Alexander Jakovljević. Schillers Geschichtsdenken: Die Unbegreifl ichkeit der Weltgeschichte. Berlin: Ripperger & Kremers Verlag, 2015. 381 pp.

Summary

Among the many contributions of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) was to question the dogmatic belief in providence: Kant argued that the human mind represents both organic nature and human history as if (als ob) both were teleological, although we can never verify this claim. Despite the fact that Kant limited teleology to regulative use, Karl Löwith claimed in his influential study Meaning in History (1949) that the nineteenth-century philosophy of history is nothing but secularized eschatology. Although Löwith's argument is a simplification, his criticism of master narratives had enormous influence on the development of postmodernism. Since Hayden White's Metahistory (1973), historians have debated to what extent historical events themselves have order and to what extent it is only the historian's narration that gives them meaning.

Alexander Jakovljević's Schillers Geschichtsdenken: Die Unbegreiflichkeit der Weltgeschichte (2015) shows how complex Friedrich Schiller's historical thought was, and provides some new insights into how he theorized the relationship between teleology and contingency in history. Schiller's place is very interesting among the post-Kantian philosophers, because he published his major works before the rise of German idealism: his position seems to be somewhere between Kant's regulative approach to teleology and Hegel's belief that the telos of history is the accumulation of freedom.

Jakovljević convincingly shows that Schiller's position is based on the tension between two almost opposite views of history. In 1789, Schiller was appointed professor of history at the university of Jena on Goethe's recommendation. His famous inaugural lecture Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? (1789) appears to be firmly anchored in the belief that human history is a teleological process. It was published one year before Kant's criticism of teleological judgments in the third critique. In contrast, Ueber das Erhabene (1801) provides a very different understanding of history. Schiller argued there that history is incomprehensible and seems to be ruled more by coincidence (Zufall) than teleology. The previous scholarship has often assumed that Schiller moved from earlier providentialism to a more pessimist understanding of history because of his disappointment with the horrors of the French Revolution. According to Jakovljević, Schiller's hovering between providentialism and coincidentalism should not be seen as a linear development from the former to the latter.