“Storm and Stress Crisis in Anthropology”
American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies
Lessing Society Seminar
Providence, Rhode Island
April 25, 1993
Karl J. Fink
There would be no point in talking about Storm and Stress anthropology if the central
effort were not to actualize it, if we did not go beyond historicizing and contextualizing the
period, if we did not ask what the period has to do with the last decade of the twentieth century.
So bear with me as I seek currency for my topic (Graham, Lepenies, Weingart, 1983: xv-xx).
1. Actualized Storm and Stress
There is hardly a text of Storm and Stress anthologies (Loewenthal, 1949; Müller, 1978;
Karthaus, 1991) that does not raise questions about the legitimacies of established values in
personal, social, and political life. In short this is what the Storm and Stress decade has to do
with our decade, our continent, and our heritage. Since the late 1970s, Edward Said has been
questioning the cultural imperialism of anglo literary traditions (1979; 1993). And with another
scholarly tact, Richard H. Gaskins (1993) is examining an increasingly public style of argument
that says I am right because you cannot prove I am wrong. At the end of this kind of discussion
we have gridlock, because everyone is right, because there are no accepted authorities, because
I'm okay and you're okay!
I am not complaining. These are stressful, but exciting times, for all around us we see
different ways of dealing with this new war of cultures. The "Oklahoma Project for Discourse
and Theory plans to "explore non-hierarchical forms of self-governance and non-pyramidal
forms for conference organization" (October 8-10,1993); the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Summer Professional Program on Literature and Ethical Values includes topics on
"the rights of individuals to resist legal authority, the responsibilities of leadership, the need for
power in an unjust world, the ethics of manipulation, the value of lying" (June 21-25, 1993); the
University of Auckland in New Zealand has proposed a conference on voyages of discovery in
the Pacific that "will be devoted broadly to the contact zone shared by Europeans and indigenous
cultures in the 18th century" (August 24-28, 1993); and the International Society for the Study of
European Ideas has announced a list of over 100 seminars in which "The European Legacy" will
be examined as a means "Towards New Paradigms" (August 22-24, 1994). This is not just an
academic exercise. My local newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a headline recently
told its readership to "brace for a world full of ethnic conflicts" (p. 20A, April 7, 1993), and they
were not talking only about Sarajevo and Los Angeles.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Scherer argued that the Storm and Stress
movement was "an analogue to the French Revolution" (1870;1985:20), but by the middle of this
century Roy Pascal reduced the movement to a minor anarchy, to a few individuals more
successful in "grasping problems than asserting principles" (1952:131). Revising Scherer's
analog has continued into the present, where we find in one recent book the argument that the
Storm and Stress generation "had a strong conservative tendency that has largely been
overlooked in the critical literature" (Brown, 1992).
To question the validity of Scherer's analog certainly should not be considered wrong, but
to claim conservatism of the Storm and Stress generation, of works like Goethe's Werther
(1774), also does not seem right. The trend has been to level the issues of the Storm and Stress
decade to the general project of the Enlightenment, then to extend the Enlightenment into the
twentieth century and call it all "cultivation" of "the ultimate human destiny" (McCarthy,
1989:86). The final irony is that these two centuries of "Modernism," of cultivated destiny, also
2
have been declared dead and are now being replaced by "Postmodernism" (Docherty, 1993). In
response to our own crisis in legitimacy, we have questioned even the canon of dissent. In our
haste to restore sensitivity to emergent cultures of change, we have begun to standardize the past,
to ignore the stories of other generations that struggled against entrenched powers, in effect
committing the very crime of which we accused those in power (Federico, 1992).
2. Issues of Legitimacy
Texts of the Storm and Stress canon that give voice to the crisis in legitimacy range from
deeply personal questions about the bonds and limits of friendship, as found in Schiller's letter
(1776?; NA, 1943, 23: 2-6) to Friedrich Scharfenstein (1758-1817), to broad cultural questions
about literary models for the empowerment of a nation, as found in Goethe's speech "Zum
Shakespeares Tag" (1771, WA, 1887, I, 37:127-35). Friedrich Stolberg (1750-1819) offers us a
full spectrum of human behavior from which questions of legitimacy spill forth: "Love, courage,
compassion, devotion, admiration of goodness, disgust of the bad, and joy in a nature that speaks
to the heart; see there the seven rays of a seven colored arch, seven rays, all streaming from the
fullness of the heart" (1777, Deutsches Museum [Reclam, 78]). You, Stolberg tells the reader,
split light rays, but the wise, he argues, "unite many rays" (vereinigt viele Strahlen, p. 79); for
you "nothing is true, everything contradiction" (Euch ist nichts wahr, alles Widerspruch, p. 79).
Yes, Stolberg is arguing for unity, for "a rainbow coalition;" so where do we go from here in our
present call for diversity without equal emphasis on unity?
What irony that Stolberg would call forces of science into question with a metaphor from
the most successful story of eighteenth century science, turning Newton's analysis of light
against itself, not disputing the "value of science" (den Wert der Wissenschaften, p. 86), but
arguing that "without the warm participation of the heart the sciences are almost nothing" (Ohne
3
den warmen Anteil des Herzens sind die Wissenschaften fast nichts, p. 87). This is the issue
today, the sensitivity gap claimed by environmentalists, feminists, and a whole range of
revisionists challenging the scientific basis of power and politics in Western society.
The list of issues defining the Storm and Stress crisis of legitimacy is long, but let those
held in common with our era mark the short list. At the top is the issue of sensitivity itself, along
with the debate on the language and emotions appropriate to the advancement of relationships
between human beings and their environment. As early as 1764 Thomas Abbt (1738-66) wrote to
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) of the inadequacy of the word "feelings" (Fühlung, Vermischte
Werke, 3: 283) for this enterprise, primarily because it calls to mind specific sensations, and
because it does not encourage transitions from physiological sensations to the social and
psychological understanding of human behavior. His alternative was the term "sentiment"
(Empfindung, p. 283), an early form of "sensitivity" (Empfindsamkeit), a term that has become a
literary concept but remains problematic in the face of the Enlightenment where the forces of
disinterested reasoning are located.
Yet, linguistic inventions only mark issues. In fact, in this case Abbt's distinction fed the
source of the problem, encouraged a way of thinking, or a philosophy of science, that forms
concepts by strict aristotelian rules, per genum et differentiam (Burke, 1962:408). Serious
challenge to this habit of thinking came from another generation, from Herder (1744-1803), who
in his Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (SA, 1967, 4:343-461) called into question the
legitimacy of the entire educational system: "Look at the miserable teachers! and textbooks, who
understand no word of that which they treat. Our times have fallen into such a jumble of nominal
concepts, definitions and textbooks; that is why it delivers nothing great; that is why it discovers
nothing. It is like the greedy one: has everything and enjoys nothing" (SA, 4: ??[Reclam 142]).
4
Goethe, too, a few years later in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; WA, 1887, I,
19:1-191), has his hero give voice to the failure of formal logic and the need for more sensitized
ways of viewing our fellow human beings: "Just one thing, however: it is very rare in this world
that we can get along with an Either-Or; feelings and modes of behavior shade off as diversely as
there are gradations between a Roman and a snub nose" (WA, 19:61; Morgan, 1957, 58).
Goethe and Herder continued in later writings to challenge the powers that construct
hierarchies, reward rank, and ignore shadows. Others refract the crisis differently, like Lessing,
when he juxtaposed the process toward truth to the possession of it, and claimed the former a
human virtue: "Not truth, in whose possession someone is or may think to be, but the sincere
effort to get behind the truth shows the value of the human being" (Eine Duplik, 1886,
Lachmann, 13:23). So much for our experts! Let's hear it for those not in established chairs, for
those of an emergent culture.
In those days, too, cultural empowerment spilled over into debates on the curriculum.
Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818) argued in the preface to his Robinson der Jüngere (1779)
that this hero of self-sufficiency might serve as a role model for those inflicted with a "sensitivity
fever" (Empfindsamkeitsfieber, p. 6). This suggestion was roundly ridiculed in the preface of
Johann Carl Wezel's (1747-1819) new edition of Robinson Krusoe (1779), for Wezel could not
bring himself to trust that book nor any other as a cure for a "national illness"
(Nationalkrankheit, 1:v).
By the end of the decade the issues of legitimacy called into question by the spectra of
"sensitivity" had come full circle and began to bit its own tail. In his book on Die Feyerstunden
der Grazien (1780) Johann Georg Heinzmann wrote "On Phony Sensitivity" (pp. 100-101),
seeking to separate true issues of the heart from those fabricated for a special cause. This was
5
only the beginning of the slippery slope of advocacy by special interest groups. The issues of
sensitivity did not fade away, they continued through the period of the French Revolution.
Listen to the voice of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger (1752-1831) who named the movement and
later, at the turn of the century, observed that the detractors and defenders of sensitivity were in
gridlock: "The controversy, which presently reigns between the cold rational and the warm,
sensitive philosophers, is like the battle between the so-called, totally new sovereignty of the
people, and the thousand years of experience against it. . . . When warriors of the controversy are
tired, they look around at their true position and step back into their borders. Only one difference
will remain, and it is considerable. That struggle covered the battlefield with bodies, this one
covers it with books" (Betrachtungen un Gedanken, 1801-02, 11:82).
Few controversies of our decade are a better refraction of the battlefield of the Storm and
Stress movement than the issue of multiculturism. And few testimonies of that period provide a
clearer image of our own dilemma than Goethe's speech dedicated "Zum Shäkespears Tag" (WA,
1887, I, 37:127-35). Speaking in the personal tones of a promethean activist and reflecting the
nationalistic voice of a third world culture, that is representing a culture particularized and
fragmented by more than 300 absolute principalities, he asked quite simply how an individual or
a culture might overcome "non-existence" (Nonexistenz, WA, 37:129); he asked about models of
emulation proper for himself, the German language, and German aspirations. He wanted to
know how one creates a natural literature, proclaiming "Nature! Nature! nothing so nature like
Shakespeare's human beings" (Natur! Natur! nichts so Natur als Shakespeares Menschen, WA,
37:133). But listen to the way he rejected the legitimacy of the literary establishment: "I jumped
into the free air and felt for the first time that I had hands and feet. And now, after I have seen
how much injustice the gentlemen of rules in their abyss have done to me, how many free souls
6
therein still twist; my heart would break if I had not called them into a feud and not daily tried to
topple their apparatus" (WA,37:131). What he saw is what the crystal pepsi advertisement says:
"right now nature is inventing better stuff than science."
3. The Legacy of Secularization
What does this Storm and Stress crisis in legitimacy have to do with anthropology and
what does that mean for us today. To answer the second question all we have to do is look at the
ethnic conflicts on every continent and we realize that the difficulties are located in historical
events, in wars, treaties, slave markets, in acts of oppression committed generations and
centuries ago. It should not surprise us that our own crisis is plagued by regrets, indeed, by
disrespect for our past, for if our century can claim world wars, and global economies, than why
should it not also claim collective guilt for crimes against humanity. If globalism defines our
age, what is the contribution of the Storm and Stress movement to this legacy.
It was in the Storm and Stress decade that all the pieces to the puzzle of global
populations became known for the first time. And so it was in this decade that we get the first
glimpse of some of the border conflicts known to anthropology both as a discipline and as a
political reality. Four basic border disputes seem to cover the range of cultural and physical
anthropology from this period, including the tension between 1) christians and non-christians, 2)
scientists and humanists, 3) polynesians and europeans, and 4) human beings and animals.
These disputes were represented by lines drawn between real people and on real maps; they were
borders discussed in books and journals, in syllabi, lectures, and dissertations. They were issues
driven by the motors of mercantilism, religion, and science, not unlike the problems of contact
zones today.
Briefly sketched, the legacy of Storm and Stress anthropology began with the
7
Enlightenment, with Voltaire's (1694-1778) critique of biblical history in his Philosophy of
History from 1765 (1766; 1965), but it took on its unique character in the German reception of
that work. The results of this first step was not just to question the legitimacy of the Genesis
story, but to inaugurate a complete secularization of our understanding of human behavior. The
project in universal history at Göttingen, introduced by Johann Gatterer (1727-99) and developed
by August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809), accepted Voltaire's perspective but rejected his history
which they considered undisciplined.
The Göttingen project was designed to make historical study scientific, and in the process
of developing an "ethnographic" (ethnographisch, 1772:99) methodology they also shaped the
border conflict between histories written from a western and non-western perspective. For better
or worse, the Göttingen project was a response to Voltaire's criticism of histories written from
the Judeo-Christian perspective and it did lead to a syllabus of diversity distinguished by local
and general compositions, or in Schlözer's words, as "special" (Special) and "aggregate"
(Aggregat, 14) histories of the world.
Herder despised the scientific language of Schlözer's ethnographic historiography; he
called it "linnean aping" (Linneische Nachäffung, SA, 1967, 5: 440) And so it was Herder who
next advanced the secularization of human history, proposing in his essay on "Auch eine
Philosophy der Geschichte" (1967, SA, 5:475-5-94) from 1774 that indigenous measures of
value be introduced in the study of human behavior. In his view each historical culture should be
evaluated according to its own "center of gravity" (Schwerpunkt, 509). This proposal was to
yield a new kind of historiography in conflict with the scientific ethnography proposed by the
Göttingen school. In his alternative new lines were drawn in cultural anthropology, those
between the peoples of the orient and Egyptians, between the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, the
8
Phoenicians and the Greeks, and finally the Greeks and Romans, each one marked by their own
center of gravity, by their own "inclinations" (Neigungen, SA,1967,5:486-88).
In Schlözer's scheme, there was only one historical period, the one marking the rise and
fall of Rome. Herder set a new standard for cultural anthropology, one Forster followed in his
journal from the Voyage Round the World with Captain Cook (1777; 1958, 1). Not only is this
work one of the best ethnographic reports on early polynesian culture, but it also represents some
of the first criticism of Eurocentrism in cultural contact zones around the globe. Today Herder's
call for indigenous measures of value remains the fundamental challenge in policies and
programs of multiculturalism.
Physical anthropology of the Storm and Stress period went through much the same
transition from a theistic to secular definitions. In his natural history, Buffon had defined a
species of animals as those of that group that can procreate fertile offspring (Buffon, 1771-74).
Kant (1724-1804) endorsed this definition and as early as 1775, and applied it to his lecture on
the various races of mankind. The definition had eliminated hybrids such as the mule from
species status, but the case still had to be made for the human beings marginalized from status as
members of the same species; this was the task that Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840) accepted
for his dissertation, defended in 1775, published in 1776, and again in 1781 and 1795. His
challenge was to establish and defend the unity of the species against attempts to reject certain
groups different in stature, like the Pathagonians off the coast of South America, and those
afflicted with certain pathologies like the albinos. His dissertation warns of the dangers of
pluralism and the potential by which those of a dominant cultures take advantage of diversity as
a means to exclude and differentiate, ultimately in this process gaining rank and power.
In his dissertation Blumenbach had unified the human species. In 1779 a second
9
dissertation by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) marked the high point of Storm and Stress
anthropology by positing three organic forces that unite the human beings' animal and spiritual
nature. These forces brought into mutual reciprocity the neural and intellectual functions of the
human being, ending the either-or separation of mind and body. Schiller argued that the human
species evolved from "a collision of animal drives" (Kollision der thierischen Triebe, NA,20:54),
and developed the freedom that supports improvement in the human condition. The decade had
begun with Kant's endorsement of Pieter Moscati's (1739-1824) claim that the human being was
in a structural sense originally a four-footed animal, and it ended with that assumption, and with
a search for the forces that integrate the reciprocity of mind and body. From this point on
anthropology would engage border conflicts in the search for human behavior grounded in
biology and sociology.
This, the secularization of anthropology, was the achievement of the Storm and Stress
decade. The human being was not of Adam's rib and human behavior was of nature and by
nurture. No, it was not a product of natural selection. But for purposes of policy and curriculum,
would it not profit us to skip Darwinian anthropology and return to the organic teleology of the
late eighteenth century, where we acknowledge a reciprocity of mind and body, but work
towards mind over matter? Should we not study the literature of those who did not know about
"the survival of the fittest," of those who sought the unity of the human species, saw human
behavior as a product of body and soul, and at least remained open to the possibility of human
perfection.
References
Müller, Peter, ed. Sturm un Drang. Weltanschauliche un ästhetische Schriften. 2 vols. Berlin:
Aufbau, 1978.
Loewenthal, Erich, ed. Sturm un Drang. Kritische Schriften. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1949.
10
Karthaus, Ulrich, ed. Sturm un Drang un Empfindsamkeit. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991.
Gaskins, Richard H. Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993.
Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Brown, Robert H. Nature's Hidden Terror: Violent Nature Imagery in Eighteenth-Century
Literature. Columbia, SC: Camden, 1992.
Graham, Loren, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart, eds. Functions and uses of Disciplinary
Histories. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
McCarthy, John A. Crossing Boundaries. A Theory and History of Essay Writing in German
1680-1815. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Pascal, Roy. "The `Sturm un Drang' Movement." Modern Language Review. 1952:129-51.
Scherer, Wilhelm. "Die Deutsche Litteraturrevolution." in: Sturm un Drang. M. Wacker, Ed.
Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1985. pp. 17-24. Repr. 1870.
Burke, Kenneth. A grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Meridian, 1962.
Goethe, Johann. The Sufferings of Young Werther. B. Q. Morgan, Trans. New York: Ungar,
1957.
Federico, Joseph. Confronting Modernity. Columbia, SC: Camden, 1992.
Buffon, George Louis Leclerc. Herrn von Buffons Allgemeine Naturgeschichte. 7 vols. ??????,
Trans. Berlin: ?????, 1771-74.