumenberg’s absolute metaphors to act as a “model” and “point of orientation” that guides our thinking and “gives structure to a world.”40 Once the basic law of the lever is understood, one can apply it even in contexts where one would not usually think to apply it (such as water temperature). According to Eschenmayer’s Propositions, the lever functions as an instrument of reason when we can use it to develop and visualize particular intuitions we might have about physical processes and then verify whether or not these intuitions are correct. Eschenmayer’s comments about the lever can also be understood within a broader tendency toward simplification: analogical thinking is economical when the same observations or intuitions can be reapplied productively in different contexts. The quantification of nature and natural processes is important in this regard, and Eschenmayer writes that it is “an essential advantage of the dynamic way of looking at things that it excludes the multiplicity of specifically different materials and views the entire manifold of nature in terms of degrees.”41 Certainly, the figure of the mechanical lever retains its usefulness in the context of dynamical philosophy—perhaps more than Eschenmayer is even aware of. He continues, “Indeed, hereupon rests the place of mediation [Vermittlungsort], in which the most contradictory opinions of the physicists can be compared as well as the propositions of metaphysics for all possible hypotheses, which the investigator of nature desires to establish.”42 According to the theoretical scenario described, could one

40 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 22. 41 “Es ist ein wesentlicher Vortheil der dynamischen Vorstellungsart, daß sie die Multiplicität specifisch verschiedener Materien ausschliesset, und alle Mannigfaltigkeit der Natur als Grade ansieht” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 44). 42 Eschenmayer, Säze, 44.

124  The Lever as Instrument of Reason not think of this “place of mediation” as a hypomochlion that balances various intellectual “forces,” such as physics and metaphysics? If so, then it would seem that the model of the lever is even more deeply entwined in Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical thinking than one would have suspected at first glance: even as we investigate the levers of nature philosophy in the next few pages, it bears keeping in mind that, for Eschenmayer at least, the lever acts as one of the governing structural ideas of nature philosophy itself. Indeed, the fundamental notion connecting physics to metaphysics seems deeply indebted to the mechanics of the lever. To understand the full extent of Eschenmayer’s investment in the lever—and to see that his thinking about its usefulness extends beyond the Propositions—requires a brief look into his second major publication, devoted to magnetic phenomena: the Versuch die Geseze magnetischer Erscheinungen aus Säzen der Naturmetaphysik mithin a priori zu entwikeln (Attempt to Develop the Laws of Magnetic Phenomena A Priori from Propositions from Nature Metaphysics), from 1798. From our presentday perspective, it might seem peculiar to think about magnets and levers in relation to one another but, as we already observed in the Propositions, Eschenmayer is committed to his belief that mechanical phenomena obey “higher” metaphysical laws and that one way of showing this is by rethinking them in terms of the key concepts of attraction and repulsion. The strength of this analogy is what carries the lever to prominence in the Laws, and it is reinforced when Eschenmayer writes, “Dynamics had proven that if those two forces bind themselves on one and the same location . . . intuition would remain empty. For the dynamic concept of absolute connection, mechanics now posits the concept of an absolute equilibrium.”43 He repeats several of the same ideas from the Propositions, sometimes verbatim (among others: that “absolute dynamic equilibrium” can be expressed mechanically in terms of equal mechanical moments on the lever, which will then find itself in a state of rest).44 When he refers to the lever’s usefulness, however, Eschenmayer lingers on one word in particular: that we use the lever to make things anschaulicher. Readers familiar with the German intellectual tradition will already be aware that the word Anschauung, often translated as “intuition,” has

43 “Die Dynamik hätte erwiesen, daß wenn jene beide Kräfte sich an einem und ebendemselben Ort binden . . . die Anschauung leer bleibe. Für den dynamischen Begrif absoluter Bindung sezt nun die Mechanik den Begrif eines absoluten Gleichgewichts” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 73). 44 Eschenmayer, Geseze, 73–74.



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a long history in German philosophy.45 It is frequently associated with the work of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between empirical intuitions (sense impressions) and the “pure” intuitions of space and time. In more common usage, its most basic definition is to regard something: either in the physiological sense of a looking at an object that sits before us on the table or in the intellectual sense of observing something with the “eyes of the mind,” as Goethe would say.46 Eschenmayer uses it in the latter sense, but the phrasing of his examples suggests that he is still sensible of how the object of the lever operates within a physical environment, in experimental settings: “We have a relative, dynamic equilibrium in experience on positive and negative electricity when they are separate from one another, and in experience we have a relative, mechanical equilibrium clearly on the lever, as soon as force and burden lie beyond the hypomochlion.”47 In the Propositions, we observed how Eschenmayer uses the correspondence between dynamic and mechanical equilibrium to rephrase the inverse relationship of mass and velocity in terms of density and elasticity. Eschenmayer rehearses these arguments in the Laws and adds, “At least this agreement gives us the advantage that we can represent the propositions for dynamic quantities more visibly [anschaulicher] on the lever.”48 Just as a physical lever gives a “mechanical advantage” over the object to be displaced by augmenting our natural physical strength, a conceptual lever provides an “intellectual advantage” by making something more apparent or easier to understand that was not fully clear to us before. Eschenmayer uses his conceptual lever to develop his thinking even further by applying the same logic to magnetic phenomena. Of interest is not that Eschenmayer does this in the first place—after all, it is part and parcel of the nature-philosophical spirit to see a congruence between various kinds of physical phenomena—but rather how he does it. He begins

45 For an introduction that focuses on the particular problematic of Anschauung, evidence, and the construction of knowledge, see Sibylle Peters and Martin Schäfer, “Intellektuelle Anschauung”: Figurationen von Evidenz zwischen Kunst und Wissen (Berlin: transcript Verlag, 2004). 46 See Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75.1 (2001). 47 “Ein relatives dynamisches Gleichgewicht haben wir in der Erfahrung an der  +  und – Elektrizität, wenn sie ausserhalb einander sind, ein relatives mechanisches Gleichgewicht haben wir in der Erfahrung deutlich am Hebel, sobald Kraft und Last ausserhalb dem Hypomochlion liegen” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 80). 48 “Diese Uebereinstimmung gibt uns wenigstens den Vortheil, daß wir die Säze für dynamische Grössen öfters anschaulicher am Hebel darstellen können” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 82).

126  The Lever as Instrument of Reason by conjuring once again the row +nillustrated in the first of the diagrams -n above, which reached from A.B. to A.B. Eschenmayer adjusts the terms, however, replacing the “AB” terms in cases where n = ∞ to n = 1 with p.M. (“positive magnetism”) and the “AB” terms in cases where n = −1 to −∞ with n.M. (“negative magnetism”). He then describes the conditions under which absolute equilibrium would be understood on the magnet. As with the case of absolute rest on the lever, the net “sense” or “perception” (Empfindung) equals zero. In the case of a disruption, however, the two magnetic forces will enter a relation of relative equilibrium: The main conditions of a relative equilibrium for dynamic quantities, however, are that, just as on one side elasticity increases, on the other the density would have to increase, just as on the lever, where on one side the velocity increases, just as mass on the other; should this also apply to the magnet, then it too must have two sides like the lever, where for both of these dynamic quantities an equally large field of play [Spielraum] is found, so too with the magnet, the positive row must go over through zero into the negative row, and from this follows that which also takes place on the lever, that elasticity and thickness must grow in equal relation with the distance from the hypomochlion or zero point.49 Phrases such as “just like on the lever,” “if this should also apply to the magnet, then like the lever, it too ” and “from there follows, what also occurs on the lever” reinforce the idea that the lever serves as an instrument of reason, a heuristic tool for understanding diverse natural phenomena. These expressions also testify to the lever’s versatility. Once the initial congruence between mechanical and magnetic equilibrium has been established, the lever is able to generate expectations and confirm observations. The connection between levers and magnets might strike present-day readers as strange, given that for Eschenmayer there is little difference between the two, regarding

49 Die Hauptbedingungen aber eines relative Gleichgewichts für dynamische Grössen sind, daß so wie auf einer Seite die Elasticität zunimmt, auf der andern die Dichtigkeit wachsen müsse, gerade wie am Hebel, wo auf einer Seite die Geschwindigkeit eben so wächst, wie auf der andern die Masse; soll diß auch für den Magnet gelten, so muß er auch wie der Hebel zwei Seiten haben, wo für diese beide dynamische Grössen ein gleich grosser Spielraum statt findet, auch bei ihm muß die positive Reihe durch die Null in die Negative übergehen, und daraus folgt, was auch beim Hebel statt findet, daß Elastizität und Dichtigkeit in gleichem Verhältniß mit der Entfernung vom Hypomochlion oder Nullpunkt wachsen müssen” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 84).



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both their physical properties and their visualization. In each case, he imagines two interacting forces mapped into a spatial diagram whose chief coordinates are two endpoints and a central point, be it hypomochlion or “zero point.” It is worth noting that Eschenmeyer does not provide overly specific diagrams either of levers or of magnets: their theoretical compatibility conforms completely to an abstraction based on a kind of diagrammatic minimalism. As for the diagrams that already exist, such as the line of gradation that quantifies the various qualities of matter, Eschenmayer is willing to reinterpret those in the context of magnetic phenomena as well. If, he writes, we imagine the distance from the hypomochlion to be “d,” then the transition from positive to negative magnetism on a magnet would look like this (where “P” = positive magnetism and “N” = negative magnetism):

Figure 3.3 Scale depicting various ratios of positive and negative magnetism. Source: Eschenmayer, Laws, 85. Year: 1798. Eschenmayer acknowledges that there are two possible paths to take when discussing the most important observations and experiments on the magnet: either one begins from the point of view of cases conceived a priori in order to generate a set of predictions about how the magnet would behave in various circumstances, or one can begin on the basis of empirical observation and then strive for a theoretical explanation. Perhaps more for convenience than out of philosophical conviction, Eschenmayer opts for the latter, but it is a decision with which he seems to be not entirely comfortable. After discussing three different scenarios, he again raises the topic, and the lever is the instrument of choice to help resolve the conflict: “In order to follow this explanation step by step and to make it clearer in the visualization [in der Anschauung], I choose the lever.”50 Eschenmayer then proceeds—step by step—to revisit the conditions under which one can describe the absolute and relative equilibrium of magnetic phenomena. There is, however, a limit to how well the lever can serve Eschenmayer, and he reaches this limit

50 “Um dieser Erklärung Schritt für Schritt zu folgen, und sie in der Anschauung deutlicher zu machen, wähle ich den Hebel” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 100).

128  The Lever as Instrument of Reason when he attempts to account for the two points of indifference on a magnet. There is no equivalent of a lever with two hypomochlia: it is a “circumstance which cannot be illustrated at all on the lever, which is why this image only partially fulfills the demand of visualization [die Erforderniß der Anschaulichkeit]”.51 That the lever is mentioned even in cases where it is no longer of great use testifies to the degree to which it is ingrained in nature-philosophical thinking, but it is also remarkable how, in the very act of defining the lever’s limits, Eschenmayer makes one of the clearest programmatic statements about why philosophers use it: because it enables them to respond to the “demand of visualization.” Such a statement also offers a reason for the lever’s longevity in philosophical thinking: there is a need to preserve a relatively simple model, one which acts as a philosophical firm point, or fulcrum point, even (or perhaps: above all) in times of rapidly growing complexity. There will be cause to return to this idea in the discussion of Schelling. As for Eschenmayer, in the years following the publication of his two nature-philosophical treatises, he directs his attention away from the lever to focus on a variety of other concerns, including his medical practice, his political pursuits, and the investigation of animal magnetism. In fact, the lever makes only two other significant appearances in Eschenmayer’s writing: in an argument with Schelling that erupts in their correspondence, and in the publication of the Psychologie in drei Theilen (Psychology in Three Parts) of 1817. These two additional appropriations of the lever will have a significant role to play in this chapter and the next.

Schelling and the Construction of the Ego

The examples taken from Eschenmayer’s Propositions (1797) and Laws (1798) illustrate how his knowledge of mechanics and physical law allowed him to use the lever heuristically, as an instrument of reason, and as a “model” toward which he could orient himself. We also observed how, for Eschenmayer, the lever facilitated connections between various physical phenomena not usually associated with one another, much as it did in the Romantic fragments and notes connected to their encyclopedia project. What still remains to be established is the connection between the lever and the ego such as we observed in the

51 “diß ist aber ein Umstand, der am Hebel gar nicht darstellbar ist, weswegen dieses Bild die Erforderniß der Anschaulichkeit nur zum Theil erfüllt” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 112). Paul Ziche discusses a similar case in the context of the general deduction in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism He notes that for all that the magnet has two points of indifference, “Schelling’s image of the magnet does not distinguish itself from the image of the lever” (Ziche, Mathematische Modelle, 202).



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context of German Romanticism. This is where Schelling’s early work, from between 1797 and 1801, has an important role to play. In these writings, Schelling encourages us to think about the “human” in terms of the lever, much as Schlegel and Novalis do. In order to understand the lever of Schelling’s philosophy, however, we first need to approach it via the concept of equilibrium. In the introduction to his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature) from 1797, Schelling writes that philosophy is an act whereby we free ourselves from the “bonds of nature.”52 To do so, we must put ourselves into a state of contradiction with the external world.53 Initially, we exist in a state of “absolute equilibrium” of forces and consciousness. This state of equilibrium can, through an exercise of intellectual freedom, be removed—and freely reinstated. This freedom is the freedom to speculate, and for Schelling, that means to differentiate between intuition (Anschauung) and its object (Gegenstand), between concept (Begriff) and the image (Bild) one has of it: He who first attended to the fact that he could distinguish himself from external things, and therewith his ideas from the objects, and conversely, the latter from the former, was the first philosopher. He first interrupted the mechanics of his thinking [and] upset the equilibrium of consciousness, in which subject and object are most intimately united.54 Schelling constructs this concise narrative to relate how we, as thinkers, become conscious of ourselves and of the world by learning to distinguish ideas from objects. He describes this process in terms of the replacement of “absolute equilibrium” with a series of relative equilibrium states. According to this logic, once the first distinction between object and representation has been made—once their original identity has been replaced by a relationship of equivalence— equilibrium as metaphor is in play. With this idea, Schelling links the concept of equilibrium inextricably to the physical or material origin of abstract thought. In anticipation of Nietzsche, he also reminds us of the metaphorical structure of language itself. Equilibrium therefore

52 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, ed. Manfred Durner and Walter Schieche (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommannholzboog, 2001), 70. 53 “Sobald der Mensch sich selbst mit der äußern Welt in Widerspruch setzt . . . ist der erste Schritt zur Philosophie geschehen” (Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 71). 54 Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Reprint 1995), 12.

130  The Lever as Instrument of Reason hinges upon the ability to negotiate even the most radical differences of the material and the nonmaterial. The ease with which equilibrium can construct relationships between disparate things is worthy of more attention in the context of Schelling’s nature philosophy, where ideas from the natural sciences are reworked in innovative ways. In these writings, he is attuned to the problem of equilibrium in the context of a wide range of phenomena related to physiology, electricity, and heat, and here too, we can observe a clear affinity to the conceptual “work” accomplished by the lever of Romanticism. The chapter on Kant showed how the beginning of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay set the stage for the arrival of the lever: long before it actually appeared on the scene, its conceptual apparatus was already in place. A similar argument can be made with regard to Schelling. Once he frames a relationship of two dissimilar things—objects and ideas—in terms of equilibrium, we are only one step away from the work of the lever itself, which has proven time and again to be the instrument that brings disparate objects into an unexpected rapport. The first overt connection between the lever and the ego in Schelling’s philosophy appears three years after the publication of the Ideas, in his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism).55 This treatise describes the emergence of the ego’s self-awareness, and one of the questions Schelling poses to himself is how the ego comes to perceive of itself as limited or determined. His preliminary answer is that “inasmuch as the opposing activities of self-consciousness merge in a third, there arises a common product of them both.”56 As he elaborates this idea, he takes advantage of the logic of the lever. Schelling’s reasoning will be easier to follow if we keep in mind that, for him, the ego exists in a state of “rest” and (relative) “equilibrium to which the two [opposing infinite activities, J.H.] reduce one another, and whose continuance is conditioned by the persistent rivalry between

55 Originally published as Friedrich Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1800). German quotes refer to the System des transscendentalen Idealismus in the Historische-kritische Ausgabe, Werke 9.1, ed. Harald Korten and Paul Ziche (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2005). 56 Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 51. “Indem die entgegengesetzten Thätigkeiten des Selbstbewusstseyns sich in einer dritten durchdringen, entsteht ein Gemeinschaftliches aus beyden” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 92). I include the German translation, because of the importance of this quote: it lays the groundwork for the following comparison with the mechanical lever.



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the two.”57 Everything that we think of as sheer matter is, according to Schelling, merely “the expression of an equilibrium between opposing activities that mutually reduce themselves to a mere substrate of activity.”58 This is the dynamic view of nature, one which takes as its point of departure an understanding of matter as existing through the interplay of the two opposed forces of attraction and repulsion. Schelling chooses to linger a bit longer, however, on the notion of a “substrate”: (Compare the lever, for example; the two weights merely act upon the fulcrum, which is thus the common substrate of their activity.)—This substrate, moreover, does not arise voluntarily, as it were, through free production but completely involuntarily, by means of a third activity, which is no less necessary than the identity of self-consciousness.59 To understand what is so peculiar about Schelling’s use of the term “substrate” with regard to the lever in this context requires a bit of digging into its eighteenth-century background. The first reference point is the closest to home: Substrat is an important term in Eschenmayer’s Propositions. When he posits that AB  =  M, he emphasizes that this formula does not represent a degree, but rather emphasizes the unity of a substrate that is “capable of gradation.”60 Around 1800, we also

57 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. Schelling writes that the situation of the ego can be described as “ein Gleichgewicht, auf das sie sich wechselseitig reduciren, und dessen Fortdauer durch die fortdaurende Concurrenz beyder Thätigkeiten bedingt ist” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 92). 58 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. “Aller Stoff ist blosser Ausdruck eines Gleichgewichts entgegengetzter Thätigkeiten, die sich wechselseitig auf ein blosses Substrat von Thätigkeit reduciren” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 93). 59 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. “(Man denke sich den Hebel, beyde Gewichte wirken nur auf das Hypomochlion, welches also das gemeinschaftliche Substrat ihrer Thätigkeit ist). Jenes Substrat entsteht überdies nicht etwa willkührlich durch freye Production, sondern völlig unwillkührlich, mittelst einer dritten Thätigkeit, die so nothwendig ist, als die Identität des Selbstbewußtseyns” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 93). 60 Eschenmayer, Säze, 11. Here, too, Jantzen’s essay on “Eschenmayer and Schelling” is of great help. Jantzen describes how, when Eschenmayer adopts Kant’s understanding of matter as the product of attractive and repulsive forces and formulates the notion of a mathematical series, the middle point—or “M” to the zero power—is the perfect “indifference” of both forces (Jantzen, “Eschenmayer and Schelling,” 75). In this case, matter is “substrate, for while the forces are equaled out and in fact do not yet stand in relation to one another, matter is external to all intuition, or as the case may be, not yet specific, not yet qualitative” (i.i.o.) (Jantzen, “Eschenmayer and Schelling”).

132  The Lever as Instrument of Reason have two other sources likely of interest to Schelling. One is the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where Kant refers to the “schema” of the substance as the “persistence of the real in time, i.e., the representation of the real as a substratum of empirical time-determination in general, which therefore endures as everything else changes.”61 The other is the Handbuch der gesammten Chemie (Hand Book of the Entire Chemistry) by Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren (1794), which proves that the notion of “substrate” was firmly established in chemistry, where it appears as the bearer of acidic and alkaline “principles.”62 Zedler’s Lexicon also emphasizes that, in the eighteenth century, the substratum could be used synonymously with the term “subject.”63 Why should it matter to us what notion of “substrate” Schelling has in mind in what seems to be little more than a parenthetical remark? From the point of view of the lever—and its potential connection with the ego—it matters quite a bit, because it raises the question of whether the “substrate” exists prior to everything that happens to it or whether it itself is the product of some activity. What is so peculiar in the passage from Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism quoted above is that, when Schelling identifies the hypomochlion or fulcrum point as the “substrate” of the activity of the two weights which act upon it, he appears to invert the usual definition such that the “substrate” is the product of two activities, as opposed to something upon which they exert themselves. Its status is fundamentally ambiguous. From a physical or material point of view, the locus of the substrate—the point

61 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 275. This is not to say that the association of substance with the term substratum originates with Kant. One finds the same idea in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and elsewhere in the history of philosophy. In this case, Kant serves as a more contemporary reference point for Schelling. 62 Winterl’s System der dualistischen Chemie (1807) also refers to “substrates” which are capable of combining with “base principles” or “acid principles” such that the resulting product possesses a particular chemical affinity and is then able to combine with other substances. Winterl describes how “acid principles” and “base principles” are joined by a “band” to a “substrate.” The weaker the band, the stronger the acid or base, because it is more “free” to react. See System der dualistischen Chemie des Prof. Jakob Joseph Winterl dargestellt von Johann Schuster M.D., vol. 1 (Berlin: Frölich, 1807), 278 and passim. 63 Zedler, s.v. “Substratum.” Zedler, Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 40 (Leipzig and Halle: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1744), col. 1597. Immanuel Robinson Howard’s entry on “Substance” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a thorough overview of various historical criteria that were attached to the concept of the substrate in the eighteenth century, including ontological basicness, durability, and the ability to bear predicates and be a “subject of change.” Robinson, Howard, “Substance,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http:​//pla​to.st​anfor​d.edu​/arch​ives/​spr20​14/en​tries​/subs​ tance​/, accessed September 22, 2016, at 1:08 p.m.



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which the substrate will become—is, of course, already there. The status of the fulcrum point is more of a challenge to define. On the one hand, its existence depends upon the weights: the application of the weights makes the concept of the fulcrum relevant. On the other hand, we cannot equate the hypomochlion with the weights themselves in a straightforward way, given that it is also the locus of their cancellation. The substrate, then, is an elusive concept in this example—it both appears and disappears at the same time. As he makes his analogy, Schelling emphasizes that the substrate only appears indirectly, that is, not through a deliberate choice, but rather involuntarily, through a “third activity” that is “no less necessary than the identity of the selfconsciousness” (i.e., an identity which encompasses the productive cancellation of opposing tendencies, or forces).64 Even beyond the complex mechanics of the ego’s self-awareness, further light is shed on the possible connection between the lever and the ego when Schelling returns to the comparison in the deduction of productive intuition (Anschauung). Here, he devotes his attention to describing the two activities that comprise the production of an intellectual intuition: one is “ideal,” the “negative” striving of the Ding an sich (thing in itself) projected back into the ego. The other is “real,” the “positive” striving of the ego to expand itself infinitely.65 The “product” (i.e., the intuition) results from these reciprocating activities and is equivalent to their equilibrium state. Schelling then calls upon the lever to make an important distinction that, in the state of equilibrium, these two opposed activities do not cease, but they also no longer appear as activities: To the extent that they preserve a balance between them, the two will not cease, indeed, to be activities, but they will not appear as such.—Let us recall once more the example of the lever. In order for it to remain in balance, equal weights must bear upon it at both ends, at equal distances from the fulcrum. Each individual weight acts, but cannot achieve its effect (it does not appear as active); both are confined to the common effect. So too in intuition. The two activities that preserve equilibrium do not thereby cease to be activities, for the equilibrium only exists insofar as both are actively opposed to one another, only the product is static.66

64 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. Jenes Substrat entsteht überdies nicht etwa willkührlich durch freye Production, sondern völlig unwillkührlich, mittelst einer dritten Thätigkeit, die so nothwendig ist, als die Identität des Selbstbewüsstseyns” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 93). 65 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 77. 66 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 81–82. “Insofern sich beyde unter einander das Gleichgewicht halten, werden beyde zwar nicht aufhören, Thätigkeiten zu seyn, aber sie werden nicht als Thätigkeiten erscheinen.—

134  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Once again, Schelling has summoned the lever in the service of explaining a fundamental activity of the ego: the production of an intuition. The first example we considered invoked the cancellation of opposing forces in the hypomochlion and introduced the notion of a substrate. Here, the emphasis is on maintaining equilibrium, which Schelling phrases in aesthetic terms of sense perception. The idea is comparable to what Eschenmayer describes in his Propositions: that forces in equilibrium are, for all intents and purposes, “invisible,” because through their mutual cancellation they have ceased to become an object of analysis. Equilibrium is a constant activity that appears inactive, just as the stability of an intuition in our mind’s eye gives no overt clues as to the interplay of those forces that produce it in the first place. Schelling’s use of the lever is also remarkable when one considers how the simplest of objects serves as a model for the most abstract of intellectual processes. Just one more example, taken from the Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie (Further Representations from the System of Philosophy) (1802),67 will help to illustrate the virtuosity with which Schelling manipulates philosophical levers to his advantage. In a section that compares Fichte’s philosophical system to his own notion of an “absolute way of knowing,”68 Schelling elaborates on the proposition Man erinnere sich wiederum des Beyspiels vom Hebel. Damit der Hebel im Gleichgewicht bleibe, müssen in gleichen Entfernungen vom Ruhepunct an beyden Enden gleiche Gewichte niederziehen. Jedes einzelne Gewicht zieht, aber es kann nicht zum Effect kommen (es erscheint nicht als thätig), beyde schränken sich ein auf den gemeinschaftlichen Effect. So in der Anschauung. Die beyden sich das Gleichgewicht haltenden Thätigkeiten hören dadurch nicht auf, Thätigkeiten zu seyn, denn das Gleichgewicht existirt nur, insofern beyde Thätigkeiten als Thätigkeiten einander entgegengesetzt sind, nur das Product ist ein ruhendes” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 135). 67 Originally published in the Journal für spekulative Philosophie (1802). The Schelling critical edition has not yet printed the volume with this work. The following quotes are from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke 1800– 1802, part 1, vol. 4 (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1859). Excerpts are available in English translation by Michael G. Vater, “F. W. J. Schelling: Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802)” in The Philosophical Forum 32.4 (Winter 2001): 373–97. If no reference is given, the translation is my own. 68 Elsewhere, in a defense of Naturphilosophie, Schelling captures the “monadic” quality of Naturphilosophie—understood here emphatically as his version of Naturphilosophie—when he refers to it as a not just another rung on the ladder of philosophical history but rather something qualitatively different, an “entirely different mode of knowing [Erkenntnißart], an entirely new world . . . into which, from the world where contemporary physics exists, there is no possible passage, [a world which] exists entirely for itself, which is enclosed in itself, and has no external relations.” See “Benehmen des Obskurantismus gegen die Naturphilosophie” in Sämmtliche Werke 1.4, 548.



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that the egoity (Ichheit) is the “form . . . in which the absolute composes itself for the immediate consciousness.69 In an intuition, he writes, the empirical ego finds itself in connection with the pure ego (or pure consciousness), without one being collapsed into the other. The empirical ego is “necessarily and unavoidably burdened with the object and”—for that reason—“occupied with an external influence.”70 To illustrate this point, Schelling turns once again to a mechanical example, but this time he uses a different kind of lever altogether.71 The construction, however, completely resembles that of a onearmed lever; the empirical ego is, through the connection with the pure consciousness, supported on one side and joined with it, on the other [side] however hangs the weight of the object, which is nothing other than a moving, an opposed force.72 A diagram—not included in Schelling’s original text—will make this construction easier to visualize: Empirical Ego

Pure consciousness

object

Figure 3.4  Illustration of the “empirical ego” in terms of a one-armed lever. 69 “die Form sey, in welche das Absolute sich für das unmittelbare Bewußtseyn faßt” (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen,” 355). 70 Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen.” 71 In mechanics, levers are usually divided into three “classes,” based on where the fulcrum point is in relation to the counterbalanced weights. In the first class, the fulcrum is positioned in the middle between the burden or load (Last) and the force applied to displace it. In the second class, the fulcrum is at one end, the burden is in the middle, and the displacing force is applied to the other end (as in a wheelbarrow). In the third class, the fulcrum is at one end, above the lever (a “hyper-” as opposed to “hypomochlion”), the load is at the other end, and the displacing force is applied to the middle. The human mandible functions this way. 72 Die Construktion aber gleicht vollkommen der eines einarmigen Hebels; das empirische Ich ist durch die Verbindung mit dem reinen Bewußtseyn auf der einen Seite unterstützt und mit ihm eins, an der anderen aber hängt das Gewicht des Objekts, welches nichts als ein Bewegendes, eine entgegengesetzte Kraft ist (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen,” 355).

136  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Based on this diagram, the empirical ego and pure consciousness are aligned at the fulcrum point or hypomochlion. The “influence” of the object is that of a motive force that needs to be offset by the joint activity of ego and consciousness. Schelling adds, “To come to a true unity, however, which would engulf the empirical ego and its weight, together with the pure consciousness, within an absolute point of indifference, is already made impossible by the first limitation.”73 Paul Ziche’s Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie Schellings und Hegels (Mathematical and Natural-Scientific Models in Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy) is of great help when it comes to interpreting Schelling’s references to the lever and other mechanical and mathematical concepts. Ziche observes that, through the comparison with the one-armed lever, Schelling wants to show how two activities working in opposite directions can be united in a single point: “Each of the two forces [i.e., the empirical ego and the object, J.H.], makes contact in a point that is removed from this third point; the forces therefore lie externally to the pure ego.”74 He also notes an important distinction between the lever and the dynamic construction of matter from opposing forces, where the “center of force was clearly the target and point of departure for the forces.”75 What the diagram therefore shows is “how the true unity of the empirical ego, the object and the pure self-consciousness would be to intuit: as an “engulfing” of these three positions in an absolute point of indifference. This understanding of unity corresponds terminologically and in its own right to Eschenmayer’s concept of absolute equilibrium.”76 To put things in perspective with the levers from the System of Transcendental Idealism, it is noteworthy that Schelling’s “two-armed” levers are much more defined by a sense of interiority: they represent the emergence of self-awareness in the ego, or the process of intuition whereby the Ding an sich and the ego negotiate their equilibrium.

73 “zu einer wahren Einheit aber zu kommen, welche das empirische Ich und sein Gewicht zusammt dem reinen Bewußtseyn in einem absoluten Indifferenzpunkt versenkte, ist schon durch die erste Beschränkung schlechthin unmöglich gemacht” (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen”). 74 “Jede der beiden Kräfte greift in einem Punkt an, der von diesem dritten Punkt entfernt ist; die Kräfte liegen also außerhalb des reinen Ichs” (Ziche, Modelle, 216). 75 “dort war das Kraftzentrum eindeutig Ziel bzw. Ausgangspunkt der Kräfte” (Ziche, Modelle, 216). 76 Ziche, Modelle. Ziche also emphasizes Schelling’s point that there are no divisions (Unterscheidungen) in the absolute, and as a result, nothing can be sensed (Ziche, Modelle, 216).



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When the fulcrum point is in the middle, as in these two cases, it is also symbolically “contained” by lever’s weight and counterweight. Schelling therefore appropriates this lever as a model for his egoconcept because of its compatibility with a contained unit (or unity) of balanced attractive and repulsive forces. In the case of the “onearmed” lever, however, we can see a shift to collapse the “interiority” of the lever by joining the position of the empirical ego and the “pure consciousness” such that the object symbolically hung from the end of the lever arm is both visually and theoretically “exterior” to them. Even without diagrams, Schelling’s levers would seem to fulfill the Eschenmayer’s “demand for visualization” based on description alone. By now it is clear that Schelling embraces the conceptual apparatus of the lever in the service of clarifying a philosophical idea on several occasions, so that once again, we are able to admire the lever’s versatility. For all that it is such a simple object, it possesses various features upon which one can focus attention: the position of weights, the fulcrum point, its symmetry,77 or even the traces of the lever’s materiality as physical object. Up until this point, however, there is been no indication that Schelling voices any concern about the limit of what the lever can do as we witnessed in Eschenmayer’s Laws, where the usefulness of the lever eventually ran its course. The situation changes with the publication of the Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie (Aphorisms for the introduction to nature philosophy) in 1806.78 In the same year, Schelling communicates his doubts about nature philosophy in correspondence with Alexander von Humboldt: In Germany, one has taken up against this matter [nature philosophy, J.H.], as one always does against everything new. One has misunderstood it and twisted it and disseminated the coarsest judgments against it. One has insisted that nature philosophy scorns experience and limits its progress, and this at the same time as individual researchers of nature took the most advantage of its ideas for their experiments, and guided them according to nature philosophy. Until now, there has been lacking in Germany, from the side of the empirical researchers, even a

77 Ziche has noticed more generally that Schelling prefers in his examples to describe scenarios where the weights of the lever are equal and equidistant from the fulcrum point and does not conjure the “law” of the lever which relies on an inverse ratio of weight and distance from the fulcrum. 78 “Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie,” in Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, ed. A. F. Marcus and F. W. J. Schelling, vol. 1.1 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1806), 3–11.

138  The Lever as Instrument of Reason single man, who could comprehend the perspective as a whole and who would be able to judge it accordingly.79 By this point in his career, Schelling is no longer writing or revising systems of nature philosophy, but he has also not yet decamped from the field, however great his frustrations with its reception may be. In the aphorisms, one can see a serious attempt—published in Schelling’s own journal, in collaboration with his friend Marcus—to explain once again the rudiments of his thinking. When Schelling discusses “the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective,” one of the foundational ideas of his system, he is careful to distinguish this state from “mere equilibrium.”80 Unlike equilibrium states, which always involve a relation between at least two discrete things, the state of identity has a “one-ness” that is quite different. “The fulcrum point of a lever,” Schelling writes, “illustrates the equilibrium of two opposed forces; it is that which unifies both, but it is by no means their absolute identity.”81 It is a “point of rest” but only relative to those two opposed forces, not in itself: “These forces reduce themselves reciprocally to nothing in it [i.e., in the fulcrum, J.H.], but it does not, as itself, it is the positive nothing of both.”82 Schelling distances himself from Eschenmayer in this passage. The unity (or “one-ness”) of identity, as Schelling puts it, would appear to be compatible with Eschenmayer’s “absolute equilibrium,” but Schelling prefers to remove the concept of equilibrium from that description altogether. In the subsequent

79 Man hat sich in Deutschland gegen diese Sache [i.e., Naturphilosophie, J.H.], wie noch immer gegen alles Neue, benommen. Man hat sie erst misverstanden und verdreht und die gröbsten Vorurtheile dagegen verbreitet. Man hat vorgegeben, die Naturphilosophie verschmähe die Erfahrung und hemme ihre Fortschritte, und dies zu gleicher Zeit, als einzlene Naturforscher von den Ideen derselben den besten Gebrauch zu ihren Experimenten machten und diese darnach regulirten. Es hat bis jetzt in Deutschland von Seiten der empirschen Forscher an dem Mann gefehlt, der die Ansicht im Ganzen und Großen aufgefaßt und darnach beurtheilt hätte” (Aus Schellings Leben, 47). 80 In Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, ed. A. F. Marcus and F. W. J. Schelling, vol. 2.1 (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1806) 23. The aphorisms in this volume are found on pages 3–36. Note that they are continued in Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, vol. 2.2 (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1806), 121–58. 81 Der Ruhepunkt eines Hebels stellt das Gleichgewicht zweyer entgegengesetzter Kräfte dar; er ist das Vereinigende beyder, aber er ist keineswegs ihre absolute Identität” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,” vol. 2.1, 23). 82 “diese [= Kräfte, J.H.] reduciren sich wechselseitig in ihm zur Null, nicht aber er selbst, als er selbst, ist die positive Null beyder” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,” 23–24).



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discussion of opposing forces in matter, he takes the additional step of distancing himself from the lever as well: All of nature, by necessity, offers examples of the absolute one-being [Eins-seyns] of oppositions, as do all the sciences. Whoever attempted to understand matter in the simplest sense of contraction and expansion would never arrive at real matter, as long as he assumed both of those forces to be opposed like the forces of a lever, if he did not think of matter as expansive and attractive completely and indivisibly in every point.83 It is the nature of aphorisms to be laconic and to gesture at more than is put into words. This aphorism points toward an ambivalence regarding Schelling’s own use of the lever. At first glance, it appears to describe a case of the lever’s misuse: where an image of two opposed forces operating at different points on the lever is applied—incorrectly—to our understanding of the forces of attraction and repulsion in matter. Instead, Schelling suggests that we should think of the opposed forces operating in each and every point. As far as a scientific description of the lever is concerned, this is always already the case: a weight may be attached to the lever at a particular distance from its fulcrum, and a counterweight might be attached on the other side, but as far as a calculation of torque is concerned, it can be measured for every point on the bar of the lever, when the force of the fulcrum is also taken into account. And it is also useful to recall that the German Romantics entertained the notion of a lever understood simply in terms of a hypomochlion. If we extend this concept in the other direction, that is, as an expansion of cases rather than as the reduction to a single one, we can see that the conclusion of this idea is that everything—every point—is a lever in miniature. Is this an enormous triumph for the lever of nature philosophy, or does it risk losing its usefulness altogether? A debate that erupts between Schelling and Eschenmayer will put this very question to the test.

83 “Beyspiele des absoluten Eins-seyns Entgegengesetzter bietet, nothwendiger Weise, die ganze Natur, bieten alle Wissenschaften in Menge dar. Wer die Materie auch nur auf die einfachste Art aus Contraction und Expansion zu begreifen versuchte, würde nie zu einer realen Materie gelangen, so lange er jene beyden wie die Kräfte eines Hebels entgegengesetzt annähme, wenn er die Materie nicht durchaus und in jedem Punkt als expansiv und als attractiv dächte auf untheilbare Weise” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,” 24).

140  The Lever as Instrument of Reason

The Lever as God of Naturphilosophie

Given the degree to which Eschenmayer and Schelling incorporate the lever into their early nature-philosophical thinking, one would assume that its legacy was secure. A dispute that emerges in their correspondence, however, has serious repercussions for lever’s status as well as, more generally, the degree to which analogies drawn from mechanics and mathematics are considered at all useful for nature philosophy. For the lever, in any event, the stakes could not be higher. In Schelling’s and Eschenmayer’s own words, the result of the debate will be either its death or its apotheosis. In order to understand the source of the controversy and the terms with which the debate was waged, we need to turn first to the text that was central to the dispute, Schelling’s controversial essay, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit” (Philosophical Investigations on the Nature of Human Freedom) from 1809.84 This essay has been understood in various ways: as a meditation on freedom in the age of philosophical systems, as a contribution to the debate on theodicy, and as an attempt to reconcile physics and moral philosophy, to name just three strands of interpretation. Heidegger’s reception of Schelling and Žižek’s reception of Schelling and Heidegger have also guaranteed that the Philosophical Investigations possess a kind of status in contemporary philosophical thinking that sets it apart from Schelling’s nature-philosophical writings. Those familiar with Schelling’s essay might already be wondering what its relevance to the conceptual history of the lever could possibly be. After all, it makes no mention of the lever, much less the concept of mechanics. The term “equilibrium” does have a role to play in terms of the balance of forces of the intellect, although readers of the English edition should be aware that the translator renders not only Gleichgewicht but also Gleichgültigkeit as equilibrium whereby the latter is often closer to the English notion of “indifference.” Schelling does use scientific terminology for the purpose of making analogies, but these references are largely drawn from the fields of optics and gravitational theory. The lever, as it is used with reference to the Philosophical Investigations is, in fact, not Schelling’s creation at all. It is entirely the product of 84 One finds testimony to the resonance of Schelling’s thought in Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1985); Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975); Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992); Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Maters (London: Verso, 1996).



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Eschenmayer’s interpretation and owes its existence to his attempt to grapple with two of the most challenging concepts in Schelling’s essay, Grund and Ungrund. Of the two, Ungrund—usually translated as “nonground”—is a semantic oddity, a concept that seems perpetually at risk of undermining itself through its simultaneous positing (of a “ground” or Grund) and self-negation. Schelling first uses it in the Philosophical Investigations in the middle of a discussion about the possibility of a distinction between being (Wesen) and its relationship to ground: For a long time already we have heard the question: What end should this primary distinction of being serve, in so far as it is ground and in so far as it exists? For there is either no common point of contact for both, in which case we must declare ourselves in favor of absolute dualism, or there is such a point; thus, both coincide once again in the final analysis. We have, then, one being [Ein Wesen] for all oppositions, an absolute identity of light and darkness, good and evil, and for all the inconsistent results to which any rational system falls prey and which have long been manifest in this system too.85 Schelling touches here upon a question that has led to numerous dissenting opinions among his interpreters: whether or not the original being that encompasses and exists a priori to all oppositions also coincides with and includes the concept of “ground,” or whether they need to be thought of as distinct from one another. He pushes forward with the claim that there must be something that exists prior to “ground”: We have already explained what we assume in the first respect: there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality—how can we call it anything other than the original ground [Urgrund] or the non-ground

85 “Schon lange hörten wir die Frage: wozu soll doch jene erste Unterscheidung dienen, zwischen dem Wesen, sofern es Grund ist und in wie fern es existirt? denn entweder giebt es für die beyden keinen gemeinsamen Mittelpunkt: dann müssen wir uns für den absoluten Dualismus erklären. Oder es giebt einen solchen: so fallen beyde in der letzten Betrachtung wieder zusammen. Wir haben dann ein Wesen für alle Gegensätze, eine absolute Identität von Licht und Finsterniß, Gut und Bös und alle die ungereimten Folgen, auf die jedes Vernunftsystem gerathen muß, und die auch diesem System vorlängst nachgewiesen sind” in Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Reutlingen: J. N. Enslinsch Buchhandlung, 1834), 113–14.

142  The Lever as Instrument of Reason [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference of both.86 At the risk of paring down the subtleties of Schelling’s argument to an overly reductive structural question, I would like to put the philosophical (as well as theological) problems attached to the notion of an Ungrund aside for the moment and consider the basic distinction Schelling emphasizes between thinking of it in terms of “indifference” as opposed to “identity.” According to Schelling’s account, indifference must by definition precede identity. Whereas an “identity” of opposites presupposes that those opposites already exist and are in a relation to each other, “indifference” is essentially a state of “pre-difference” prior to all oppositions within which these oppositions are not “present in any way.” There are, by now, any number of questions clamoring for attention. Chief among them is how do we account for the origin of good, evil, or a divine being if they are not present in the initial “nonground”? Does not this “non-ground” itself act as a kind of grounding concept? Or is this just a case of philosophical sophistry? Out of all the responses to Schelling’s essay that arise, however, as posed by the numerous readers who have struggled to come to terms with the elusive non-ground, I am interested in just one: Eschenmayer’s. At his home in Kirchheim on October 18, 1810, Eschenmayer sat down to write a letter to Schelling. The subject was Eschenmayer’s thoughts about the Philosophical Investigations, which he had just finished reading. Eschenmayer frames his letter with his customary humility. He writes that, like Schelling, he has already pursued a similar line of philosophical inquiry and has attempted, without success, to reconcile the spheres of nature and human history. What follows, however, is an increasingly pointed critique of Schelling’s concept of the Ungrund. The most striking aspect of Eschenmayer’s lengthy letter is his repeated use of analogies to compare Schelling’s philosophical ideas to physical phenomena. This strategy also catches Schelling’s attention and, as we eventually see in the written response, becomes a source of profound irritation. Why is that the case? On the

86 “Was wir in der ersten Beziehung annehmen, haben wir bereits erklärt: es muß vor allem Grund und vor allem Existirenden, also überhaupt vor aller Dualität, ein Wesen seyn; wie können wir es anders nennen, als den Urgrund oder vielmehr Ungrund? Da es vor allen Gegensätzen vorhergeht, so können diese in ihm nicht unterscheidbar, noch auf irgend eine Weise vorhanden seyn. Es kann daher nicht als die Identität; es kann nur als die absolute Indifferenz beyder bezeichnet werden” (Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 114).



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one hand, it is a well-known fact that the use of optical, magnetic and other kinds of physical phenomena to serve as metaphors or to model philosophical ideas is quite common in Schelling’s writings. On the other hand, it is also true that, in the case of Eschenmayer’s letter, mechanical references appear with disproportionate frequency when compared to the language of the Philosophical Investigations. For example, when Eschenmayer refers to “three systems” of the ego in Schelling’s essay: reason (the “universal organ” associated with the All, or Allheit), understanding (the “particular organ” associated with the One, or Einheit), and sense (the “singular organ” associated with the Many, or Vielheit), he connects them to scientific and mathematical concepts in various ways.87 First, he refers to what by his own admission is a “weak analogy,” whereby reason is light, understanding is the prism, and the senses are the colors of refracted light.88 He also uses mathematical language, where understanding is a mirror and the ego is the midpoint of a hyperbola with two abscissae of space and time rising on either side. These examples, which relate to corresponding metaphors in Schelling’s essay, set the stage for the appearance of the lever. In order to understand why Eschenmayer summons this particular mechanical figure among all others, however, we need to take a closer look at the substance of his argument. Eschenmayer is troubled by the thought that Schelling’s claims about human freedom amount to “a complete transformation of ethics into physics.”89 For Eschenmayer, this transformation would lead to a collapse of the “higher order of things” (such as freedom and morality) into necessity and natural processes in general. He writes that we cannot arrange concepts such as duty, right (Recht), conscientious behavior (Gewissen), and virtue (Tugend) on a scale just as we would the varying degrees of sickness and health, darkness and light. Instead, human history needs to be thought of as a figure of a “transcendental line” where for every x there was an innumerable quantity of y values: as a cycloid rather than a circle. In Eschenmayer’s letter, we also witness the difficulty he has coming to terms with the concept of “ground,” as Schelling understands it. In response to Schelling description of God’s “indifference,” and the claim that we should conceive of God as having a “ground” from which

87 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 40–42. Schelling’s reply to Eschenmayer, “Antwort auf das voranstehende Schreiben von Schelling” is published in the same volume, 79–99. 88 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 42. 89 “eine völlige Umwandlung der Ethik in Physik” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 50).

144  The Lever as Instrument of Reason (separately, not as oppositions) the principles of good and evil emerge, Eschenmayer has the following to say: God has no nature, God has no ground in himself, the in-self and beyond-self have no meaning for God, there is no operative ground dependent upon God, which contains for you [Shelling] the possibility of the principle of evil.90 According to Eschenmayer, we should not think of God as having any predicates; this precludes his existence in space and time. One can well imagine his frustration with Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations—not only with the idea of God’s “ground,” but also with the idea that the principle of evil is in some way connected to it: According to your perspective, understanding emerges from that which is without understanding, order from chaos, light from the dark ground of gravity. Should something hinder us, to push these oppositions even further in order to allow virtue to emerge from vice, what is holy from sin, and God from the devil? For that, which you call the dark ground of God’s existence, is certainly something similar to the devil.91 Eschenmayer struggles to reconcile the notion of God’s eternity with the notion of light emerging from darkness, order from chaos, etc.92 His irritation only increases when confronted with the notion of the Ungrund, which he understands as the “essence of the ground [Wesen des Ungrunds].”93 If the Ungrund is supposed to cover precisely the conceptual terrain of the non-predicated, then where was one to find the “principle of separation” (Prinzip des Theilens) that exists to differentiate it further into concepts of good, evil, and all the rest? Schelling’s claim is that what we usually think of as oppositions (good and evil, 90 “Gott hat keine Natur, Gott hat keinen Grund in sich, das in Sich und außer Sich hat keine Bedeutung für Gott, es gibt keinen von Gott abhängig fortwirkenden Grund, was Ihnen die Möglichkeit des bösen Princips enthält” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 51). 91 “Nach Ihrer Ansicht geht der Verstand aus dem Verstandlosen, die Ordnung aus dem Chaos, das Licht aus dem finstern Grunde der Schwere hervor. Sollte uns etwas hindern, diese Gegensäze noch weiter fortzusezen, und die Tugend aus dem Laster, das Heilige aus der Sünde, den Himmel aus der Hölle und Gott aus dem Teufel hervorgehen zu lassen? Denn das, was sie [sic] den dunkeln Grund der Existenz Gottes nennen, ist doch so etwas Aehnliches von Teufel” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 57). 92 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 58. 93 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 60.



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etc.) emerge as “non-oppositions” from the non-ground. Or, put in somewhat different terms: Schelling does not allow for the possibility of oppositions to be acknowledged in the zero moment, only in all subsequent ones (in succession). From the point of view of a physical analogy, this does not seem unreasonable. Perhaps it already gestures toward the problem of applying (even if implicitly) a physical logic to metaphysical ideas. In order to impose his own kind of order on what he perceives to be the conceptual chaos of the Philosophical Investigations, Eschenmayer turns to the lever. The degree to which he pursues this analogy is unprecedented in nature philosophy, and such a milestone in the history of the lever justifies it being quoted at length: What is won by negating opposition in co-existence and then affirming it again in succession, so that light and darkness, goodness and evil do not proceed at once but rather one after the other from the non-ground? This non-ground divides itself, so that love and life may be, and so that the divided may become one again.94 Eschenmayer begins with a statement that puts him in direct conflict with Schelling’s model. According to Eschenmayer, there is no possible motivation for making a distinction between that which a priori falls “within” purview of the non-ground and that which can be shown to emerge from it. Nor does Eschenmayer accept the notion that concepts joined within opposing pairs can somehow move independently of each other. To demonstrate his point of view, he writes, I will show this to you conclusively using the mechanics of the lever. Time and space are the non-ground for the lever, the ground is its absolute center of gravity [Schwerpunkt95], the indifference of all relative equilibria that occur in it; the separation into two equally eternal beginnings are the two arms of the lever, the one as force, principle of light or goodness, the other as burden

94 “Was ist gewonnen, wenn der Gegensaz in der Coexistenz negirt, dafür aber in der Succession wieder affirmirt ist, so daß Licht und Finsterniß, Gutes und Böses zwar nicht zugleich aber nacheinander aus dem Ungrund hervorgehen. Dieser Ungrund theilt sich, damit Liebe und Leben sey, und das Getheilte wieder Eins werde” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61). 95 Schwerpunkt can refer to the center of mass or gravity as well as, more generally to a point of emphasis in an argument.

146  The Lever as Instrument of Reason [Last96], principle of darkness or evil, its existence or life consists in move and counter-move or generally in relative equilibrium, but even this relative equilibrium is always striving to return to the absolute again, and seeks to be one again, and this is love.97 As we read through Eschenmayer’s prolonged comparison between the relation of Ungrund and ego to the lever, it becomes clear that certain aspects are easier to visualize than others—there is an intimate connection between the “visibility” of the model and the notion of what is and is not directly anschaulich. In other words, that aspect of the lever which is visible to us correlates to the emergence of conscious life. For the purposes of this comparison, the categories of time and space that comprise the non-ground cannot be visually located on the lever, as is the case with other concepts that make up its center of gravity and its arms. Perhaps the most powerful idea captured by Eschenmayer’s use of the lever is the perfect rapport of stasis and emergence: the “two equally eternal beginnings of the arms” (one good, the other evil) find their perfect balance at the center of gravity, but are exemplary of innumerable other conceptual pairs, given that this center is the “indifference of all relative equilibria.”98 This perfect rapport, also described as an eternal departure and striving toward return is, according to Eschenmayer, nothing less than love. He does not stop here, however: The only difference is that the principle of evil and the principle of good, burden and force on the lever, can only be made visible [anschaulich] in co-existence, but in fact nothing at all hinders us sometimes to think of the lever entirely as burden and other times entirely as force. Now, replace the lever with the ego, then your

96 The Last, the weight applied to the lever, is also semantically related to Laster, or “vice,” which suggests an additional degree of compatibility between the mechanics of the lever (with the opposition of Kraft and Last) and how Eschenmayer uses the lever to model the origin of good and evil. 97 “Ich zeige Ihnen diese Schlußweise in der Mechanik am Hebel auf. Zeit und Raum ist der Ungrund für den Hebel, der Grund ist sein absoluter Schwerpunkt oder die Indifferenz aller relative Gleichgewichte, die an ihm statt finden, das Auseinandergehen in zwei gleich ewige Anfänge sind die beyde Arme des Hebels, der eine als Kraft, Lichtprinzip oder das Gute, der andere als Last, finsteres Prinzip oder das Böse, seine Existenz oder Leben besteht in Zug und Gegenzug oder überhaupt im relative Gleichgewicht, aber eben diß relative Gleichgewicht strebt immer wieder auf das Absolute zurük, und sucht wieder Eins zu warden, und diß ist die Liebe” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61). 98 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61.



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entire construction lies within. And so is it too, this lever is the god of nature philosophy, and it cannot aspire to another one.99 One has to ask whether or not this vision of the lever effectively falls within a blind spot for Eschenmayer. Did he not, at the beginning of his response to Schelling, complain about Schelling’s conflation of physics with ethics? A lever subsumed entirely by good, evil, or some balance of the two and, what is more, which makes claims to being the “god of nature-philosophy,” would seem quite susceptible to this very criticism. At the same time, I do not want to divert too much attention from the truly stunning punchline of Eschenmayer’s comparison: that what he has been building up to all along is a description of the ego itself. The previous chapter, which addressed the role of the lever in German Romantic thinking, showed how Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis took the fulcrum point or hypomochlion of the lever as a metaphor for the ego. They also used the mechanical theory of the lever to support the comparison and allowed the arms of their levers to conjoin pairs of concepts drawn from different branches of human thought. Eschenmayer’s description encompasses the Romantic idea of man as a “self-tool” (Selbstwerkzeug) where agency and medium are collapsed. At the same time, there are critical differences between the levers of German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. Eschenmayer’s lever is morally engaged in a way that Schlegel’s and Novalis’s is not: whereas their levers embody the dynamic balancing of various concepts, Eschenmayer’s lever is an agent of good—and evil—that emerges in the immediate context of an essay on the possibilities of human freedom. When one considers the mechanics and morality of the lever with this emphasis, then Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical lever appears to be in some ways closer to how Kant describes processes of moral equilibrium in the human mind in his negative magnitudes essay—with some caveats. The lever Eschenmayer designates the “god of nature philosophy” is not quite embedded in the human in the same way Kant’s was, however. Also, Eschenmayer does not refer to levers in general but rather a particular one: the lever which he summons from Schelling’s essay. As the “god of nature-philosophy,” it is singular, yet

99 “Die einzige Differenz ist, daß das böse und gute Princip, Last und Kraft am Hebel nur in der Coexistenz anschaulich gemacht werden können, es hindert Uns aber in der That nichts, den Hebel das einemal ganz als Last, das anderemal ganz als Kraft zu denken. Sezen Sie nun an die Stelle des Hebels das Ich, so ist Ihre ganze Konstruction darinn. Und so ist es auch, dieser Hebel ist der Gott der Naturphilosophie, und keinen [sic] andern kann sie nicht erringen” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61–62).

148  The Lever as Instrument of Reason connected to the mechanical principle applicable to all (moral and nonmoral) levers. Unfortunately for Eschenmayer, his attempt to resolve an apparent contradiction of ground and non-ground is met with a scathing rebuttal. According to Schelling, Eschenmayer has gotten it all wrong: the concept of the non-ground, its relationship to good and evil, and all the rest. In part, Schelling is irritated at what he perceives of as Eschenmayer’s total lack of understanding, although one could make the argument here that Eschenmayer understands Schelling better than Schelling does himself. Schelling does not just react against Eschenmayer’s philosophical positions, however. He is as much if not more irritated with the way Eschenmayer goes about making his case. After railing against Eschenmayer for summoning circles, cycloids, lines, and hyperbolas as “analogies for the moral world,” he writes, “Above all I want to note my wonderment at how you still rely on mathematical comparisons which could perhaps accord some advantages to subordinate things and how you cannot overcome the inclination to bring everything back to these dead formulas.”100 If that were not enough, Schelling moves on to include Eschenmayer’s (mis)use of the lever among his fondness for “dead formulas”: “You want nevertheless to use the latter to interpret my dialectical theory of the first origin of duality, as in for instance magnetic phenomena.”101 Even if we keep in mind Schelling’s early skepticism with regard to mathematical representations, it is nonetheless a surprising statement from a philosopher who, since 1797, has used the lever’s mechanical advantage for philosophical gain in writings on natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and ethics. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at Schelling’s further complaints as he contemplates how best to enlighten Eschenmayer:

100 Christopher Lauer and Jason Worth have translated Schelling’s response to Eschenmayer and published it as an appendix to Jason Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild. Time, Art, Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 173–96, here 185.“   Ueberhaupt will ich bemerken, daß ich verwundert bin, wie Sie noch immer an mathematischen Gleichnissen hangen, die Ihnen vielleicht für untergeordnete Dinge einige Vortheile gewähren konnten, und die Neigung nicht überwinden können, sich alles auf diese todten Formeln zurückzubringen” (Schelling, “Antwort auf das voranstehende Schreiben,” 106). 101 Lauer and Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 185. “Sie wollen sogar . . . meine dialektische Theorie vom ersten Ursprung der Zweyheit, wie einst die magnetischen Erscheinungen, am Hebel deutlich machen” (Schelling, “Antwort auf das voranstehende Schreiben,” 106).



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I found in that entire exposition a confusion of my concepts, so that I did not know where to begin. I needed either to set the entire matter right and deduce it from the beginning—who knows whether with any more success, given the silence with which you can look down on all philosophical systems with a mocking and self-deprecatory glance, which would have made the deduction difficult for you to follow. Or I needed to emulate that place in your letter where you, in order to pronounce yourself fully, speak in loud negations.102 One will notice here that Schelling is arguing entirely in hypotheticals, in terms of what he “would” have to do. As a consequence, the pejorative tone notwithstanding, his actual position is not entirely clear. He continues in the same vein, going so far as to quote his hypothetical self, even as he moves toward the crux of his argument: I would have to say, “A living process, like that of the first origin of duality, does not allow itself to be represented on the lever. What I call the ground cannot be compared with the center of mass [Schwerpunkt]; were such a mechanizing to take place here, then it [er] would have to be compared with the one weight of the lever. One does not need a particularly differentiating principle in the One, in order to explain the origin of duality. I have never claimed that evil and good—simultaneously or sequentially— emerge from the non-ground etc.” What, however, would all of these denials have served?103 We seem to have reached an impasse, in more than one sense. It is an argumentative impasse because Schelling has reached the point— whatever the rhetorical motivation may be—where his argument only exists in the hypothetical. It is also a conceptual impasse because for Eschenmayer, unlike for Schelling, the concept of Grund is associated with the absolute center of mass, the indifference of all relative equilibria

102 Lauer and Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 185–86. 103 “ich mußte sagen: ‘Ein lebendiger Proceß, wie jener des ersten Ursprungs der Zweyheit, läßt sich nicht am Hebel darstellen. Was ich den Grund nenne, läßt sich nicht mit dem Schwerpunkt vergleichen; sollte je ein solches Mechanisiren hier statt finden, so müßte er mit dem einen Gewicht des Hebels verglichen werden. Es braucht kein besondres differenziirendes Prinzip in dem Einen, um den Ursprung der Zweyheit zu erklären. Ich habe niemals behauptet, daß Böses und Gutes—zugleich oder nacheinander—aus dem Ungrund hervorgehen u.s.w.’ Wozu würden aber alle diese Verneinungen gedient haben?” (Lauer and Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 107).

150  The Lever as Instrument of Reason (the state of absolute equilibrium Eschenmayer describes in the Propositions and Laws). The existence of the lever lies not, however, in an idealized punctual stasis, but rather in the act of balancing itself. Relative equilibrium is always to be understood as a process, a constant state of tension between two opposed forces. Eschenmayer has encoded the opposed forces with moral values. In the spirit of Prudentius, he envisions a scenario tantamount to a mechanical psychomachia. If Schelling refuses to play the role of the approving audience, however, then Eschenmayer’s somewhat “poetic” interpretation of Schelling, however accurate it may be, remains as invalidated as an “I-would-have-to” argument that never materializes. We are left, then, with a cliffhanger, and it will take the arrival of Johann Herbart onto the scene to determine precisely how the lever, no matter how disputed its apotheosis in nature philosophy, lives on to serve the human in the realm of psychology.

Four From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology

“After more precise reflection on the lever some things have come to mind, which will be presented here; without concern, that it might seem too foreign.”1 Johann Herbart

Introduction

The following pages will bring Carl Eschenmayer, whose fleeting appearances in the chapter on Romanticism were followed by a starring role in the context of nature philosophy, into a dialogue with Johann Herbart, a philosopher equally known for his writings on psychology and pedagogy.2 This combination would have likely seemed strange to their contemporaries, just as it may to readers today. In one of the few pairings one can find of Eschenmayer’s and Herbart’s names in recent years, Matthew Bell refers to them as “the two best-known products of Idealism” only to distinguish them for coming to “two different conclusions from Kant’s philosophy,” both “against Kant’s intentions.”3 There will be opportunities to add more nuance to this statement, but Bell’s description of their essentially different orientations holds true. Whereas Eschenmayer, like Schelling, posits a “psychology of the absolute” that describes innate connections between empirical phenomena and structures of the mind, Herbart insists that

1

Herbart, “Ueber Analogien in Bezug auf das Fundament der Psychologie” in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke, vol. 11, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and Sons, 1906), 185–202, 187. 2 I am very grateful to Carolina Malagon for insightful and critical feedback on an early draft of this chapter. 3 Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology, 164.

152  The Lever as Instrument of Reason his psychology be grounded in mathematics.4 If this goal could be achieved, then, Herbart thought, psychology could achieve the status of a science—at least, by the standard Kant set in the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) of 1786.5 In the preface to that text, Kant states quite clearly that “the empirical doctrine of the soul”—that is, empirical psychology—“ can never become anything more than a historical doctrine of nature . . . that is, a natural description of the soul, but never a science of the soul.”6 As we will see, Herbart thought that empirical psychology lent itself quite well to quantitative techniques. In his (somewhat polemically titled) Psychologie als Wissenschaft (Psychology as Science) (1824), he states that that mental processes, such as the awareness and repression of thoughts, could be analyzed by what he refers to as a “statics and mechanics of the mind.”7 I will show that there is an additional reason to couple Eschenmayer’s and Herbart’s names. The motivation in this particular case has more to do with a surprising affinity that exists between the two. For both Eschenmayer and Herbart, the lever and its conceptual apparatus are important—and even essential—to their thinking about psychology. We find references to the lever, to equilibrium, and to mechanical laws in each section of Eschenmayer’s Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische, reine, und angewandte (Psychology in Three Parts as Empirical, Pure, and Applied) (1817),8 just as we do in significant works on psychology throughout Herbart’s career. In Herbart’s case, these include the essay “Über die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit, Mathematik auf Psychologie anzuwenden” (On the Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics to Psychology) (1822), his major treatises, Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824) and the Allgemeine Metaphysik (General Metaphysics) (1829), and above all, the later essay “Über Analogien in Bezug auf das Fundament zur Psychologie” (On Analogies in Relation to the Foundation of Psychology) (1840). In the essay on analogies, Herbart devotes himself to a lengthy reflection as to what makes the

4 Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology, 164. 5 In the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, Kant claims “that in any special doctrine of nature, there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein.” See Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6. 6 Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology, 7. 7 Herbart refers many times to a “statics and mechanics of the mind” in his Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 2, 36 and passim. 8 C. A. Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische, reine und angewandte. Zum Gebrauch seiner Zuhörer (Stuttgart und Tübingen: Johann Georg Cotta, 1817).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   153 lever and its conceptual apparatus particularly well suited to describe and model the processes and phenomena of the mind. In order to understand the contributions of Eschenmayer and Herbart in terms of the field of psychology in general, and our thinking about levers in particular, their work needs to be contextualized against the backdrop of German psychology as well as the particular history of the lever that is the focus of this study. After an introduction that briefly summarizes a few of the challenges and key events that informed the study of the mind in the years before and after 1800, my argument will pick up where the chapter on nature philosophy left off, with the question of the life or death of the lever. It begins by exploring the surprising prevalence of mechanical thinking in Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts (1817). On the basis of this treatise alone, it is clear that the lever is more than a “dead formula,” as Schelling had claimed. In its resurrection, we can observe that the lever, which was for Eschenmayer the “god of nature philosophy” (see Chapter Three), is also indispensable to his writing on psychology. The next section then focuses on Herbart’s work as a mathematically and mechanically minded psychologist. His use of the lever extends well beyond a general notion of static equilibrium in the mind as it becomes an instrument of reason in its own right. In Herbart’s reflections on the lever, we will also see surprising affinities to the levers of nature philosophy and Romanticism.

Eighteenth-Century Psychology: An Overview

One need not be a specialist in eighteenth-century philosophy to follow the developments in the emerging field of psychology and the debates about the criteria required to secure its status as an independent discipline and science. Many readers will already be familiar with the distinction between “rational” and “empirical” psychology, each of which has its own trajectory.9 The history of rational psychology is often linked with the names of Descartes and Leibniz, and in the eighteenth century with Christian Wolff. Broadly speaking, rational psychology attempts to formulate truths without reliance on the senses. Empirical psychology, associated with Francis Bacon’s critique of Scholasticism,10 distinguishes itself through an emphasis on mental “facts” as a basis for the discovery of fundamental truths. Christian Wolff’s contributions to the history of psychology cannot be overstated. He was responsible for the placement of psychology

9 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 19. 10 Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 150.

154  The Lever as Instrument of Reason within a system of knowledge in the early eighteenth century and, in addition to relegating psychology to special metaphysics, he provided a theoretical justification for dividing it into the subdisciplines of empirical psychology (which he understood to be “about the soul in general, what we namely perceive of it”) and rational psychology (“about the essence of the soul and of the spirit in general”).11 Wolff remained a reference point for most of the eighteenth century, both in Germany and beyond its borders,12 even as the status of psychology shifted such that it was no longer primarily understood as a subdiscipline of metaphysics.13 It is important to keep in mind, however, that when speaking about psychology’s relation to metaphysics and its status as “science,” one needs to pay close attention to how these terms are defined and which philosophers they are associated with. With regard to the question of metaphysics, Eschenmayer and Herbart each negotiated an individual relationship with Kant, as the following sections of this chapter will make clear. With regard to the question of psychology as “science,” even though Herbart’s insistence on a mathematically informed psychology responds to criteria defined by Kant, one should recall that older definitions in circulation still have a role to play. Wolff, for example does not define a “science” in terms of mathematical principles. He believed that psychology was already a “science,” if by science one means “the capacity to demonstrate,” as he writes in the German Metaphysics.14 Matt Hettche describes how, for Wolff, “science is a disposition or ability of the human mind to conceive the facts of reality in an ordered and structured way” and that “individual sciences” like psychology “are simply the various sets, or subsets of demonstrable facts.”15 With a similar emphasis, Klaus Sachs-Hombach has argued that the growth in popularity of empirical psychology during the eighteenth century was spurred by a growing skepticism toward “non-fact-based

11 See “von der Seele überhaupt, was wir nehmlich von ihr wahrnehmen” (106) and “von dem Wesen der Seele und eines Geistes überhaupt” (453) in Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott. 12 The authors of the French Encyclopèdie, which could be considered paradigmatic for the context in mid-eighteenth-century France, refer to Christian Wolff in the entry on “Psychologie.” 13 See E. Scheerer’s entry on “Psychologie” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 7 (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1989), col. 1601–02. 14 This reference to paragraph 383 of the Deutsche Metaphysik is quoted in the entry for “Christian Wolff” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Matt Hettche, “Christian Wolff,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ wolff-christian/, accessed May 30, 2017, 12:28 p.m. 15 Hettche, “Christian Wolff.”

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   155 research,”16 although the question of what constitutes a “fact” in this context is by no means a simple one.17 We could take, as an example of the polemical position in favor of “fact-based” empirical research of the mind, Karl Philip Moritz’ journal, Gnothi seauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Know Thyself or the Magazine of Empirical Psychology), founded in 1783. This journal was supposed to contain only “true facts,”18 and it featured contributions by nonspecialists about “childhood memories, dream reports, reflections on language, stories of misfits, and accounts of various tics and quirky behaviors.”19 Eschenmayer and Herbart are also interested in psychological “facts,” although not necessarily in the sense that Moritz has in mind. For Eschenmayer, the self-consciousness is itself the most certain, indisputable and fertile Factum.20 So too is man. Empirical psychology, he writes, can allow the human to emerge before its eyes as fact and accompany him step by step from the elementary relations up through the maximum of his development.21 Herbart’s approach—and terminology—is somewhat different: whereas Eschenmayer takes as his point of departure the sheer “fact” of consciousness, Herbart prioritizes the “facts” of consciousness.22 His Psychology as Science, though reliant on the awareness of one’s own mental states, refers to “facts” with considerably less frequency than Eschenmayer, perhaps due to a greater focus on active mental processes. For Herbart, the activity of the mind is of much greater interest than mental “content.” Both Eschenmayer and Herbart could be considered sympathetic to the position described by Daniel Robinson in An Intellectual History of Psychology as a “point of agreement between rationalists and

16 Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 31. 17 See Michael House’s description of this problem in his essay, “Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the Magazine for Empirical Psychology and Beyond,” in Fact and Fiction. Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain, ed. Christine Lehleiter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 175–98. 18 Quoted in Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 34. 19 Andreas Gailus, “A Case of Individuality: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Magazine for Empirical Psychology,” New German Critique 70 (Winter 2000): 67–105, 71. 20 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 257. 21 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 25. 22 Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 44.

156  The Lever as Instrument of Reason empiricists” that survives through the behavioral psychology of the twentieth century:23 This common feature may best be labeled “mentalism.” The leading architects of empiricism all based their epistemologies upon what seemed to them to be the fixed dispositions of the mind. … Their philosophies were explicitly designed to account for the facts of mental life. Although all agreed that the mind is furnished by the senses, they agreed as well that philosophy’s task was to determine how this occurred and what it implied. The empirical tradition, therefore, is in no sense anti-mental, notwithstanding its emphasis on perception.24 Robinson’s assessment points, albeit indirectly, to a key concern of this chapter, one closely linked to the use of the lever: the question of quantification. To his description of philosophy’s “task” to determine the “how” and the “what,” we could add two questions that defined Herbart’s study of mental phenomena: their quantity and duration. These concerns place Herbart squarely within the tradition of psychometrics and also offer a useful point of contact with Eschenmayer, even if the latter’s “quantitative” thinking has more to do with the lever as an instrument of ratio and proportion. Psychometrics is also one of the most interesting and influential concepts of eighteenth-century psychology, one with significant consequences for the history of the lever in nineteenth-century psychology. It is associated with the idea that some aspects of the mind, such as thoughts and feelings, could be quantitatively modeled, and by the end of the eighteenth century, it was central to a discussion of whether or not psychology could achieve the status of an independent science. In an essay on the historical basis for Herbart’s use of mathematics in psychology, David E. Leary reminds us that Kant “denied the possibility of measurement in psychology because, as he maintained in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, psychological phenomena have only the one dimension of time.”25 As we will see in the following discussion, there are other quantifiable (if not always measureable) “dimensions” of interest to Herbart apart from a temporal one, such as the number of thoughts one could be aware of at a given

23 Robinson, Intellectual History, 150. 24 Robinson, Intellectual History, 150. 25 Leary, David E. “The Historical Foundation of Herbart’s Mathematization of Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 150–63, 153.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   157 time, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the rapidity with which individual thoughts crossed above or were repressed below the “threshold of consciousness.”26 It should be clear by now that by 1800, the state of psychology as a field could no longer be categorized simply in terms of empiricism and rationalism. Sachs-Hombach identifies three theoretical opponents to Herbart’s psychology and begins his list with faculty psychology (Vermögenspsychologie), whereby the mind is understood as a collection of separate functions. As Wolman describes in the Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology, around 1800, The soul was believed to be immortal, the body perishable. Psychology was the study of the soul. The soul was divided into distinct parts that performed distinct functions. Hence the theory of mental faculties, such as thought, sensation, and conation, with conation being divided into desire, feeling, and will.27 Scheerer has noted that the idea of psychological faculties did not come without a recognition of various difficulties attached to it. These include the problem of how to understand the materiality or immateriality of “soul” or “mind,” as well as the relationship of “faculty” and “force” (Kraft). The latter also concerns itself with the question of whether various mental activities could be reduced to a single “force,”28 a key term for Herbart’s psychology. The second of the opponents Sachs-Hombach lists is the “idealism of freedom” supported by Kant and Fichte. For Herbart, he says, they stand in the way of a scientific psychology because they “either remove or discard a large portion of psychological facts of universal legality through the dogma of the so-called transcendental freedom of will or they declare this legality as a mere illusion.”29 This characterization is certainly true, as one can read in the Psychology as Science (see paragraph 84, for example), but when one turns to the broader question of Herbart’s relationship to Kant, the answer becomes much more complicated. Here, the best reference is Frederick Beiser’s study of Neo-Kantianism, which devotes an entire chapter to “Johann Friedrich Herbart, Neo-Kantian Metaphysician.” Beiser describes how even though Herbart rejected central Kantian themes, including that space 26 This is a frequently recurring figure in Herbart’s psychology. See, for example, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 292 and passim. 27 B. B. Wolman, “The Historical Role of Johann Friedrich Herbart” in Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 29–46, 29. 28 Scheerer, “Psychologie,” col. 1603. 29 Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 77.

158  The Lever as Instrument of Reason and time are a priori intuitions, that acts of synthesis are the origin of the unity of the manifold, that the mind is divisible into cognition, desire and taste, that there are mental faculties, that there are a priori concepts and intuitions, and that reason is the source of moral obligation, he still describes himself as a “Kantian.”30 That leaves, according to Sachs-Hombach, just one more opponent: the nature philosophy of Schelling and Eschenmayer. He describes how Herbart critiques the scientific method of nature philosophy because of its reliance on the concept of an intellectual intuition.31 Here, too, the devil is in the details. Herbart’s critique of intellectual intuition in Psychology as Science does not allow us to ignore the fact that, as the chapter on nature philosophy has shown, Schelling’s and Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical positions are far from identical. As we will see below, Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts relies upon a “threefold structure of mind developed by Tetens and Kant,”32 a structure that Schelling also incorporates in his notion of the “three powers” (Potenzen) of the finite, infinite, and eternal. In contradistinction to both Schelling’s “powers” and Herbart’s “forces,” however, Eschenmayer prefers to think in terms of patterns and structures, that is, an “architectonics of the mind.”33 Those familiar with the landscape of German Romanticism might argue that Eschenmayer’s willingness throughout his career to let clairvoyance, animal magnetism, and dream play a role in his thinking makes him more suitable for a dialogue with thinkers such as Carl Gustav Carus, Lorenz Oken, and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, rather than with Herbart. Those other contributors to Romantic psychology do not, however, share Eschenmayer’s affinity for mechanical figures. I would also like to underscore the fact that my approach to Eschenmayer—as in the readings of German Romantic thinkers Schlegel and Novalis from the previous chapter—will have little to do with the Romantic tropes of dream and animal magnetism mentioned above. Instead, what this chapter pursues is a new reading of Eschenmayer that, as was the case with Schlegel and Novalis, uncovers a trajectory to his thinking that has, up until now, received little attention. It is precisely this new discovery–that the “Romantic psychologist” is, in his way, just as “mechanically minded” as Johann Herbart–that motivates the readings of this chapter. The acceptance of “force” as a valid term for the description of mental processes is another point of connection and distinction between Herbart

30 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 90. 31 Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 77. 32 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 166. 33 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 166.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   159 and Eschenmayer. Both refer frequently to force, but for Herbart a mental Vorstellung34 will act like a force, whereas for Eschenmayer force is the objective corollary to subjective processes: “The opposition between knowing and being is expressed objectively (im Objectiven) between force and burden.”35 For Herbart, who understands the mind in terms of an interplay of forces, it makes no sense to subdivide it artificially into the activities of “representing, desiring, [and] feeling” because “it tears apart the indivisible unity of the mind,”36 an idea he shared with German Romantic writers Novalis and Schlegel. As Herbart attempts to balance metaphysics with empiricism, he is careful to divest his notion of soul of anything resembling substance: it has “no where, no time” and is “not known.”37 For all of their apparent differences, however, Herbart and Eschenmayer are joined in one important regard: that the phenomena and activities of the soul are to be understood as unified.38

34 Boudewijnse, Murray, and Bandomir note that Vorstellung is alternately translated as idea, concept, and presentation and describe it as “the basic unit of mental life . . . thereby more comparable to a mental ‘atom’ than to a mental body”; the “continuous process of builing up, breaking down, and again building up” of Vorstellung explains “the everchanging flux of conscious experiences.” See Geeart-Jan Boudewijnse, David J. Murray, Christina A. Bandomir, “Herbart’s Mathematical Psychology,” History of Psychology 2.3 (1999): 163–93, 164. 35 “Das Gegensetzen zwischen Wissen und Seyn ist ausgedrückt im objectiven zwischen Kraft und Last” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448). 36 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 137. 37 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 137. Huemer and Landerer provide this additional perspective: “Although arguing from a metaphysical point of view, Herbart comes very close to the empiricist conception of the human mind as a tabula rasa. Neither an implicit cognitive architecture, nor structures of any sort, is or are initially present in the mind. Everything that unfolds, unfolds by means of presentations and their combination.” See W. Huemer and C. Landerer, “Mathematics, experience, and laboratories: Herbart’s and Brentano’s role in the rise of scientific psychology,” History of the Human Sciences 23.3 (2010): 72–94, 75. Günter Gödde states that “in express opposition to idealist philosophy and psychology, Herbart pursued the project of grounding a psychology on ‘realist metaphysics’” and that “although he remained beholden to metaphysics, he founded an ‘explanatory psychology’ which tried to comprehend the regularities of mental life with the methods of natural science.” See Gödde, The Unconscious in German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Ciaran Cronin, in Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 205–06. 38 Herbart’s Lehrbuch zur Psychologie is useful for understanding his terminological distinctions. There one can read that the soul (Seele) “is called spirit (Geist), in as far as it represents (vorstellt), and mind (Gemüth) in as far as it feels and desires.” See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, ed. Karl Kehrbach (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne, 1891), 118.

160  The Lever as Instrument of Reason

Part One: Eschenmayer’s Psychological Lever

Eschenmayer’s intellectual contributions are often neglected in histories of philosophy and psychology alike. In the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, he is barely accorded a bibliographic reference, and there is no mention made of him in B. H. Hergenhahn’s otherwise thorough Introduction to the History of Psychology. Matthew Bell, in his book on German psychology in the long eighteenth century, dismisses Eschenmayer’s psychology when he writes that it is as “entirely hypothetical as Herbart’s psychometrics.”39 Bell does give a brief outline of the tripartite structure of Eschenmayer’s treatise on psychology, only to reduce each part to the work of some prior philosopher: the empirical section is derivative to Schelling’s System, the section on “pure psychology” is “effectively a digest of Kant’s three critiques,” and the “final and most bizarre” section, on “applied psychology,” is “neither psychological nor applied.”40 It is possible that the peculiar amalgam of mechanical theory and speculative thinking has long been overlooked in Eschenmayer’s work because it made him difficult to categorize within traditional histories, whether of Romanticism, philosophy, or psychology. When we consider the fact that the influence of mechanics in Eschenmayer’s thinking has already proven valuable to the prior chapters on Romanticism and nature philosophy, it is no exaggeration to say that the present study celebrates him as one of the unsung heroes in the history of the lever. We can also acknowledge Eschenmayer’s efforts to award psychology pride of place in the disciplinary hierarchy of the early nineteenth century, as a glimpse into the preface and introduction to the Psychology in Three Parts will show. There, he writes that he wants to give the historically undervalued study of psychology the acknowledgment it deserves after it has been “slumbering in the shadow of philosophy.”41 With reference to the empirical science of chemistry and Stahl’s terminology,42 Eschenmayer argues that psychology needs to be removed from the “aggregate state” of empirical knowledge and granted a more prominent theoretical status.43 Eschenmayer also makes the analogy between geometry’s significance for the entire field of analysis and psychology’s for philosophy: “It leads us into the nature

39 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 166. 40 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 166. 41 Eschenmayer, Psychology in drei Theilen, iii. 42 Eschenmayer does mention Stahl’s name on several occasions in the Psychologie, but only with reference to their shared opinion that the soul “builds” the body, an idea Eschenmayer considers in the context of organic theories of procreation. 43 Eschenmayer, Psychology in drei Theilen, iii.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   161 of the elements.”44 The language he uses about the status of psychology becomes even more polemical when he calls it “the elementary science or the root of all philosophy.”45 These fundamental claims bear repeating, because they relate directly to the lever: if psychology is to surpass philosophy in importance, and if, as I argue, the lever is to be recognized as the structuring principle of Eschenmayer’s philosophy, then the Psychology asks to be read as a manifesto proclaiming the lever’s apotheosis predicted in correspondence with Schelling. Let us first consider Eschenmayer’s particular view of the distinctions between empirical, pure, and applied psychology as described in the preface and introduction to the Psychology in Three Parts. The lever only makes a brief appearance in the introductory description of empirical psychology, but will have an increasingly important role to play with regard to the other two branches. The section of the introduction devoted to empirical psychology nonetheless invokes the conceptual apparatus associated with the lever when it proposes an understanding of the mind and mental processes in terms of equilibrium. Eschenmayer’s definition of empirical psychology in the introduction will sound familiar to most readers, even as his metaphorical language anticipates the importance of mechanical theory for his thinking: If we observe the expressions and appearances of the soul as objects of inner experience and observation, as they flow from the soul, join one another, gain and lose in intensity and extensity, and as they present themselves in various preponderances [Uebergewichte] or equilibrium, without inquiring into the nature of the ground from which they flow, without, in a word, returning to the source of all mental phenomena, and if we investigate the living spiritual dynamic in its general laws, then we have empirical psychology.46

44 “Sie führt uns in die Natur der Elemente ein” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, iii). Eschenmayer does not specify what, exactly, these elements are comprised of. 45 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 2. 46 “Betrachten wir Aeusserungen und Erscheinungen der Seele als Gegenstände innerer Erfahrung und Beobachtung, wie sie aus der Seele fliessen, sich verbinden, an Intensität und Extensität ab- und zunehmen, in verschiedenem Uebergewichte oder Gleichgewicht sich darstellen, ohne nach der Natur des Grundes zu fragen, aus dem sie fliessen, ohne, mit einem Wort, an die Urquelle aller geistigen Phänomene zurückzugehen und die lebendige geistige Dynamik in ihren allgemeinen Gesezen daselbst zu erforschen, so erhalten wir die empirische Psychologie” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 3). Leary reminds us that it was Leibniz who “introduced the concept of intensity into

162  The Lever as Instrument of Reason As Eschenmayer understands it, empirical psychology focuses on the status of mental phenomena as given data. Within this branch of psychology, he discourages us from undertaking any kind of genetic approach that would cause us to investigate the origin of the spectacle that takes place before the eyes of the mind. At the same time, the objects of experience and observation can be said to move in and out of equilibrium, as physical bodies do. In the references to equilibrium and the notion of phenomena that gain in intensity and extensity, we can also see the basic elements necessary for a psychometrics, which will form a surprising point of connection to Herbart’s statics and mechanics of the mind. The second part of Eschenmayer’s system, “pure” or “rational” psychology,” takes as its point of departure the many phenomena described by empirical psychology and investigates their laws and principles. The focus of pure psychology is, accordingly, to “seek out the main traits of the three basic functions thinking, feeling, and willing and make them the object of a higher reflection.”47 Even if Bell has pointed out that the constellation of concepts in this section is Kantian in flavor (and here we see that Eschenmayer is more accepting of psychological “faculties” than Herbart), there is much to Eschenmayer’s thinking about pure psychology that has little to do with Kant at all, as will become evident when he connects those same basic concepts to an even more foundational concept whose components are knowledge, self, and being. In the third and final section on “applied psychology”—the one Bell finds decidedly “bizarre”—we see the degree to which Eschenmayer’s thinking still owes a debt to Schelling’s nature philosophy. He bases this section on the supposition that “all objectivity” is merely “a reflection of subjectivity” and that the “subjective forms and proportions we behold are at the basis of all phenomena of the universe.”48 In his Ideas, Schelling had argued for a basic compatibility between the structures of the mind and those found in nature. Eschenmayer’s description of applied psychology in the introduction continues in much the same vein when he insists that “objectivity, with its real formulae, gradually transforms into subjectivity, with its ideal formulae.”49 Yet we can

the German intellectual tradition through his discussions of the concept of force and the concept of the clarity of ideas” (Leary, “Historical Foundation,” 154). 47 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 8–9. 48 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 10. 49 Eschenmayer refers to the assumption that objectivity is only a “reflection” (Widerschein) of subjectivity and that the basis of phenomena of the universe is comprised of “subjective forms and proportions” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 10).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   163 also see Eschenmayer’s willingness to defy Schelling when he takes advantage of a mathematical example quite familiar to us by now: The law of the lever, that burden [Last] and force [Kraft] are inversely related, like their distance from the hypomochlion, is without a doubt an objective law of nature, given in intuition, and still remains objective in its reduction to the law of proportionality of mass and speed, which we understand to be the basic law of mechanics.50 It speaks to the prominence of the lever in Eschenmayer’s thinking that it already appears in the introduction to Psychology in Three Parts. After the passage cited above, he begins step by step to deconstruct and defamiliarize the lever when referring to applied psychology, transforming the lever into an instrument of reason by bringing its component parts into the realm of the subject. For instance, Eschenmayer requests that we contemplate the proportional velocity of the two lever arms. He reminds his readers that velocity is nothing other than “space divided by time” but continues by stating that “already here the law begins to become subjective, in that space and time are merely forms of intuition.”51 Where the law of the lever “really” becomes subjective, he continues, is when we reduce this ratio into its smallest components. What if one were to reduce the length such that 1/∞: 1  =  1: ∞? His answer: “This proportion is entirely subjective; for the infinite is no object of experience.”52 Eschenmayer then sums up his argument: If the at first entirely objective law of nature is finally returned to the purely subjective proportion, then I am also entitled to say that the law of the lever is basically only the objective impression of

50 “Das Gesez [sic] des Hebels, daß Last und Kraft sich verkehrt verhalten, wie ihre Entfernung vom Hypomochlion, ist ohne Zweifel ein in der Anschauung gegebenes objectives Gesez in der Natur und bleibt auch noch objectiv in seiner Reduction auf das Gesez der Proportionalität der Masse mit der Geschwindigkeit, was wir als Grundgesez der Mechanik kennen” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11). 51 “Hiebei fängt das Gesez schon an subjectiv zu werden, indem Raum und Zeit blose [sic] Anschauungsformen sind” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11). 52 “aber es wird ganz subjectiv in der Reduction auf die in uns liegende allgemeinste Proportion, daß das Product des unendlich kleinen in das unendlich große gleich dem Endlichen seye, oder: 1/[∞]: 1  =  1: [∞]. Diese Proportion ist ganz subjectiv; denn das Unendliche ist kein Gegenstand der Erfahrung” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11).

164  The Lever as Instrument of Reason a proportion that lies within ourselves. And thus nature appears as the impression [Abbild] of an original image [Urbild] lying within us.53 If pure psychology investigates the laws governing the empirical phenomena of the soul, according to Eschenmayer, then applied psychology reveals a deeper affinity between objective laws of nature and subjective phenomena that is one of the guiding principles of Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy. The cases cited above also testify to the fact that the status of the lever is already put into question in the introduction to Eschenmayer’s Psychology. On the basis of these initial passages, it could be argued that it is merely one example, chosen as if by chance of the many correlations between the structures of the ego and the objects of the world—between objective laws and subjective proportions. As the following pages will argue, however, the lever is not simply “an” example for Eschenmayer. It is the example: part of a conceptual apparatus of utmost significance for the structure and content of his argument and, as we will see, for how his argument is given historical justification. Now that we have a sense of the big picture—that the lever and its conceptual apparatus have a role to play in each of the three parts of Eschenmayer’s psychology—let us take a closer look at what, precisely, the lever is doing in each.

The Lever in Empirical and Pure Psychology

Even though Eschenmayer’s thinking about equilibrium is most innovative in the section on applied psychology, we need to understand in greater depth the role it plays in the first two sections of his treatise, because the function of equilibrium in the final section is a synthesis of what comes before. Of the various faculties treated in the section on empirical psychology, the faculty of feeling is the one worthiest of attention according to Eschenmayer. In this case, we can see that what Herbart considers a vice—an arbitrary rendering of the “soul” in spatial terms—is used to philosophical advantage by Eschenmayer when he situates the faculty of feeling both “in the middle row of the faculties” and “in the middle point of the entire human,” a position that raises the possibility of an analogous relationship to the fulcrum.54 With direct reference to Kant, he identifies this faculty 53 “Lässt sich nun das anfänglich ganz objective Gesez der Natur zuletzt auf die rein subjective Proportion zurückführen, so bin ich auch berechtigt, zu sagen, daß das Gesez des Hebels im Grunde nur der objective Abdruck einer in uns selbst liegenden Proportion seye. Und somit erscheint die Natur als Abbild eines in uns liegenden Urbildes” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11–12). 54 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 85.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   165 with the concepts of “pleasure and displeasure” (Lust und Unlust) we have already had occasion to consider in the context of the essay on negative magnitudes. The centrality of this faculty operates for Eschenmayer within a model of equilibrium because it is here that one finds “the absolute unity or the absolute equilibrium of the entire mental [geistigen] organism in man.”55 Absolute equilibrium should not be understood here as “original” as in the models of Fichte and Schelling, in the sense of a primary, undifferentiated state. Instead, we can conceive of it in the sense of an absolute mechanical equilibrium articulated in Eschenmayer’s earlier texts as a state when “two forces are completely cancelled, so that they no longer remain an object for mathematical construction or for analysis,” or as a constant point of departure and return among a stream of disruptions.56 In this context, Eschenmayer also uses a metaphor with aesthetic and mechanical overtones: the plucking of a string: “Thus what enters into the faculty of feeling plucks as it were all of man’s strings at once, and its harmonious or disharmonious tone, that is, pleasure or displeasure, is felt in the entire human.”57 Eschenmayer mobilizes his description of the faculty of feeling as a point of departure for a series of ever farther-reaching comparisons, whereby man is always in the middle point, between traditional dichotomies such as spirit and nature, mind and body. To be sure, models that advocate the centrality of the human in the grand scheme of things are common in the history of ideas and not necessarily mechanical in nature. When the subsequent steps of Eschenmayer’s argument are taken into consideration, however, one can argue that the mechanical model of equilibrium is prefigured here. Though it does not yet receive the full exposition, it will—in the section on applied psychology, the illustration Eschenmayer gives of the lever as figure of navigation between the material and the immaterial fits well with the dichotomies listed above and also recalls, albeit indirectly, Hegel’s definition of sublation: “All mental oppositions in man are mediated through the ego . . . thus in mechanics, for example, the hypomochlion on

55 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 85. 56 Eschenmayer, Säze, 22. 57 “Was daher ins Gefühlvermögen eingeht, das zieht gleichsam alle Saiten des Menschen auf einmal an, und ihr harmonischer oder disharmonischer Klang, d. h. Lust oder Unlust wird im ganzen Menschen empfunden” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 86). Caroline Welsh has also shown in her book Hirnhöhlenpoetiken (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003) how around 1800 acoustical phenomena were used by Herder, Sömmering, Ritter, Kant, Blumenbach and numerous others (she does not mention Eschenmayer) to model the soul in various ways and that the figure of a vibrating string had an important role to play.

166  The Lever as Instrument of Reason the lever is that which mediates between force and weight.”58 If, then, it is one of the defining characteristics of man that he is “everywhere . . . positioned between oppositions,” whether they be in the objective world (outside of us), in the organism (with us), or in subjectivity (in us), then the lever is the symbol of that mediating position.59 Indeed, as we have seen in prior chapters, the lever is a symbol for mediating processes in general, a way of reflecting on the structure of language itself. Such patterns of opposition exist between different realms, such as spirit and nature, the soul and the body. They can also exist within a single realm, where Eschenmayer classifies them as general, particular, and individual. He writes that when one understands nature as a physical world order, then the highest, most general, opposition is between light and gravity; or, that a particular opposition in nature is that of acid and base and we find individual oppositions between positive and negative electricity, magnetism, etc.60 We can also see in these cases the degree to which Eschenmayer is able to marshal concepts beyond the realm of mechanics to strengthen his argument. For Eschenmayer, the practical value of these oppositions lies in their “construction,” the product of which includes not just the opposing pair itself but also “a third” whose job it is to mediate back and forth. For instance, the power of zero mediates between the positive and negative exponents and correlates to the concept of the finite between the infinitely small and large, “Thus in the mechanism,” Eschenmayer adds, “the hypomochlion is the mediating element on the lever between force and burden.”61 Eschenmayer’s thoughts on empirical psychology might leave one with the impression that the lever is merely an arbitrary comparison chosen to illustrate for a basic structure that informs both the subjective and the objective, but this is far from the case. A closer look at the section on pure psychology is required to see that the lever does not merely have the status of an analogy, but rather the concretization of a central structuring principle. In other words, the lever is not simply exemplary for Eschenmayer, it is paradigmatic in the sense of being a governing idea, much as we saw in those passages from introduction to this volume where the lever was thought to provide a unifying principle useful for understanding the operations of the other simple machines. Pure psychology, as Eschenmayer informs us, is responsible for identifying and describing the laws of the mind, based on the “natural 58 “Alle geistige Gegensätze im Menschen sind durch die Ichheit vermittelt . . . . So ist im Mechanismus z. B. am Hebel das Hypomochlion das Vermittelnde zwischen Kraft und Last” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 188). 59 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 186–87. 60 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 187. 61 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 288.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   167 history of man” which was the “occupation” of empirical psychology.62 We could take, as an example, one of the most fundamental “objects” of study that the mind has to offer: the self-consciousness (das Selbstbewußtseyn). Eschenmayer’s definition of self-consciousness as “a knowledge of the self about being” (ein Wissen des selbst um das Seyn) might not seem particularly revolutionary from a psychological point of view.63 The novelty lies in what Eschenmayer does with each of the three elements of knowledge, self, and being. Of these three, the self, or ego, is the “copula” and “middle term” that balances the opposing concepts of knowledge and being. Eschenmayer emphasizes that what he is positing here is a relationship of equivalence, not identity (i.e., not like Fichte, he writes, for whom being and knowledge are identical). In Eschenmayer’s discussion of pure psychology, we learn the degree to which he is willing to pursue his comparison between equilibrium among the components of his model of the self and the law of equilibrium as it applies to the mechanical balance or lever. Though being and knowing have a relation to each other through their mutual relation to the self, Eschenmayer is careful to point out that this common relation still allows for the preservation of differences: “What matters here is that we do not confuse a relational equivalence with a complete identity” (Psychologie in drei Theilen).64 In other words, we are dealing with a model of relative equilibrium, and to illustrate it, Eschenmayer constructs a diagram that symbolizes the act of balancing between something material (a weight) and something abstract (force):

Figure 4.1 Eschenmayer, Psychology in Three Parts, 288. Force (Kraft) and weight (Last) are in this diagram. The fact that they balance each other out relatively in the hypomochlion without becoming identical to each other illustrates the basic idea of the lever as a figure of mediation and equivalence. It is important in this context to keep in mind that philosophy distinguishes between a relative as opposed to an absolute equilibrium. Relative is the equilibrium on the 62 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 5. 63 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 287. 64 This is with reference to Fichte: “Es kommt hier darauf an, daß wir ein beziehungsweises Gleichsezen nicht mit einer vollkommenen Identität verwechseln, was mehrere Philosophen gethan haben, wie z. B. Fichte, welcher Seyn und Wissen identisch setzt” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 287).

168  The Lever as Instrument of Reason lever, when weight and force lie beyond the hypomochlion, and for that reason are also object of intuition and calculation. If one brings weight and force closer and closer together, and finally so close as to collapse with the hypomochlion, then equilibrium becomes absolute and thus has nothing more to offer the intuition. Eschenmayer then writes, In a similar relation, the three factors that lie in the proposition [Satz] of the self-consciousness can be portrayed: Knowledge. Self. Being.65 These two passages also herald the use of diagrams for the first time in Eschenmayer’s Psychology. The first diagram visualizes the model of the mechanical lever, and it is presumably in relative equilibrium because “force” and “weight” have not collapsed in the hypomochlion. This diagram resembles a physical lever and functions accordingly, and it also instates its own artificiality as diagram and visualizes the theoretical construct that the physical lever embodies. It projects the “object of intuition” in print. The second diagram—Knowledge. Self. Being.—only deserves the designation because of the italics and white space that set it off from the main text, and because it is meant to recall the first diagram in its linear arrangement of three terms, whereby the outside two compete in their relations with the central term. The diagrams each function doubly: first, they show how the apparatus of the lever has the ability to make connections between abstract terms and things that are material or accessible to the senses. They also show, through the repetition of the second diagram, that equilibrium itself can serve as a hermeneutic tool, and that it is possible to make comparisons between equilibrium states to advance our understanding of how the mind works through a relationship of equivalence between the immateriality of knowledge and the materiality of being. Eschenmayer instrumentalizes his own diagram when he responds to a question he asks of himself “where the enlivening [belebende] central point of the entire system or the egoity [Ichheit] of the general consciousness” should be located.66 He continues by thinking through this problem

65 “In einem ähnlichen Verhältniß lassen sich die drey Factoren, die in dem Satz des Selbstbewußtseyns liegen, darstellen” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 288). Eschnemayer then typesets the triad of knowledge, being, and self so that they are graphically distinct from the rest of the page. 66 “Wohin fällt der belebende Centralpunct des ganzen Systems oder die Ichheit des gemeinen Bewußtseyns?” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 404).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   169 in various ways: where the ego is on a scale between the positive and the negative, or between the “higher” and the “lower,” or between experience and ideas.67 Central to this entire organization is the faculty of feeling, and in particular: “self-feeling” (Selbstgefühl): This self-feeling is the general hypomochlion, to which knowledge and being, like force and burden, are related. Within it rests the absolute equilibrium of the entire system and all relative equilibria of the entire intellectual sphere strive to return to it. From this point, all philosophy can orient itself, both for the external and for the internal world.68 Within this passage one can find encapsulated everything of importance for the history of the lever—and also for the Archimedean point. We look toward the lever and its conceptual apparatus to help explain how things work. We look away from the lever—and implicitly take its fulcrum point to be our Archimedean point: the firm point from which we orient ourselves—in our pursuit of further knowledge.

The Lever of Applied Psychology

In his section on applied or “practical” psychology, which he heralds as a “new experiment” in thinking, Eschenmayer returns to the model of the self as lever (where the “self” is the hypomochlion between the two arms of “knowing” and “being”).69 Although the phrase “applied psychology” appears as early as the 1790s in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Magazine for Empirical Psychology, Eschenmayer’s treatise represents one of the first attempts to think systematically about it in depth.70 As he states in the introductory paragraph, the word “applied” is used here in the same sense as a mathematician—or indeed, any theorist—would take theoretical propositions and apply them to cases drawn from experience. For our purposes, it is remarkable to see to what extent that 67 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 404. 68 “Dieses Selbstgefühl ist das allgemeine Hypomochlion, zu welchem Wissen und Seyn, wie Kraft und Last sich verhält. In ihm ruht das absolute Gleichgewicht des ganzen Systems, und alle relative Gleichgewichte der ganzen geistigen Sphäre streben auf dasselbe zurück. Von diesem Punct aus kann sich die ganze Philosophie orientiren, und diß sowohl für eine Aussen- als Innenwelt” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 405). 69 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 10. 70 The only person who seems to have thought systematically about an applied psychology before Eschenmayer is Johann Karl Wezel, in his Grundriß eines eigentlichen Systems der anthropologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: in der Dykschen Buchhandlung, 1805). In Wezel’s text, however, there is no clear distinction made between the terms “empirical” and “applied” psychology.

170  The Lever as Instrument of Reason which is “applied” in this section of Eschenmayer’s psychology has to do with the conceptual apparatus of the lever, with a special emphasis on the concept of equilibrium: The general formulae and equations of mathematics, for example the theorem of equilibrium in terms of the product of mass and speed, find their application in mechanics, statics, and astronomy. Entirely in this sense I place a pure and applied psychology in opposition to each other.71 Equilibrium, a concept deployed in mechanics, statics, and astronomy, has come in Eschenmayer’s Psychology to embody the figure of application itself, an idea that also played a role in the chapter on the lever in Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes. It thereby becomes an illustration for how quantitative models can be seen to influence methodological approaches: metaphors of equilibrium have become metaphors of method. The purpose of an applied psychology is much more than a unidirectional application of theory to experience. According to Eschenmayer, it takes as its premise that “laws of thought” (Geseze [sic] des Denkens) become objective in “physical nature” and that there is complete congruence between the intellectual “realm of freedom” and the physical “realm of necessity.”72 The discovery of this congruence may well begin with experience. The counterpart to Schelling’s “first philosopher” who learned how to distinguish ideas from objects, the immaterial and the material,73 is Eschenmayer’s investigator of nature (Naturforscher) who gathers elements of experience and observations of the world, orders them, and tries to find the laws governing them even as, unbeknownst to him, he is being led by the general law that exists within himself. Once again, the special case that illustrates this general point is the lever: The physicist believes, for example, that he invented the law of the lever. The psychologist, however, shows him the prototype of it already in the law of self-consciousness and can demonstrate

71 “So finden die allgemeine Formeln und Gleichungen der Mathematik, z.B. der Satz des Gleichgewichts der Masse mit der Geschwindigkeit in der Mechanik, Statik, Astronomie ihre Anwendung. Ganz in diesem Sinne stelle ich eine reine und angewandte Psychologie einander gegenüber” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 423). 72 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 428. 73 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 12.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   171 to the physicist that such an expression of equilibrium in nature must necessarily take place.74 We have here a very clear statement about the primacy of psychology over physics and philosophy, but there remains the potential for confusion. If, according to Eschenmayer, the structures of the mind are supposed to exist prior to all else, then even if we find them reproduced with pleasing regularity in nature, it remains unclear what status should we accord the mechanical language and logic that informs his thinking. There is, after all, a long tradition, reaching back to pseudoAristotle, that conceives of mechanical tools as somehow “contrary to nature” (when nature is understood in the most general sense of everything living) because they augment human agency to beyond its natural (unenhanced) limits. In Eschenmayer, the very object that is “against nature” is repositioned such that the relationship of opposition no longer holds. Just as we saw in Romanticism, Eschenmayer imagines a collapse between human and tool. Such reflections are far from Eschenmayer’s own stated concerns; however, he insists upon a fundamental symmetry between the mind and the material world and reminds us that already “the deduction of logic showed that the law of the self-consciousness in its subjective form expresses precisely what the law of the lever does in its objective form.”75 Eschenmayer’s analogical thinking provokes some interesting speculations: for example, that “all laws of thinking are reflected in the laws of motion.”76 This is an overlooked point of affinity between Eschenmayer and Herbart, and an idea that the latter will work out in much greater mathematical detail. Eschenmayer also muses that the opposition of force and weight mirrors that of knowledge and being, that the mediating function of being is expressed in the lever’s hypomochlion, and that “the equation of knowledge and being is expressed through the relative equilibrium of weight and force.”77 Eschenmayer does not appear inclined to use the lever to generate

74 “Der Physiker glaubt etwa, er hätte das Gesez des Hebels erfunden. Der Psycholog aber zeigt ihm den Prototyp davon schon im Gesez des Selbstbewußtseyns auf, und vermag dem Physiker zu demonstriren, daß ein solcher Ausdruck des Gleichgewichts in der Natur nothwendig statt finden müsse” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 435–36). 75 “Die Deduction der Logik erwies, daß das Gesetz des Selbstbewußtseyns in seiner subjectiven Form eben das ausdrücke, was das Gesez des Hebels in seiner objectiven Form” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448). 76 “alle Geseze des Denkens in den Gesezen der Bewegung sich reflectiren” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 425). 77 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448.

172  The Lever as Instrument of Reason knowledge directly, however, at least not in the sense of using it to uncover new relationships as the German Romantics do. Instead, for Eschenmayer, the lever as instrument of reason seems designed to maximize the “force” of those relationships already in place, and in that regard it tends to point back toward itself, to hold itself as exemplary. An illustration of such mechanical advantage occurs in another passage that refers to the law of the lever (i.e., the law that states that the lever or balance is in equilibrium when the ratio of weight and force is the inverse of their distance from the hypomochlion). According to Eschenmayer, this is also applicable to the self-consciousness: Knowledge namely becomes an even greater force, and stands in equilibrium with an even greater weight, the more it is removed from the standpoint of the self, and thereby approaches the standpoint of ideas. Thus the law of self-consciousness expresses in its objective form precisely that which the law of mechanics does in its objective form, and this correspondence is not a contingent, but rather a necessary one. Nature cannot appear to us otherwise than in such forms that are innate [eingebildet] to our mind.78 According to this passage, applied psychology can augment the force of knowledge by revealing that self-knowledge leads to an ability to remove oneself from the standpoint of self. This passage also reveals that at the heart of Eschenmayer’s “applied psychology” one finds an “applied equilibrium.” After its appropriation from the physical world in the service of philosophical theory, it might at one time have been sufficient to say that equilibrium’s instrumental value simply lies in the connection of material and nonmaterial concepts, but Eschenmayer’s psychology proves that this is no longer the case. Equilibrium has been promoted to a more prominent position in the conceptual apparatus of the lever: it has been allowed to become an instrument of reasoning in its own right. As the above examples have shown, however, this does not mean that the mechanical balances and levers have been left behind. Rather, they have remained, as diagrams and figures of thought, and as a reminder that the concept of equilibrium itself has become necessary

78 “Das Wissen nemlich wird auch eine um so grössere Kraft, und steht mit einer um so grössern Last im Gleichgewicht, je mehr es sich vom Standpunkt des Selbsts entfernt, und eben dadurch sich dem Standpunkt der Ideen nähert. So drückt das Gesez des Selbstbewußtseyns in seiner objectiven Form gerade das aus, was das Gesez der Mechanik in seiner objectiven Form, und diß Zusammentreffen ist kein zufälliges, sondern nothwendiges. Die Natur kann und gar nicht anders erscheinen, als in solchen Formen, die unserm Geiste eingebildet sind” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   173 for continued negotiations between the physical world on the one hand and the world of abstract forces, knowledge, and consciousness on the other.

Excursus: A Surprising Application

Readers such as Matthew Bell, and others who find the thoughts contained in Eschenmayer’s “applied” psychology too ridiculous to be of any pragmatic use, might be surprised to learn that the nineteenth century witnessed several serious efforts in that regard. Walter Wuttke, who has compiled one of the most detailed accounts of Eschenmayer’s intellectual contributions to date,79 has identified three different contexts in which Eschenmayer’s psychological theories were applied to political situations. The first regards the new constitution for Wurtemberg, which was drafted as it transitioned from a principality to a kingdom in 1805. Wuttke reports how Karl August von Wangenheim, the trustee (Kurator) of the Tübingen University, wished to transform the unified estates of the country (Landstände) into two chambers, a decision influenced by Eschenmayer’s tripartite psychology.80 Wuttke writes that Karl August overtakes as well the structure of [Eschenmayer’s] system, that means, the polar dichotomy and the dynamic mediation of the faculties and their potencies in an area of indifference . . . the Democratic and the autocratic moment oppose each other in the thusly partitioned state organism as polar forces and compel through this polarity a mediating force, which is law in the area of the physical, the organic, and the spiritual world orders. In the force field of the state, whose poles form on the negative side the subjects and on the positive side the regent, this task of mediation falls to the aristocratic moment, which to a certain degree is conceived of as a liberal and thereby a fulcrum point of a lever, one which constantly guarantees equilibrium, upon which the people grasp as dragging burden and the regent as pressuring force.81

79 See Wuttke, “Materialien,” 255–96. 80 Wuttke argues that even though the discussions took place in 1815, and Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts was first published in 1817, the ideas were already in circulation based on Eschenmayer’s university lectures. 81 “[E]r übernimmt . . . auch die Struktur seines Systems, d.h. die polare Gegensätzlichkeit und die dynamische Vermittlung der Vermögen und ihrer Potenzen in einem Indifferenzbereich . . . Demokratisches und autokratisches Moment stehen sich in dem so gegliederten Staatsorganismus als polare Kräfte gegenüber und erzwingen durch diese Polarität eine vermittelnde Kraft, wie das im Bereich der physischen, der organischen und der geistigen

174  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Wangenheim even extended his particular vision of the lever of power to include Germany as a whole, which would establish “the independent middle states” as a fulcrum point “between the two great powers of Prussia and Austria.”82 Wuttke shows how Eschenmayer offers himself as mediator (Vermittler) in these debates, thereby realizing the connection of the human to the fulcrum point, as well as the individual and the social, in ways that even German Romanticism might not have anticipated.83 In short, we have seen that Eschenmayer’s 1817 treatise, Psychology in Three Parts as Empirical, Pure, and Applied, takes up several of the narrative threads in the discussion on equilibrium and develops them. This treatise exhibits some of the most advanced theoretical thinking we have witnessed thus far about equilibrium’s function to connect the material and nonmaterial, and as a concept that becomes an object of visualization in its own right. The psychologist is the persona who embodies the central arguments Eschenmayer develops. Even if a nature philosopher shares the perspective that all laws of nature are corollaries of subjective intuitions, it is the psychologist who takes the extra step of showing that this structure is replicated in psychological theories on the structure of the brain itself. There is also, in Eschenmayer’s thinking, a clear relation of reciprocity between lever and agent. The lever is a useful tool as well as a model that advances the construction of knowledge, but it also imprints itself upon the human, which recalls Leroi-Gourhan’s argument that it is the tool which informs and “invents” the human, rather than the human being the one who creates the “technical.”84 So deeply is the lever embedded in Eschenmayer’s thinking, that we are entitled to ask whether it is more the case that the lever is a natural fit in a discursive environment whose conceptual framework is structured in terms

Weltordnungen Gesetz ist. Im staatlichen Kraftfeld, deren Pole auf der negativen Seite die Untertanen, auf der positiven Seite der Regent bildet, fällt diese Vermittlungsaufgabe dem aristokratischen Moment zu, das gewissermaßen als ein liberaler und damit ein ständiges Gleichgewicht garantierender Drehpunkt eines Kräftehebels gedacht wird, an dem das Volk als zerrende Last und der Regent als drückende Kraft angreifen” (Wuttke, “Leben und Werk Eschenmayers,” 273–74). 82 Wuttke, “Leben und Werk Eschenmayers,” 274. 83 Wuttke, “Leben und Werk Eschenmayers,” 274. 84 See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, for a summary of Leroi-Gourhan’s argument as well as the succinct comment, “the technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond.” Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   175 of equilibrium and disequilibrium, or whether it is Eschenmayer’s continued reflection on the lever itself, as instrument of reason, that motivates the entire project. The next section will offer an intriguing counterexample to Eschenmayer’s psychological lever by focusing on Johann Herbart’s equally idiosyncratic use of it. Herbart shares Eschenmayer’s belief in a unified vision of the mental phenomena and activities, but his philosophical background, methods, and use of analogical thinking will offer new perspectives in the history of the lever and its conceptual apparatus.

Part Two: Johann Herbart’s Statics and Mechanics of the Mind

There is good reason to recall Fichte’s assertion about the impossibility of defining an external theoretical perspective while one is rooted “in the world” when we observe the difficulties Herbart faced with his critique of faculty psychology. “Instead of engaging with the further dismembering of the faculties of the soul,” he writes, “let us linger for a while in the middle of them, in order to look for a standpoint from where the whole can be viewed to some degree as whole.”85 Such a drive for synthesis and a perspective of the whole also manifests itself in other ways, such as when Herbart calls for more collaboration among the disciplines: “At the present time, the mathematicians are here and the philosophers are there—as if one could be an authentic investigator of the truth without being both at once.”86 Herbart’s desire for synthesis informs his work on psychology, which, as was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, extends from the Textbook on Psychology of 1816 to the Psychological Investigations of 1839 and 1840. Whereas the early writings lay the groundwork by providing a theoretical foundation for the concepts of force, statics, and mechanics, it is in the later writings that we find prolonged reflections on the lever that seek to justify theoretically why it is well suited for the tasks Herbart envisions for it. With regard to the lever in Herbart’s oeuvre, there are two questions

85 “Anstatt uns schon jetzt auf die weitere Zerstückelung der Seelenvermögen einzulassen, verweilen wir noch eine Zeitlang in der Mitte zwischen ihnen, um einen Standpunkt zu suchen, von wo aus sich das Ganze einigermaassen als ein Ganzes überschauen lasse” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 17). Jonathan Crary also notes that Herbart’s psychology is one of his earliest attempts to “demonstrate and preserve Kant’s notion of the unity of mind.” See Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 100. 86 “Jetzt sind hier Mathematiker, und dort sind Philosophen;—als ob man, ohne beydes zugleich zu seyn, ein ächter Wahrheitsforscher seyn könnte” (Herbart, “On the Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics to Psychology,” xiii).

176  The Lever as Instrument of Reason to be answered: the first concerns the role the lever plays in Herbart’s quest for a unified perspective of psychological phenomena, while the second addresses the specific contribution Herbart makes to the conceptual history of the lever that has informed each chapter of this study. In order to comprehend Herbart’s special role in the history of the lever and related narratives (such as the history of psychometrics and the pervasive interest in quantifying mental phenomena), we as readers are also required, to the extent that we are able, to achieve the elusive view of “the whole” in Herbart’s thinking. In Herbart’s Textbook of Psychology, which was substantially revised between its first publication in 1816 and the year 1834, when it achieved its final form, we can see inscribed the musings of a thinker who struggles to come to terms with his relationship to Kant. On the one hand, there is plenty of evidence testifying to the fact that Herbart is still deeply embedded in the terminology of Kantian faculty psychology: the first paragraph of the first edition focuses entirely on faculties of imagining, feeling, and willing. In the second section, however, which is devoted to an “explanation of psychological phenomena, derived from the hypothesis of Vorstellungen87 as forces,” Herbart’s thinking goes in a much different direction. This second section was, in the 1834 edition (and perhaps as a sign of Herbart’s growing intellectual independence), moved to the beginning of the manuscript. In it, Herbart does not disavow the existence of a soul, but he clearly distances himself from a spatial concept of it. “The soul is not somewhere,” he writes, even if it is our convention to speak of it in a place and time; nonetheless, one must think of it as somehow locatable and Herbart solves this conundrum a compromise that seeks to balance both requirements: “This place is the simplex in space, or the nothing in space, a mathematical point.”88 It is here that Herbart first takes advantage of a mechanical model. Within the “simplex” of the soul there are “simple” though “dissimilar” beings existing in a relation to each other “that one can characterize with help of a comparison from the corporeal world as pressure

87 Herbart’s concept of the Vorstellung, which will be explained in greater detail in the following pages, has been translated as idea and representation, neither of which is satisfactory. I prefer to keep the custom of those writers who retain the German word Vorstellung. 88 “Dennoch muss sie in dem Denken, worin sie mit andern Wesen zusammengefasst wird, in den Raum, und zwar für jeden Zeitpunct an einen bestimmten Ort gesetzt werden. Dieser Ort ist das Einfache im Raume, oder das Nichts im Raume, ein mathematischer Punct” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 363).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   177 and counter-pressure.”89 What are these “beings” (Wesen), exactly? These are the Vorstellungen, which Herbart also describes as the “the self-preservations of the soul.”90 Just as in material nature there is an opposition of attractive and repulsive forces, so too do the Vorstellungen interact with each other as forces: “Vorstellungen become forces,” Herbart writes, “in that they resist each other” when they come into conflict; each resistance is an “expression of force.”91 According to this model, it stands to reason that some are stronger than others. When one force yields to another, it is transformed from an active Vorstellung into the mere striving to become one. Some readers might recall the imagery of Gottfried Leibniz when Herbart refers to the process of one force yielding to another in terms of a “darkening,” since Leibniz also used “brightness” and “darkness” to describe ideas as they emerge and disappear from our consciousness.92 The quantification of a Vorstellung, according to the logic of this metaphor, is connected to the “degree of the darkening of the entire Vorstellung.”93 For Herbart, then, the “statics and mechanics of the mind” is a field of inquiry that concerns itself “with the calculation of equilibrium and of the movement of the Vorstellungen,”94 where “movement” is the physical metaphor that correlates to the darkening or lightening of our minds.95

89 “Zwischen mehrern, unter sich ungleichartigen einfachen Wesen giebt es ein Verhältniss, das man mit Hülfe eines Gleichnisses aus der Körperwelt als Druck und Gegendruck bezeichnen kann” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 364). 90 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 364. 91 “Vorstellungen werden Kräfte, indem sie einander widerstehen. Dieses geschieht, wenn ihrer mehrere entgegengesetzte zusammentreffen” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 369). 92 Leibniz is another reference point for understanding Herbart’s psychology. From Leibniz, Herbart also borrows the concept of apperception, the conviction that there is a unity of mind, the notion that mind can be reduced to power and force. See Leary’s discussion in “Historical Foundation.” 93 The picture is a bit more complicated. If a Vorstellung is partially repressed, so that some amount of it is turned into pure striving, then, as Herbart warns us, we should not think of this part as somehow “broken off” from the entire Vorstellung. Rather, it has a particular size, which describes a degree of the darkening of the entire Vorstellung (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 370). 94 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 370. 95 For an overview of Herbart’s intellectual predecessors Leibniz, Wolff, Maupertuis, and Kant, see David E. Leary’s article, “The Historical Foundation of Herbart’s Mathematization of Psychology” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.2 (April 1980): 150–63. See also Erik C. Banks, “Extension and Measurement: A Constructivist Program from Leibniz to Grassman” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013): 20–31. Banks shows how Herbart’s theory can be seen as an attempt to seek “an explicit construction of extension from the unextended points and forces in a physical monadology” (20).

178  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Once the assumption has been made that Vorstellungen behave like forces when they interact with each other, it becomes desirable to develop laws of equilibrium to describe their behavior. Given that Herbart conceptualizes the mutually limiting behavior of forces in terms of a kind of restraint or inhibition (Hemmung), his statics of the mind is primarily concerned with two issues: the sum of inhibition and the ratio of inhibition among various Vorstellungen. The former is “the burden to be distributed, which arises from the opposition of the Vorstellungen.”96 If one knows this quantity, writes Herbart, as well as the relation “in which the various Vorstellungen give way to it,” then one can, “through an easy calculation of ratio, determine the static point of every Vorstellung, and that means the degree of its darkening in equilibrium.”97 With this description of the mechanical behavior of Vorstellungen, we find ourselves in a very similar environment to the beginning of Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes, when the discursive conditions were primed for the lever to make its appearance. In Kant’s essay, the topic under discussion was “real opposition,” which he illustrated through a series of mechanical examples. The analogy between Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes and Herbart’s Textbook on Psychology holds because each is concerned with a balance of “forces” in opposition to one another. Two related concepts, equally essential to Herbart’s conceptual apparatus, are the “static” and “mechanical” thresholds. The “static threshold,” which Herbart often refers to as the “threshold of consciousness,” simply indicates which mental content we are aware of (= above the threshold) or are not aware of (= below the threshold) in our conscious minds. Unlike many of his predecessors, however, it was Herbart’s firm belief that there are mental operations that take place without our being aware of them. As Lowry phrases it, “[Herbart’s] notion here was that, even though a mental content might be held in equilibrium outside of consciousness, it could still exert effects upon consciousness.”98 This conviction compelled Herbart to develop the concept of a “mechanical threshold”: “So long as a suppressed mental content remains above the mechanical threshold, it will contribute to

96 “Jene ist gleichsam die zu vertheilende Last, welche aus den Gegensätzen der Vorstellungen entspringt” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 371). 97 “Weiss man sie anzugeben und kennt man das Verhältniß, in welchem die verschiedenen Vorstellungen ihr nachgeben, so findet man durch eine leichte Proportions-Rechnung den statischen Punct einer jeden Vorstellung, d h. den Grad ihrer Verdunkelung im Gleichgewichte” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 371). 98 Richard Lowry, The Evolution of Psychological Theory: A Critical History of Concepts and Presuppositions, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1971), 68.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   179 what goes on inside consciousness, even though it is itself unconscious.99 In this context, Herbart also summons the concept of “latency” to refer to those Vorstellungen which, though still active, exist below the threshold of consciousness.100 It is also in the Textbook of Psychology that Herbart introduces the first of many equations designed to model the activity of the mind. The equation and a sample graph are represented below:101 1.0 0.8 0.6 s S

s = S(1 – et)

0.4 0.2 1

2

3

4

5

t

Figure 4.2  Graph that models the relation of the “sum of inhibition” relative to time. Self-produced using Mathematica. In this equation, “S” equals a quantity Herbart refers to as the Summe der Hemmung or “sum of inhibition,” which he defines in Psychology as Science as “the quantum of representing which, taking together those representations working in contrast, must be inhibited.”102 The “t” stands for time and the “e” is the mathematical constant that is the base of the natural logarithm. The lowercase sigma on the left refers to “that which has been inhibited from the collected Vorstellungen in

99 Lowry, The Evolution of Psychological Theory, 68. 100 Günter Gödde helps clarify the distinction between the static and mechanical thresholds for Herbart when he writes that the threshold is not just a spatial metaphor but also “a mathematically measurable factor within his realistic psychology”; for Gödde, the static threshold is that point “in which a representation, even though it is no longer in consciousness, can nevertheless re-enter consciousness without encountering major resistance” and a “mechanical threshold” as that “in which a representation is completely suppressed from consciousness for a certain time.” See Gödde, The Unconscious in German Philosophy and Psychology, 205. 101 See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 1st ed., 106. 102 “Die Summe der Hemmung ist das Quantum des Vorstellens, welches von den einander entgegenwirkenden Vorstellungen zusammengenommen, muss gehemmt werden” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 282).

180  The Lever as Instrument of Reason this time.”103 In Herbart’s words: “When the sum of inhibition lowers, the as of yet uninhibited quantum of the same is in every moment proportional to that which is sinking.”104 This equation condenses several of Herbart’s basic ideas. First and foremost, it attests to his belief in the unity of psychological phenomena. It symbolizes the fact that “the easily comprehended metaphysical reason, why opposed Vorstellungen resist each other, is the unity of the soul, whose self-preservations they are.”105 It also allows for the mechanical lever to appear, by way of a comparison. The above formula, which contains the “seed” of important psychological investigations for Herbart, is a simplification of the sort which could never be found “in reality” within the human mind. But it is precisely this genre of simplification that aligns it, Herbart adds, with the mathematical lever,106 a construction of pure relation, devoid of all material constraints. This connection, though incidental to the work of the Textbook on Psychology as a whole, is itself a seed that will grow and germinate throughout Herbart’s career. In Herbart’s case, the lever only begins its conceptual work once the “apparatus” (a word he himself uses) is firmly in place. In the 1822 essay “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit, Mathematik auf Psychologie anzuwenden” (On the Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics to Psychology), whose programmatic title echoes Kant’s 1763 “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes to Philosophy,” Herbart emphasizes that it is possible to take advantage of mathematics in psychological investigations, even when a direct numerical measurement is not possible.107 He even goes a step further to argue that the “tool” of mathematics has always been quite flexible and has never shied away from inventing useful fictions,108

103 “das in dieser Zeit von sämmtlichen Vorstellungen gehemmte” (Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816), 106). 104 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816), 131. 105 “Der sehr leicht begreifliche metaphysische Grund, weswegen entgegengesetzte Vorstellungen einander widerstehen, ist die Einheit der Seele, deren Selbsterhaltungen sie sind” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816): 136). 106 See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816): 112. 107 Boudewijnse, Murray, and Bandomir remind us that mathematics had already made an appearance in Herbart’s work in the 1811 essay, “Psychological remarks on the theory of tones” and that “for Herbart . . . psychology was intimately bound in with the science of mental acoustics” (Boudewijnse, Murray, and Bandomir, “Herbart’s Mathematical Psychology,” 170). This suggests an interesting connection between Herbart and those Romantic-era psychological models discussed by Caroline Welsh in Hirnhöhlenpoetiken. 108 Johann Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit, Mathematik auf Psychologie anzuwenden,” in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke,

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   181 and he offers the center of gravity (Schwerpunkt) and the mathematical lever as examples. At the same time, he claims that these fictions are “real aids”109 to our understanding. The previous chapter described how Schelling’s philosophy links the concept of equilibrium to the physical or material origin of abstract thought by inscribing it in a narrative that allows it to negotiate between the material and the nonmaterial. Herbart’s essay on the application of mathematics to psychology addresses a similar problem, but comes up with an altogether different response. For Herbart, what is at stake is the viability of a large-scale model—the entire notion of a “statics and mechanics of the mind.” He needs to justify his decision to conceive of mental processes in terms of the interaction of forces. In this situation, he wants a model flexible enough not to be bogged down with a literal interpretation: its strength lies in its metaphorical value. “With the word equilibrium [Gleichgewicht],” he writes, “no one thinks about weights [Gewichte]; the forces and their directions can be whatever they [i.e., the forces and directions, J.H.] want.”110 Herbart’s distinction between material and immaterial concepts of equilibrium reminds us of the definitions of “mathematical” as opposed to “physical” levers discussed in the introduction, and it also recalls the conceptual levers of German Romanticism. What matters, he insists, is “whether their effectiveness cancels [aufhebt] reciprocally in such a way, that the entire state has to remain as it is.”111 Herbart is even willing to go quite a bit further: just as equilibrium does not require us to think of weights per se in order to be a useful concept, the same holds true for mechanics in general: “There is just as little necessity, with the words statics and mechanics, to think of the corporeal world” because these sciences “find a place everywhere, where there is a system of forces, which oppose one another, so that they do or do not cancel each other.”112 By

vol. 5, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and Sons, 1890), 91–122, 101. 109 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit.” 110 “Bei dem Worte Gleichgewicht denkt Niemand an Gewichte; die Kräfte und deren Richtungen mögen sein, welche sie wollen” (Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 110). 111 “es kommt nur darauf an, ob ihre Wirksamkeit sich dergestalt gegenseitig aufhebt, das kein weiterer Erfolg daraus entstehen kann, und dass der ganze Zustand so bleiben muss, wie er ist” (Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit”). 112 “Eben so wenig ist es nöthig, bey den Worten Statik und Mechanik an die Körperwelt zu denken . . . diese beyde Wissenschaften finden überall Platz, wo es ein System von Kräften giebt, die einander entgegenwirken, so dass sie einander entweder aufheben oder nicht” (Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit”).

182  The Lever as Instrument of Reason deliberately distancing himself from material concepts of equilibrium and with an expansive notion of what a statics and mechanics of the mind might encompass, Herbart constructs an “apparatus”113 by gathering a cluster of concepts broad enough to embrace an entire field of psychological phenomena and their theoretical descriptions. As was the case with the other authors discussed in this study, Herbart’s apparatus lends itself to thinking in terms of an absolute metaphor, given that his psychological levers operate as guiding models—in this case, within the broader concerns of a statics and mechanics of the mind—and materialize as a certain kind of “approach” to thinking about psychology. Herbart also shares an additional affinity to Eschenmayer, whose willingness to test the limits of the lever led to some productive conclusions. Herbart thought that we learn from those moments in which we become aware of the lever’s limits (as well as one’s own limits). He admits, for example, that he is concerned about a potential misunderstanding and provides us with the following illustration: suppose, in conversation with a mathematician, we describe a situation where two equally strong opposed forces “reduce each other to null.”114 If we apply this same situation to the Vorstellungen of the mind, Herbart explains, it would be tempting to come to the “false” conclusion that two equal and opposed thoughts are the “negative” of each other and “annihilate” each other completely. This is clearly not the case, he concludes, because no Vorstellung is the “negative” of another; “each taken for itself is purely positive.”115 In other words, in such a situation as Herbart describes, both Vorstellungen would be present in equal measure. It would seem, though, as if Herbart confuses the description of a physical environment with its net effect. Once again, Kant’s essay can be of service. After all, when two equal and opposite winds keep a ship from moving—the example Kant provided us with— the “effect” is one of standstill even if both winds are still physically present. The same holds true for forces in a physical environment. Herbart’s claim that no single Vorstellung is the negative of the other might seem strange to us since what he insists upon is already a given in mechanical theory. To understand the emphasis of his argument, it helps to interpret it within a broader “construction project”: that of the ego. Two Vorstellungen in opposition already share something: a restraint, or inhibition. Yet such an image already belongs in the category of “fictions”—however useful—because the reality of the soul is much more complex. Vorstellungen do not merely interact in simple pairings, but

113 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 101. 114 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 116. 115 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 116.

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   183 also in clusters and long, complex rows, an image that Eschenmayer also invokes. This implies that the model of two Vorstellungen who share a “burden” (Last) and are joined both through the physical metaphor of opposing forces and the mathematical metaphors of balance and ratio, has a provisional status. The most intricate equations to emerge from Herbart’s mathematical psychology will account for the “distribution” of force along potentially infinite rows of Vorstellungen. The total complex of these rows informs the collective activity of the ego. Consider, for example, the following two passages from the first volume of Herbart’s Psychology as Science (1824): Depending on how the rows of Vorstellungen are composed, which meet and intersect in the ego; and according to how they are excited in every particular moment: according to this is oriented, how the human sees himself in this moment.116 and The most manifold Vorstellungen must cancel each other, for the egoity to be possible.117 The “mechanics” of being human—what we feel, what we do, how we perceive ourselves—depends upon the entirety of the complex interaction of forces. To accept Herbart’s psychology is therefore to embrace an all-pervasive mechanical model for the environment of the mind: “The soul [Seele] is . . . not originally a representing [vorstellende] force, but rather it becomes one depending on the circumstances. . . . Just so the Vorstellungen, taken separately, are not forces at all, but they become so by virtue of their opposition to one another.”118 It is within this environment—where all phenomena, through metaphors of movement and the tension of opposition, become mechanical and thereby allow themselves to be described in terms of forces—that the lever finally arrives for good: not simply as an offhand remark, but a model that functions heuristically as an instrument of reason. The

116 “Je nachdem die Reihen von Vorstellungen beschaffen sind, welche im Ich zusammentreffen und sich kreuzen; und je nachdem sie in jedem bestimmten Augenblick aufgeregt sind: darnach richtet es sich, wie der Mensch sich in diesem Augenblick sieht” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 247). 117 “Es müssen also die mannigfaltigen Vorstellungen sich unter einander aufheben, wenn die Ichheit möglich seyn soll” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 251). 118 “Die Seele ist demnach nicht ursprünglich eine vorstellende Kraft, sondern sie wird es unter Umständen” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 253).

184  The Lever as Instrument of Reason context is the second volume of Psychology as Science (1825), in a passage where Herbart is discussing feelings and affects. In Herbart’s view, feelings, like Vorstellungen, are located in consciousness, and they can also be pushed above and below the threshold of consciousness. The important point, he emphasizes, is to consider the net effect of those forces working either together or against one another: Putting aside for the moment several closer determinations, which cannot yet be considered here, the most essential one can be expressed by the following example: let us think of a lever and the conditions of its equilibrium. Let us suppose that this equilibrium were to be disturbed: then [the lever] would incline toward one side or the other; one could thereby compare the rising and sinking of Vorstellungen, thus the objective determinations of the consciousness, which are not called feelings. But that equilibrium can occur, while very different forces, at very different distances from the lever’s support, are applied to it. These do not turn the lever; nonetheless it would feel them, if it had consciousness; and feel ever differently, depending on which greater or lesser weights are applied to it, so or so.119 It is a remarkable passage for a number of reasons. One can appreciate, for example, the image of feelings that counterbalance one another, some stronger, others less so. One can also admire the fact that the lever, which has long been implicit in Herbart’s statics and mechanics of the mind, with its emphasis on forces, static and mechanical thresholds, and states of equilibrium, finally makes an appearance: it rises above Herbart’s threshold of consciousness, as it were. The true surprise, however, lies in the fact that this passage irrevocably inscribes Herbart within the tradition that, up until now, has been most 119 Mit Beyseitsetzung mancher nähern Bestimmungen, die hier noch nicht eingesehen werden können, lässt sich das Wesentlichste durch folgendes Gleichniss erläutern: man denke sich einen Hebel, und die Bedingungen seines Gleichgewichts. Gesetzt, dies Gleichgewicht wäre verletzt: so neigte sich derselbe nach der einen oder andern Seite; damit vergleiche man das Steigen und Sinken der Vorstellungen also die objectiven Bestimmungen / des Bewusstseyns, welche nicht Gefühle genannt werden. Aber das Gleichgewicht kann bestehn, während sehr verschiedene Gewichte, in sehr verschiedenen Entfernungen von der Stütze des Hebels, an ihm angebracht werden. Diese drehen den Hebel nicht; gleichwohl würde er sie fühlen, wenn er Bewusstseyn hätte; und immer anders und anders fühlen, je nachdem grössere oder kleinere Gewichte an ihm so oder anders angebracht wären (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 2, 76).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   185 prominently represented by those writers such as Schlegel, Novalis, and Eschenmayer, who identify the lever with the ego. For Schlegel and Novalis, the general (encyclopedic) notion of conceptual levers in the mind was complemented by the image of the individual as hypomochlion or fulcrum point. Herbart asks us to envision a more intricate scenario: a mise en abîme where a model of consciousness is embedded within the conscious mind and where this part comes to stand in for the whole. In some ways, it is the reverse of the Romantic gesture: instead of designating the individual as fulcrum, we grant the instrument its own agency—while containing it within the environment of the human mind. This is a “fiction” to be sure, of the kind Herbart has identified elsewhere as coming to aid of the illustration of an idea, but a powerful one nonetheless.

Questioning Equilibrium

Up through this point, we have observed the increasing presence of the lever in Herbart’s mechanical psychology. In order to understand why the lever becomes such an integral part of Herbart’s thinking about the psyche, however, we need to take a step back from the psychological context and study the underpinnings of Herbart’s theoretical perspective more closely. In the introduction, I argued that it is the particular use of mechanical concepts and theory that makes the cases from the cultural history of the lever in this study so interesting. Herbart is no exception. In the second volume of his General Metaphysics (1829), he specifically rejects one mechanical explanation of the lever in favor of another. It is a decision with important ramifications for his final synthesis of mechanics and psychology in the Psychological Investigations of the 1830s. Herbart’s General Metaphysics addresses many of the basic mechanical concepts that have informed his psychology up through that point, including attractive and repulsive forces. It also demonstrates a marked interest in the material substrates of mechanical instruments. This means that Herbart also feels compelled to account for the transmission of forces, such as through the string of a pulley or the arms of a lever. Herbart’s (qualified) “material turn,” which questions the degree to which material concerns are integrated into the “fiction,” is remarkable for someone who has, up through this point, championed mathematical models for their ability to provide “helpful fictions.” This emphasis on material constraints not only broadens Herbart’s understanding of the lever, it can also be read as an attempt, in light of reactions against German Naturphilosophie, to make his writing about the lever sound like less of a “speculative physics.” A closer look at Herbart’s preferred theory of the lever in the General Metaphysics will offer some insight as to what motivates this development.

186  The Lever as Instrument of Reason Suppose, Herbart says, we consider the most familiar way of looking at the lever, where one imagines equal weights at equal distances from the fulcrum. We infer that the lever is in equilibrium and can also ascertain other equilibrium states by increasing the distance of the weights from the fulcrum, and we can eventually postulate that an inverse relation of weight and distance will also achieve an equilibrium state. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it does not account for the “why and how” behind the results “for the imagined weights, successively applied and removed again are only present in thoughts. The real lever is in equilibrium without these fictions.”120 Yet, Herbart also rejects another explanation, offered by the mathematically inclined nature philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries, as unsatisfactory. In a section of his “mathematical nature philosophy” dedicated to the “pure theory of motion,” Fries posits experience (Erfahrung) as the basis of theory and refers to the laws of the lever. Fries admits that the proof of the lever’s theory of equilibrium is difficult compared to the simplicity of the intuition that accompanies the observation of the lever, and when he defines the lever’s law he thinks in terms of the respective velocities of each lever arm and their distance from the fulcrum point.121 Herbert dismisses this case because, in his opinion, it has more to do with illustrating the concept of the moment of inertia than a theory of static equilibrium. Instead, he turns to a material explanation, the case of a pulley’s rope, upon which each point resists tearing. Just like this, the inflexible line on the lever has to transmit the pressure of the weight from place to place. Without this transmission and renewal of pressure, by virtue of which the lever would have to break in every point if it was too weak, no weight would act on the other and the cooperation of both, which lies in their equilibrium, could not emerge. It is therefore precisely the sum of the pressures, which stands in relation with the length of the lever arm, and which needs to be compensated for through the inverse relation of weights.122

120 “Der wirkliche Hebel ist im Gleichgewichte ohne diese Fictionen.” See Herbart, Allgemeine Metaphysik, vol. 2, in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Kehlbach, vol. 8 (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and Sons, 1893), 294. 121 Jakob Friedrich Fries, Die mathematische Naturphilosophie nach philosophischer Methode bearbeitet (Heidelberg: Mohr and Winter, 1822), 406. 122 Gerade so wie jeder Punct des Fadens, sofern er durch seinen materialen Zusammenhang im Stande ist ein Gewicht zu tragen, sich aus der Gefahr des Zerreissens selbst die Kraft des Tragens erzeugt,—eben so muss auch die unbiegsame Linie am Hebel von Ort zu Ort den Druck des Gewichts fortpflanzen. Ohne diese Fortpflanzung und Erneuerung des Drucks, vermöge

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   187 Regardless of whether one is speaking of statics or dynamics, the passage makes clear that equilibrium is something that “emerges” for Herbart. His emphasis on the material constraints of the lever arms makes apparent a dimension that has been absent so far in this chapter, but one which we have already glimpsed in the discussion of Kant: that of time, because the equilibrium of a system over time can also be understood more precisely as a sequential process of moving from one state of equilibrium to another. Having arrived, this concept will remain at the forefront of Herbart’s final mediations on the lever in the Psychological Investigations.

Unavoidable Comparisons

In the two volumes of the Psychological Investigations, published in 1839 and 1840, we find programmatic statements on the state of the field of mathematical psychology—which Herbart squarely situates between metaphysics and empiricism—and on the lever itself, in an essay titled “Ueber Analogien in Bezug auf das Fundament der Psychologie” (On Analogies in Relation to the Foundation of Psychology). To be sure, he writes, one has to be careful to avoid analogies that are far-fetched. At the same time, “it is a different matter with such almost unavoidable comparisons, which are already summoned with the expression statics.”123 This includes comparisons with the lever: “For the lever is certainly the first, simplest example that suggests itself, in the case of equilibrium.”124 Unlike other instances in Herbart’s writing where the lever was summoned to help think through a particular problem, in this context Herbart focuses directly on the lever itself: After more precise reflection on the lever some things have come to mind, which will be presented here; without concern, that it might seem too foreign. At the end of this essay it will be shown that sufficient, and even double reason is available to make a connection between the consideration of equilibrium among Vorstellungen with [that consideration], which the lever provokes.125

dessen der Hebel in jedem Puncte brechen müsste, wenn er zu schwach wäre, würde kein Gewicht auf das andre wirken, und die Gemeinschaft beyder, welche in ihrem Gleichgewichte liegt, könnte gar nicht entstehen. Es ist also geradezu die Summe der Drückungen, welche mit der Länge der Hebelarme im Verhältniss steht, und welche durch das umgekehrte Gewichte muss ausgeglichen werden (Herbart, Allgemeine Metaphysik, vol. 2, 295). 123 Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 187. 124 Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 187. 125 “Bey genauerem Nachdenken über den Hebel hat sich nun Einiges dargeboten, welches hier soll vorgelegt werden; ohne Besorgniss, als würde es gar zu

188  The Lever as Instrument of Reason After summarizing various ways of looking at the lever, in language taken almost verbatim from the General Metaphysics, Herbart returns to the problem of the transmission of force. Whereas the General Metaphysics spoke of a “propagation” (Fortpflanzung), however, in the essay on analogies, the word of choice is more of a spreading or distribution (Vertheilung). “Here already it is evident,” Herbart writes, “that the analogy between the equilibrium on the lever and the equilibrium among Vorstellungen acquires a somewhat more comfortable form, in that here as there a distribution (Vertheilung) is present.”126 One should not accept the analogy without reservation, he cautions. The question still remains, where the equilibrium is to be found. Herbart asks that we visualize a lever and provides us with the following illustration:

Figure 4.3  “On Analogies,” 189. We should imagine, that the lever is supported at point “C” and that equal weights are hung at points “A,” “D,” “E,” and “B,” where CA = CD and the distance CB is exactly 3CA. The “most essential” part of this construction, for Herbart, is “that a pressure, which from one point should act upon another remote point, must first traverse the distance between these two points; otherwise no connection would be present.”127 If one weight were hung from B and another, three times greater, were hung from A, then if the lever arms were fairly short, the lever would be almost instantly in a state of equilibrium. Now, suppose the arms of the lever were extended in either direction indefinitely. Then, Herbart surmises, we would have “no sudden equilibrium present all

fremdartig scheinen. Am Ende dieses Aufsatzes wird sich zeigen, dass hinreichender, und selbst doppelter Grund vorhanden ist, die Betrachtung des Gleichgewichts unter Vorstellungen mit derjenigen, wozu der Hebel Anlass giebt, in Verbindung zu setzen” (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien”). 126 “Schon hier erhellt, dass die Analogie zwischen dem Gleichgewicht am Hebel und dem Gleichgewicht unter Vorstellungen eine etwas bequemere Gestalt gewinnt, indem hier wie dort eine Vertheilung vorliegt” (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 188). 127 “Das Wesentliche aber ist: dass ein Druck, der von einem Puncte auf einen andern entfernten wirken soll, erst die Distanz dieser Puncte durchlaufen muss; sonst wäre keine Verbindung vorhanden” (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 189).

From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology   189 at once.”128 It is a point Herbart returns to again and again: that in the discussions of what constitutes an equilibrium state for a lever with weights hanging on either side of a fulcrum point, scientists usually do not stop to think about what happens when the different forces are brought into relation on lever arms of various lengths. The category of time is usually left out of the equation (where time refers to the relative speed in which equilibrium could be established). The chapter on Kant discussed the “emergence” of the zero of equilibrium in the process of thinking and emphasized how Kant’s “mental mechanics” also allowed for a time integral. In that case, we saw how Kant reconceptualized the equilibrium point of static mechanics, the fulcrum point of the lever, so that it was no longer mechanically instantaneous. This idea is an important connection between the two thinkers, because in each case it offers a glimpse of how the model drawn from statics might be adapted into the lived experience of being human. In this regard, Herbart goes even further than Kant. When he raises the idea of lever arms that are of greatly varying lengths and emphasizes that he is interested in the transfer of force, we see that he is thinking in more concrete terms about how individual Vorstellungen have their own durations as they move in and out of equilibrium. Herbart has not yet extracted all he can from his lever analogy, however. He returns to the comparison we are already familiar with from the Textbook for Psychology between the movement of Vorstellungen and their respective “lightening” and “darkening.” Now, with reference to the description of the distribution of force along the lever arm, he reminds us that Vorstellungen, for all that we think of them in terms of forces entering and departing from states of equilibrium, are not spatial entities. Their equivalent of movement—their brightening and darkening—can, however, be quantified in terms of speed (Geschwindigkeit), such that when a relative speed of two opposed Vorstellungen is zero, then they are in equilibrium. Herbart then brings the notion of speed back to the lever: One should consider here the turning of the lever, which every weight would effect, if the other one were weaker or closer to the fulcrum point. One could move a weight and turning results; if one should bring it again to the correct position, then the possibility of turning disappears. Thus this position, which we called the correct one, brings the possibility of movement to zero.129

128 Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 190. 129 Man denke hier an die Umdrehung des Hebels, welche jedes Gewicht bewirken würde, wenn das andre schwächer oder dem Unterstützungspuncte näher wäre.

190  The Lever as Instrument of Reason What distinguishes Herbart’s from all other contributions to the history of the lever examined in this study is the flexibility with which he moves between the mechanical object of the lever and his psychological thinking. On the one hand, he is inspired to think of the lever because, for him, equilibrium is a concept fundamental to the operations of the human mind. On the other hand, certain aspects of the lever’s mechanical theory—such as the distribution of force or the relative speed of lever arms—become perceptible to him and relevant to his writing because they are analogous to properties he observes in the behavior of Vorstellungen. Throughout his writing on psychology, Herbart concerns himself almost not at all with the actual content of thought. What his psychology has to offer us, through the use of the lever, is an abstraction of the lived experience of the human.

Man verrücke ein Gewicht, und die Umdrehung erfolgt; man bringe es wieder an die rechte Stelle, und die Möglichkeit des Drehens verschwindet. Also diese Stelle, die wir die rechte nannten, bringt die Möglichkeit der Bewegung auf Null (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 199).

Concluding Thoughts

This chapter does not conclude the history of the lever by any means, but it does mark the final episode in the history I have chosen to highlight, one which I hope will have changed how readers think about the mechanical lever and concepts related to it. Just as the lever informed the worldview of the Greek and Roman philosophers, so too does this most simple of machines still have the ability to construct relationships and make unexpected connections before our very eyes. One of the most surprising realizations of this study is the fact that the lever demonstrates such staying power at a time of increasing technological sophistication around 1800, and that it has been mobilized to perform in contexts that seem to have little to do with mechanics in a traditional sense. As we have seen, the works discussed in each of the four chapters of this study vary greatly in terms of disciplinary focus, and I would like once again to underscore two different ways in which the case studies speak to each other. The common denominator of this study has been a shared interest in connecting the activity of the lever to the human in a general sense. A great deal of the philosophical “work” accomplished in each chapter by the lever and its conceptual apparatus has something to do with the phenomena of human existence. For Kant, the lever is implicated in moral action as well as the basic production of mental images, the dynamics of thought. For early German Romantics Schlegel and Novalis, the lever came to stand in nuce for the essential tension of the human as fulcrum point within the balancing act of the encyclopedia project. In the context of German Naturphilosophie, we witnessed how Schelling and Eschenmayer debated the limits of the lever’s applicability to life, a debate with high stakes involving the potential death—or apotheosis— of the lever. And finally, in the chapter on psychology, we have seen how the lever is integral to two very different approaches defined by the work of Eschenmayer and Herbart: whereas the former relies upon the lever to illustrate the basic structures of human being and knowing,

192  The Lever as Instrument of Reason the latter integrates the lever into a sophisticated and mathematically informed model of thinking. As different as these various approaches may be, it becomes clear that the activity of being human around 1800 is widely—if non-uniformly—equated with being a lever. What we can conclude, then, is that in an era defined by the emergence of new disciplines and the increasing specialization of knowledge, the lever and related concepts such as “equilibrium” fulfill an unspoken need to retain a central unifying principle. The second connection between the chapters I would like to emphasize has to do with the more ephemeral question of what the lever “is” and “does” in the examples I have chosen to highlight in this study. The chapter on Kant emphasized the lever as a principle of connection and also set the stage for those contexts where a particular set of concerns come together and concretize in the lever. A key term in this context is that of “application.” Thinking about “application” helps us bridge the material and immaterial regimes—the realms of physical and mathematical levers, respectively—and also helps us understand that the lever performs or embodies particular acts of “translation” when its mechanical knowledge proves useful in extra-mechanical contexts. When Kant integrates the lever into his examples of moral action, we can see that the lever is already to some implicated within an understanding of the human, whereby the body can be read as a kind of “meter” for the moral mechanics of the mind. As I argued in the introduction, the levers we observed in the Kant chapter and the following ones are not primarily to be understood as metaphorical in the usual rhetorical sense. Indeed, it may well be that the tendency to categorize levers this way when they appear outside the realm of classical mechanics has contributed to the other roles the lever plays around 1800 being overlooked in the first place. Yet we do the lever a disservice when we pare it down to a singular metaphorical identification, such as the “lever of morality,” because such a designation ignores the lever’s particular ability to transcend and reflect on a given context, to act as an instrument of reason and “applied” knowledge while reflecting on its own status as a figure of application more generally that transcends any particular usage. There is ample evidence for this in the context of the Romantic encyclopedia project, where levers were constructed to create new conceptual constellations, and we see a similar gesture of transcendence formulated more radically by Eschenmayer in the context of nature philosophy. Finally, in Herbart’s psychology, we find the admission that the lever is somehow “unavoidable.” In that particular context, Herbart means that in regimes where the concept of equilibrium figures so prominently in simple scenarios with clear analogies to statics, it is logical to think in terms of levers. At the same time, his statement can be taken as

Concluding Thoughts  193

programmatic for the examples that inform my study as a whole. The lever, in the decades prior to and following 1800, is unavoidable. If this fact has been slow to receive recognition, then we can assume it is because of the presence of a blind spot, whether because of a bias against mechanics in the midst of newer, more organically oriented sciences and philosophies, or whether because the lever is so remarkably simple that it has remained unremarkable all these years: a hidden instrument of reason awaiting rediscovery.

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Index

advantage, mechanical Archimedean point  16–17, 20, 92 body’s 15 lever’s  5, 16, 33–5, 148, 172 as rhetorical device  41, 117 analogy fulcrum point and personality 81 geometry and psychology  160 lever and human  93 lever and political ideologies 15 lever and thought process  42, 56 lever and Vorstellungen  188–9 linguistic units and relative equilibrium 107 in Naturphilosohpie 113, 122, 124, 133, 143, 145, 166 representation and relative equilibrium 105 Archimedean point absence 23 Descartes 68–9 German Romanticism  97, 100–2 history  16–19, 21, 67

knowledge-building 20–4, 101, 169 lever 29 Archimedes agency 95 call for a point  16, 19, 30, 102 On the Equilibrium of Planes  7 Grains of Sand  18 law of the lever  2, 8, 27 Renaissance reception  9 Syracusia 17 arithmetic  45, 49, 89–90, 95 Aufhebung  27, 55–8, 95 balance (mechanical object)  38 n.9, 41, 53, 61, 82, 167, 172 Erwägen 41 German Romanticism  82 Guidobaldo dal Monte  9 history of economics  28 history of mechanics  10 Kant 28 Mechanical Problems  6–7 In Naturphilosophie  167, 172 organizing principle  53 out of equilibrium  61 Benvenuto, Edouardo  9–12, 28 Blumenberg, Hans  1 n.2, 7, 13, 15, 17, 22–4, 27, 29, 34, 62, 123

Index  205 chemistry  28, 64, 74, 117–18, 120–1, 132, 160 contradiction logical vs. real  29, 39, 43, 45, 83 Naturphilosophie 84 principle of contradiction  40–3 Derrida, Jacques 14–16 Descartes, Réné Cogito and Archimedean point  19–21, 68–9, 99 German Romanticism’s appropriation of  70, 91, 103 Law of the lever  10 Lever and orbital motion  12 diagram German Romanticism  80, 82 mechanical texts  79 Naturphilosophie 30, 117, 119–20, 122–3, 126–7, 135–7, 167–8, 172 ego Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy  164–5, 167–9 Fichte’s philosophy  83, 104–5 German Romanticism  14, 27, 66, 99–100, 111 Herbart’s psychology  182–3, 185 pure ego  103 res cogitans 69 Schelling’s Naturphilosophie  113, 128, 130–7, 143, 146–7 equilibrium Archimedes 7 cognitive processes  40, 49–51, 57–9, 61 Fichte 82 Galileo 9 German Romanticism  95–6, 100, 103–7

lever  16, 34–5, 41, 53, 62, 79, 81, 86, 118 mediating principle  30–1 moral judgments  26, 29, 42. 54, 147 Naturphilosophie 76, 84, 113, 120–2, 127–7, 129–31, 133–8, 140, 146, 150 psychology  152, 161–2, 164–6, 167–75, 177–8, 181–2, 184–90, 192 statics  6, 27, 37, 39, 43–4, 56, 60, 71, 77, 153 Varignon 10–11 Von Eschenmayer, Carl August German Romanticism  95 psychology  151–6, 158–75, 182–3, 185, 191–2 relation to Schelling  111–28, 131, 134, 136–50 Säze [sic] aus der Natur-Metaphysik (propositions)  74–8, 80 Euclid  87, 89 Faculty (in psychology)  98, 115, 157, 164–5, 169, 175–6 Feuerhahn, Wolf  48–9 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Archimedean point  175 German Romanticism  90–1, 101–5 Leiden and Thätigkeit  82–3 mind and nature  113 philosophy of the subject  43, 63 reception in Naturphilosophie 134, 165, 167 focus (optical)  97–9 fulcrum Archimedean point  16, 18, 20 body 15 ego 14 Gehler 36

206 Index German Romanticism  26, 30, 54, 66–9, 71, 77–9, 81–6, 88, 92–5, 97, 99–103, 108 Hegel 35 Herbart  185–6, 189, 191 Kant  43, 45, 47–8, 56 Naturphilosophie  110, 122–3, 128, 131–3, 135–9, 147, 164, 169 political contexts  173–4 Galileo  9–10, 12–13, 28, 38, 73 Gehler, Johann Samuel Traugott  36, 42, 44, 71, 77, 79, 82, 97 geometry  51, 87, 89–90, 97, 160 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 27, 34–5, 37, 55, 114, 116, 119, 136, 165 Herbart, Johann 1–2, 12, 28, 30–1, 40, 42, 56, 107, 150–60, 162, 164, 171, 175–92 hypomochlion lever 16 German Romanticism 67–8, 77, 80, 82, 85, 87, 92–7, 99–102, 104–10, 185 Naturphilosophie 121–2, 124–7, 131–6, 139, 147, 163, 165–9, 171–2 Idealism (German)  21–2, 31, 64, 112, 113–14, 128, 130–4, 136, 140, 151, 157 indifference  49–50, 83–4, 92–4, 128, 131, 136, 140, 142–3, 145, 146, 149, 173 intensity  50–1, 76, 78, 81, 161–2 Kant, Immanuel “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy”  33–62, 71

Conflict of the Faculties  15 Critique of Judgement  27 Critique of Pure Reason  97–8 German Romanticism  91, 99, 107 lever  77, 82, 103–4, 111 Naturphilosophie  111–13, 116, 119, 125, 130–2, 147 psychology  151–2, 154, 156, 157–60, 162, 164–5, 170, 175–80, 182, 187, 189, 191–2 Kassung, Christian  24–5 Kepler, Johannes  12, 69, 79 Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich  105 Von Kleist, Heinrich  61 Latour, Bruno  18 Leibniz  7–8, 12, 35, 38–9, 65, 82, 103, 153, 161, 177 Leupold, Jacob  13 Lucretius 3–4 Luhmann, Niklas  21–2, 95 machine (simple) 4–6, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 60, 67, 69, 80–1, 95, 166, 191 Meli, Dominico  9–10, 12–13, 28, 69, 79, 81 moment (mechanical)  9, 16, 27, 34–5, 51, 77, 118, 124, 173–4 Naturphilosophie dispute between Eschenmayer and Schelling 140–50 early history  112 Eschenmayer’s 115–28 German Romanticism  83–4 Herbart 185 life sciences  70 reception 114–15 Schelling’s 128–39 Neurath, Otto  23

Index  207 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) Archimedean point  21, 102 encyclopedia project  66–7 equilibrium 103–5 focus 98 fulcrum  92–3, 95–7, 99–100 language 106–7 lever 72–85 mathematical point  86–8, 108–9 mechanics 63 psychology differences between Eschenmayer’s and Herbart’s 155–9 eighteenth-century 153–5 Eschenmayer’s  128, 152–3, 160–74 Herbart’s 175–90 Kant  29, 51 Wolff  48, 99 n.97 rest (mechanical) active 29 German Romanticism  73, 86, 103–6 Kant  39, 43–4, 52, 54, 59–61 Naturphilosophie  124, 126, 130, 138, 169 Renaissance 9 Romanticism (German) Archimedean point  101–3 conceptual levers  130, 181 equilibrium 103–6 Eschenmayer  158, 160, 171 language 106–7 mathematical point  86–101 Novalis 72–81 reception of  63–6, 69–71 Schlegel (Friedrich)  81–5 society 107–10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  48

Schelling, Friedrich Archimedean point  21 dispute with Eschenmayer 140–50 ego 128–36 equilibrium  106, 131 Eschenmayer’s interpretation of  118–20, 162, 170 German Romanticism  83–4 reception of his Naturphilosophie  113–16 speculative physics  113 Schiefsky, Mark  2–3, 5–6 Schlegel, Friedrich Gespräch über die Poesie 109–10 hypomochlion 100–3 language 106–7 lever 81–97 Schlick, Moritz  22–3 Stevin, Simon  89–90 sublation  27, 30, 34–5, 53, 95, 165. See also Aufhebung substrate  131–4, 185 technology  1, 3–4, 6, 17, 26, 66, 93, 100 temperature  92–3, 121–3 temporality  28, 56, 107 tool agency 29 conceptual work  26, 30, 174 German Romanticism  67, 71 n.20, 106, 147 lever as simple tool  25 Naturphilosophie  126, 168, 171 philosophical 92 torque  44, 47–8, 77, 139 translation (as relates to the activity of the lever) 9, 27, 35, 37, 39, 42, 55, 60, 192 Tresch, John  66, 70 Varignon, Pierre  10–12, 35 velocity  11, 43, 75–6, 80, 118, 121, 125–6, 163

208 Index Vorstellung (in Herbart’s psychology) 176–80, 182–4, 187–90 vis viva  38–9, 114 Wolff, Christian  36, 38, 40, 46–50, 99, 153–4, 177 work (in mechanical contexts)  4, 11, 28–9, 55, 77, 80, 122, 130, 136, 191

Zammito, John  41, 99 zero German Romanticism  89–91, 93, 95, 100, 109 mechanical rest  44, 49, 52, 54, 56, 61 moral action  53 Naturphilosophie  126–7, 131, 145, 166, 189