The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

If you want to understand the modern world, a good place to start is with Kant, woken up from a dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume.

What it meant was the end of the Age of Reason, the conceit that humans had banished ignorance and superstition with the triumph of human logic and reason.

It started with Kant and ran for over a century. Whether you consider it ended when Hitler flung the brain of Germany across the Atlantic to the US of A, or perhaps later with Marcuse and Habermas, I call it the German Turn.

Back in the day it was called "the German pestilence that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible."

My relationship with the German Turn began when I read this, from F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. It's in The Meeting of East and West, Chapter V, German Idealism:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

If you have never heard of F.S.C. Northrop, here is a clue from British philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, who wrote "F.S.C. Northrop... remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call... a genius for teaching."

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top... [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them... and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

But what does this mean?

It means, to begin with Kant, that we don't experience the world directly as commonplace objects like mothers, tables, chairs, dogs, horses, and food, as we imagine. We cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only the sense impressions from our five senses, most notably vision, that have been processed into a vision of the world by our brain and its "categories."

What, you might ask? What craziness is this, when we can't even accept the reality of the every-day world around us? Well, I would now say, after 20-odd years reading and thinking and writing about this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

Here is what I wrote, for American Thinker, nearly 15 years ago in "Conservatives and the Creative Impulse." Let us start with the phenomenon of Freud and the notion of the unconscious underneath our conscious mind.

Freud's psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe.  But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.  The key link in this chain is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world?  Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory.  But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales.  It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory.  And that act comes from impulse: "All our thought is founded on our impulses," he wrote.  It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis. 

I am in the middle of reading Freud's On Dreams, and I must say I find it indigestible, partly because I find Freud too mechanical and Newtonian. I prefer the chap that came after Freud, C.G. Jung, who connected the unconscious with all the myths of mankind, as an expression, a welling up, of the human unconscious. Oh yeah. Whatabout Richard Wagner, who created a four-opera cycle about German pre-Christian mythology, The Ring of the Nibelungs, right in the middle of the German Turn.

But notice that Freud did not just appear out of nowhere, and did not invent his idea of the unconscious out of whole cloth. He is the heir to the German thinkers that came before him. Jung says that C.G. Carus invented the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann reinterpreted Schopenhauer's Will and Idea into unconscious and conscious thought.

Actually, you could say that the whole German Turn is the development of understanding about the unconscious. When Kant says that we don't know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions, he is telling us that, unbeknown to us, our unconscious mind is creating an image of the world out of our sense impressions, a theory about the actual things-in-themselves or whatever it is out there.

Jordan B. Peterson comments on this. He says that we -- and the animals -- walk around in the world on the unconscious's autopilot until the moment that something unexpected happens. Then we freeze until we figure out what is going on. In other words, our unconscious theory of the world has broken and we need to mend it with a spot of conscious thought before we proceed.

So the point of the German Turn is to say that the magnificent skyscrapers of logic and temples of reason are built on hidden foundations that we ignore at our risk. These foundations are the hidden depths of the unconscious. Indeed, it may be that 90 percent of our brain action goes on in the unconscious. And, some naughty boys have suggested, maybe the conscious mind is just a movie -- think The Matrix -- that our unconscious mind runs in our brain to make us feel good about ourselves.

One of the consequences of the German Turn is the modern culture of creativity. To repeat Fichte: "All our thought is founded on our impulses." This, of course, is what artists and writers experience. Their stories and theories do not come from pure logic and reason; they come from somewhere deep in the unconscious, or, as opera composer Puccini said of Madama Butterfly, "the music of this opera was dictated to me by God."

Notice how the notion of creativity replaces the old notion of a fixed mechanical universe, and before that of a world run according to the whim of the gods. In the old days, we understood that we were the mere playthings of the gods, and subject to the power plays amongst them. How to get in their good favor? Sacrifice. Then, with the Axial Age religions, we might discover the workings of God's or Nature's universe and we spoke of God's Law. But now we are in the business of creating the future, not merely understanding God's plan and executing it. And our lefty friends are busy creating the future and heaven on earth with their critical theory and activism and peaceful protest.

I have tried to give expression to all this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe that powerful forces run the world, and that they need to find protection under a powerful lord. My People of the Responsible Self are people that believe in God's Creation and his rational Divine Law, and the point of life is to use reason and logic to find out and live God's plan. My People of the Creative Self are people that believe that they are creating the world through creative process. They are the people inspired by the German Turn.

However, there is a problem. You may have noticed it. There is a tendency for humans only to respect and understand their own kind. Thus People of the Subordinate Self have a tendency to believe that the  rest of the world is out to get them; The People of the Responsible Self have a tendency to think that the Subordinates are lazy bums and that the Creatives are whacky immoralists. The People of the Creative Self tend to believe that Responsibles are racist-sexist-homophobes and that the Subordinates are helpless victims of the bigoted Responsibles.

But I think that my wonderful Three Peoples theory, as a stage theory of consciousness -- see Hegel above -- understands and respects humans at all levels of consciousness as it also understands why people at different levels mistrust and dislike "the other."

I have recently come into contact with Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" and his three-layer model of society, of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Says he:

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

So great minds think alike.

Now, I believe that Kant's dictum that we don't know things-in-themselves leads directly to the revolution in physics, of curved space in relativity, of indeterminacy and the state function in quantum mechanics.

I believe that Fichte's "impulse" theory of thought leads directly to our notion of creativity and the Freud and Jung theories of the unconscious.

I believe that Jung's theory of the individual and the collective unconscious and the archetypes allows us to connect with and understand our pre-rational ancestors and their mythologies.

And I believe that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is what powers the modern notion of creativity and perhaps even Schumpeter's notion of economic "creative destruction." For instance, I was just reading Nietzsche this morning and he talked in Will to Power §784 about freedom and power.

One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e., equal power.

And this echoes Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.

In other words, the German Turn leads to all things, both good and evil. And "creativity," rather than being the innocent craving of starving artists and writers for inspiration, is really a program of power. For, even back in mythology, it was understood that the god of creativity was also the god of destruction. As in Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

In a way, the German Turn is another expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Before Kant we were innocents in the Garden of Reason and Logic. But now we realize our nakedness, and are ashamed. We have learned frightful powers, and yet, as ever, there is no return to the Garden of Eden. Once you have tasted the apple of the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back.

So we go forward, terrified of our powers, and yet inspired to discover more, still the social animals of Africa that added a new dimension to social cooperation with language, still the creatures that developed logic and reason out of the need to keep our story straight in social interactions, and now conscious of our amazing and frightening creative powers.

That we have the power to make the world anew. And also to destroy it all in less time than it takes to say it.

Thanks to the German Turn it is the best of times; it is the worst of times: the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.

As it ever was, and is, and shall be.