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Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) | |
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Swiss historian and art historian, best known for his works on
the Italian Renaissance and on Greek civilization. Jacob Burckhardt's famous
thesis in Die Kultur der Renaissance in
Italien (1860, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
Italy) is that Renaissance first gave the highest development to
individuality. The early signs of "the modern European Spirit" were
according to Burckhardt seen in Florence. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was Burckhardt's colleague at the University of Basel. "In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and all things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognised himself as such." (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, authorized translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, London: Allen & Unwin, ninth impression 1928, p. 129) Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was born in Basel, the son of a Protestant minister. His family, active in business, politics, and scholarly pursuits, was one of the most distinguished in the German-speaking city – eleven ancestors had served its Bürgermeister. The Burckhardts were referred to as the "Medicis" of Basel. Also the family of his mother, Susanne Maria (née Schorendorf), had lived in Basel for generations. Her death in 1830 was a terrible shock for Burckhardt. At an early age learned how fragile human life is, but he found in music, art, and poetry the fundamental basis of human existence. Musically gifted, he bound by the age of fifteen his compositions into a sketchbook, entitled "Composizioni di Giacomo Burcardo". Following the wishes of his father, Burckhardt started to study theology in 1836 at the University of Basel, which was regarded as one of the most concervative theological outposts in Europe. After becoming under the influence of the German theologian and biblical critic, W.M.L. de Wette, Burckhardt gave up theology, concluding that the birth of Christ is a myth. Coincidentally, about the same time his father was elected the highest eccesiastical office in Basel. "The most prudent thing a negative theologian can do is to change over to another faculty," he wrote in a letter to his friend. (Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness by Thomas Albert Howard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 136) What was his father's reaction is not known. After his death in 1858 Burckhardt destroyed most of their correspondence.. With a new calling in his life, Burckhardt entered in 1839 the
University of Berlin,
where he studied history and the history of art under Leopold von Ranke
(1795-1886), whose methods of historical study he adopted. However, he
eventually rejected Ranke's vision of history as an organic, unified
drama, in which God stood behind all phenomena of the past. Instead he tried to find meaning and continuity within
history. Hegel's influence at the university was still
enormous eight years after his death. Both Ranke and
Hegel stressed that each epoch must be judged in
its own terms, ". . . every epoch is immediate to God," Ranke said. (The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present by Georg G. Iggers, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968, p. 80) Historians must immerse themselves in the epoch and write history "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" (as it really happened). During his student years, Burckhardt formed a friendship with Gottfried Kinkel, a Privatdozent and the future revolutionary. Through Johanna Matthieux he gained entry to the salon of Bettina von Arnim, where he sang lieder. Burckhardt may have met Karl Marx; they both contributed later on articles to Kölnische Zeitung. As a result of participating in a serenade honoring the liberal ruler of Baden, Burckhardt himself was listed in the Prussian police files as a "revolutionary". Before publishing his first major work, Die Zeit
Constantin's des Grossen (1853, The Age of Constantine the Great),
Burckhardt revised and edited the Handbuch der Geschichte der
Malerei (1847) and the Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte by his
teacher Franz Kugler (1848). In The Age of Constantine the Great,
which examined the transition between late pagan antiquity and the
medieval world, Burckhardt rejected Eusebius' (c.264-340)
portrait of the Byzantine Emperor as a devout Christian hero. Basically agreeing with the English historian and scholar Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Burchardt argued that Constantine was indifferent to religion and in the last decade of his life the emperor gave indications of un-Christian, even pagan sympathies. Burckhardt traced the decline of Rome through the impoverishment of art and the emergence of early Christian artists, but did not conclude that Christianity bore the responsibility of the fall of the Roman empire. In 1844 Burckhardt edited the conservative Basel Zeitung,
at the same time complaining that the city was extremely boring, and
eventually he resigned from his post. Friedrich Engels once described
Basel as a "barren town, full of frock-coats, cocked hats, philistines
and patricians and Methodists". (Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in
Unseasonable Ideas by Lionel Gossman, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 16)
Bonn
and Berlin inspired Burckhardt
more, Basel was still a small, provincial centre, ruled by
centuries-old oligarchy. Burckhardt's
early writings in art history and history focuded on the Middle Ages.
It was not until 1855, when the term "Renaissance" in its current sense
appeared in print. Jules Michelet wrote in Histoire de France (The Renaissance Debate,
edited by Denys Hay, 1965): "The pleasant word 'Renaissance' recalls to
lovers of beauty only the advent of a new art and the free play of the
imagination. For scholars, it is the renewal of classical studies,
while for jurists, daylight begins to dawn over the confused chaos of
our ancient customs." (quoted in Looking at the Renaissance: Essays Toward
a Contextual Appreciation by Charles R. Mack, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 1) Between 1846 and 1856 Burckhardt made several long trips to
Italy, partly to escape his feeling of loneliness and narrowness of the
social circles – "Italy opened my eyes," he summarized his first
impressions. Burckhardt's Italian teacher was Luigi Picchioni, who had
participated in plots to free Lombardy from Austrian rule. Burckhardt
dedicated to Picchioni the second edition of The Civilisation of
the Renessaince, though at that time he had already abandoned his
liberal beliefs. Florence was for Burckhardt the "most important
workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the modern European spirit." (Ibid., p. 86) Burckhardt was a life-long bachelor, but it seems that he had
an
unsuccesfull courtship in the late 1840s. This experience perhaps was
behind his two short volumes of poetry, Ferien. Eine Herbstgabe
(1849) and E Hämpfeli Lieder (1853). In 1848 Burckhardt taught
at the Pädagogium in Basel and in
1855 at the Polytechnic Institute in Zürich, an expanding and
progressive city, which became the center of Swiss liberalism.
Burckhardt was happy in Zürich, but three years later he resigned from
his post. From 1858 to 1893 Burckhardt held chair of history and art history at the University of Basel. One of his students was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who later become an editor of his works. In Renaissance und Barock (1888), Wölfflin made a clear historical distinction between these two styles. For Jacob Burckhardt, whose thought deeply influenced Wölfflin, Baroque meant degeneration and disruption of the classical Renaissance style. The Greek Civilization fascinated Burckhardt as much as the Renaissance. In Griechische Kulturgeschichte
(1898-1902) Burckhardt argued that myth is the underlying given
factor in Greek existence. "It illuminated the whole of the present for
the Greeks, everywhere and until a very late date, as though it
belonged to a quite recent past; and essentially it presented a sublime
reaction of the perceptions and the life of the nation itself." According to the poet
Carl Spitteler, one of Bucrkhard's students at the Basel Pädagogium, he
often said: "The world is thoroughly evil." Burckhardt did not believe in the concept of a guiding Providence. As he
analyzed the worldliness of Renaissance, Burckhardt wrote in The
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy:
"To the study of man,
among many other causes, was due the tolerance and indifference with
which the Mohammedan religion was regarded. This sympathy was fostered
by the half-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes, by dislike
and even contempt for the existing Church, and by constant commercial
intercourse with the harbours of the Eastern and Southern
Mediterranean. It can be shown that on the thirteenth century the
Italians recognised a Mohammedan ideal of nobleness, dignity, and
pride, which they loved to connect with the person of Sultan." (Ibid., pp. 492-493) Except the time he spent in Zürich and his short visits to Italy, Germany, France, and England, Burckhardt lived in his native town. However, it was not until the 1870s, that he felt there really at home. From Burckhardt's apartment, a few rooms above a bakery, was a short walk to the university. Though considered liberal and rather too much of a freethinker, he was also known affectionately as Köbi, and even a kind of patron saint of Basel. Carl Jung and other young students regarded Burckhardt as a part of the atmosphere of the city and his anti-modernism was not a serious issue – everybody read him. Burckhardt lectured on both history and art
history, and later he even abandoned the purely historical discipline.
He also gave a number of public lectures, which served as a bürgerliche
Akademie (citizens' academy). Despite viewing Basel as an intellectual
periphery, one of Burckhardt's reasons to stay there was his deep
rooted local patriotism – he felt that as a Basler he was "bound by
sense of honor and duty." Moreover, the German fatherland that he
embraced was that of Goethe, Schiller, Kant and Humboldt, the German of
humanist tradition, not that of Bismarck and militarism. (Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought by Richard Sigurdson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004, p. 51) In 1872 he turned down an offer from the University of Berlin to succeed von Ranke as chair of history. Friedrich Nietzsche was Burckhardt's younger colleague at the university
and the philosopher attended some of his lectures. They had
also long conversations. Burckhardt brought the inner tensions
of Greek culture to his attention and later Nietzsche introduced
the concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). When
Nietzsche sent him a copy of his collected essays, Unzeitgemässe
Betrachtungen
(1874), Burckhardt wrote to him: "My poor head has never been capable
of reflecting, at a distance,
as you are able to do, upon final causes, the aims and the desirability
of history," and then continued in another letter in the same vein, "I
have never . . . penetrated into the Temple of genuine thought, but
have all my life taken delight in the halls and forecourt of the
Peribolos, where the image, in the widest sense of the word, reigns." (Past
Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image by
Michael Ann Holly, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 35) As personalities, they were opposites – Burckhardt was outwardly more calm and reserved than Nietzsche, but they both were free from religious prejudices of the time. Some of their ideas, such as in the way they interpreted classical Greek culture, had similarities. Nietzsche first admired greatly Wagner but then turned his back to him. Burckhardt always disliked the composer. In his last works, Nietzsche paid his respects to the old professor. Just before he become insane, he sent a letter to Burckhardt, saying that he would rather have been a Swiss professor than God. Always reserved, Burckhardt forwarded the letter to Franz Overbeck, another friend of Nietzsche. At his late age Burckhardt associated the new middle-class culture and the Grossstadt with Jews; he lamented that the metropolis undermined the culture of old Europe he was committed to, the spirit that formerly existed in small centers of influence. Jacob Burckhardt died in Basle on August 8, 1897. On his deathbed, he gave permission to print his historical-philosophical lecture notes. Werner Kägi, Burckhardt's successor in the chair of history, edited his letters. Among Burckhardt's friends was the writer Paul von Heyse; their correspondence was published in 1974. Heyse received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910, the first German to be so honored. As the starting point of historical study, Burckhardt emphasized the individual person and the influence of small, determined groups, and ascetics. "Regarding the power of Jesuits: It is not so hard for firmly united, clever, and courageous men to do great things in the world," he argued. "Ten such men affect 100,000, because the great mass of the people have only acquisition, enjoyment, vanity, and the like in their heads, while those ten men always work together." (Judgments on History and Historians, translated by Harry Zohn, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 139; original title: Historische Fragmente, 1929) Great personalities can give a direction to whole epochs, and determine the course of history. At the same time he saw pessimistically that like the organic nature, cultures spring into being, mature, and decline. His thoughts of the loss of individualism and fear of the masses influenced among others the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who called him a master of extra-philosophical view of history. The Condottiere, the leader of a band of mercenaries, was the early embodiment of the era of unscrupulous brutes in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. According to Burckhardt, condottieres were "full of contempt for all sacred things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows," but at the same time "the genius and capacity of many among them attained the highest conceivable development". (Ibid., pp. 23-24) Burckhardt's portrayal anticipated Nietzsche's "Overman" or "Superman," who realizes his own unique individuality. "Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses?" Nietzsche asked in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Burckhardt's distrust of historical progress was not in tune with the generally optimistic cultural-historical writing of the time. Later Oswald Spengler gave to the cyclic view of cultural epochs its most visionary expression in his famous work, The Decline of the West (1918-1922). Spengler did not see any divine plan behind history. Burckhard accepted the concept of a universal spirit expressed in culture. He believed that the process of growth and decay follow laws, which are basically beyond human understanding. Turning skeptical about man's strivings for freedom and happiness, he gave up in his later years the hope of a golden age. The doctrive of progress will lead to the despotism of the masses. Burckhardt rejected Hegel's theory, in which history expresses the realization of Absolute Spirit, its coming to self-consciousness about itself. For further reading: Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered, edited by Stefan Bauer and Simon Ditchfield (2022); Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845-1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr by Evonne Levy (2015); Jacob Burckhardt: ein Portrait by Kurt Meyer (2009); Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought by Richard Sigurdson (2003); Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity by John Roderick Hinde (2000); Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness by Thomas Albert Howard (2000); Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas by Lionel Gossman (2000); 'Burckhardt, Jacob Christoph' by Albrect Classen, in Encyclopedia of the Essay, edited Tracy Chevalier (1997); Bürgerliche Modernisierungskrise and historische Sinnbildung: Kulturgeschichte bei Droysen, Burckhardt, und Max Weber by Friedrich Jaeger (1994); Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis De Tocqueville by Alan S. Kahan (1992); Der Begriff der Kultur bei Warburg, Nietzsche und Burckhardt by Yoshihiko Maikuma (1985); Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Alteuropa und Moderner Welt: Jacob Burckhardt in seiner Zeit by Wolfgang Hardtwig (1974); Hegel und Jacob Burckhardt: Zur Krisis der geschichtlichen Bewusstseins by Eckhard Heftrich (1967); Jacob Burckhardt in der Krise seiner Zeit by Johannes Wenzel (1967); Jacob Burckhardt. Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte by Löwith Karl (2. Auflage, 1966); Jacob Burckhardt als politischer Denker by Valentin Gitermann (1957); Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie by Werner Kaegi (1947-82); Nietzsche und Burckhardt by Alfred von Martin (3rd rev. ed., 1945); Jacob Burckhardt und Nietzsche by Edgar Salin (1938); Weltanschauung und Geschichtsauffassung Jakob Burckhardt by Richard Winners (1929); Jacob Burckhardt als Geschichtsphilosoph by Joel Karl (1918) Selected works:
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