Romanticism And Resistance: Humboldt And 'German' Natural Philosophy In Napoleonic France

Any attempt to deal with the relationship of French science to German science in the Romantic period has to come to grips with the increasingly ethno-national self-consciousness that comes to pervade intellectual and cultural work in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. Artists, poets, and critics measured their work against national origins. They cast themselves in a history of Europe defined by the mixture, conflict, and succession of peoples, each animated by a particular character or spirit, reciprocally determining and determined by physical environment, political institutions, religion, and art.1 So too did natural philosophers.2 Neglecting this dimension of cultural activity in the period runs the risk of attributing the prominent role of national categories in philosophical discourse to actually existing national differences and missing their internal, discursive function in the definition of nationhood in this critical period. In particular, we risk losing the constitutive role that scientific activity and the increasingly explicit discussions of “scientific method” played in the construction of national identities in the period. As Frederick Gregory notes in his essay in this volume, Orsted was preoccupied from the 1800s on with concerns about defining an authoritative approach to knowing Nature, concerns which we tend to associate more with the 1830s and 1840s and the British context. Implicit in Gregory’s account of Orsted’s debate with the Danish theologian and popular educator Frederik Grundtvig, and explicit in Andrew Jackson’s detailed exposition of the lateEnlightenment Danish church controversies that motivated Orsted’s first ventures into natural philosophy, is that Orsted’s “early” concern with defining a “scientific method” reflects a much broader contemporary debate about the place of church