When Georg Forster lay dying in the Rue des Moulins in Paris in 1794, he fantasized about an overland trip to Asia he hoped to take, and just before his eyes failed him, they met a map of India spread out before him on his bed: not a crucifix (as had been customary for centuries), not Plato’s Phaidon (on the immortality of the soul), not an image of the youth with the down-turned torch (as one might have expected of a humanist) — but a map of a faraway land, on that bed in the capital of Europe.
Eminently fitting, of course, eminently symbolic, this demise: a biographer’s dream come true. For, ever since his teens and early twenties (when he went around the world with Captain Cook), Forster had been fascinated, indeed obsessed with the idea that the time was ripe for a new and truly contemporary concept of education or Bildung as he
1 Undocumented statements are fully referenced in my book Die Erfindung der Welt:
Globalität und Grenzen inder Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen, 2005), 9–82.
That is also the place to look for additional primary and critical material pertinent to this subject. More recent relevant studies have been incorporated into the present version.
© Karl S. Guthke, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126.04
consistently called it. But what kind of Bildung? Instead of a religious idea or a humanistic idea of what it means to be truly educated, what was called for now, he thought, was what we may describe as global education or global Bildung. The religious concept of Bildung rested on the Christian verities; but that concept was by now in jeopardy, what with Canadian Indians being taught that Jesus was a Frenchman crucified by the British.2 The humanist concept of Bildung, on the other hand, promised the development of the appreciation of secular culture as a result of one’s immersion into European history all the way back to Antiquity, with its art, philosophy and civilization; this concept, too, had seen better days, although in 1808 Achim von Arnim still described its advocacy as crowing classically from the rooftops.3
Persons of global education, on the other hand, had studied the map of the world: they had become familiar with accounts of the populations on the continents beyond Europe and endeavored to form an image, a new image of themselves (or in fact, to use a word that tripped off the tongue more easily then than it does now, of “human nature”). How? By comparing themselves no longer with cattle or angels or Greeks for that matter, but with “them” out there: them and their alternative modes of existence and thought. And they did so, eager to learn from the widened horizon and quite willing to adjust and even doubt their own values and designs for their lives in the light of those of others in faraway lands.
“To study human nature you have to look at the distance,” Rousseau had thought in mid-century,4 mentioning China and Paraguay and other places he did not know about — even Florida (just the place to go to study human nature); but unfortunately, “la philosophie ne voyage point.”5 However, after Forster, in the 1770s at the latest, this was no longer true. “Philosophical voyages” with their naturalists and anthropologists aboard were “in” now. As Robert Wokler has noted,
“not until the eighteenth century [more exactly the second half of the century] did it come to be accepted that the study of human nature in general, and empirical investigations of savage societies in particular,
2 Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (n.p.: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 52.
3 Achim von Arnim und die ihm nahe standen, ed. Reinhold Steig, I: Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano (Stuttgart, 1894), 229.
4 Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 1970), 89.
5 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, Œuvres complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, III (Paris, 1964), 212.
form precisely the same field.”6 This was true even in small-town, semi-rural Weimar, where, to be sure, there was the smell of cow manure in the air (as some historians like to point out), but also what Germans call the scent of the big wide world (“Duft der großen weiten Welt”).
Parenthetically, this global anthropological interest shown by the
“philosophical travellers” as Forster called them does not need to be suspected categorically as being colonialism in disguise or even colonial fantasy. Robert Irwin recently fired a broadside against this view in his anti-history of oriental studies entitled, provocatively, For Lust of Knowing,7 not to mention Sankar Muthu’s programmatical study Enlightenment against Empire.8 These are recent insights, to be sure. But contemporaries of the “philosophical travellers” saw it that way, too, the anti-Said way, even those among them who did not think much of such “philosophical voyages”: Dr. Johnson, for example, recognized the scientific and philosophical nature of such enterprises even though he thought that not much was coming from them (“only one new animal,”
he said: the kangaroo; not: “only one new colony”), and Thoreau wondered whether it was really worthwhile to sail around the world to
“count the cats in Zanzibar,” not: to count potential plantation workers.9 But such misgivings are only a footnote to the emerging new concept of Bildung: travel (as the Encyclopédie had it in its article “Voyage”) as
“la meilleure école de la vie,” not “de la superiorité européenne.” To be sure, Napoleon’s colonialist remark that the savage was a dog (“le sauvage est un chien”)10 points to an appalling aspect of the growing global awareness of the time: throughout the eighteenth century and the age of Goethe, too, there were indeed the horrors of what Nicholas
6 “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, eds. Christopher Fox et al. (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 7 31.For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London, 2006).
8 Princeton, NJ, 2003. See also Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World (Cambridge, MA, 2006), ch. “Patrons”; Nicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages,” The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (1994), 116–136, esp. 116 and 122–123. For further evidence of the critical view of the imperialistic interpretation of philosophical voyages and similar explorations, see Guthke, 332–334.
9 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, eds. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, II (Oxford, 1934), 247; The Illustrated Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ, 1973), 322.
10 René Gonnard, La Légende du bon sauvage (Paris, 1946), 121.
Dirks called the scandal of Empire, in his book bearing that title.11 But it was also the time of the emergence of global Bildung.
The colonizing countries, Britain and France, had led the way, of course. The locus classicus is a passage from Edmund Burke’s letter of 9 June 1777 to William Robertson (whose History of America had just been published):
I have always thought that we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature. We need no longer go to History to trace it in all its stages and periods. History from its comparative youth, is but a poor instructour. […] But now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our View. The very different Civility of Europe and of China; The barbarism of Persia and Abyssinia. The erratick manners of Tartary, and of Arabia.
The Savage State of North America, and of New Zealand.12
It is not difficult to show that this global awareness, in what John Parry, in his Trade and Dominion, called “the second age of discovery,” brought about a new, a global concept of what it means to be educated: in Britain as well as in France. (Think of P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams’s book The Great Map of Mankind13 and Sergio Moravia’s study of “La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme.”14)