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Change of Paradigm As a Squabble Between CHANGE OF PARADIGM AS A SQUABBLE BETWEEN INSTITUTIONS: THE INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL SCIENCES, THE SOCIETY OF SCIENCES, AND THE SEPARATION OF CULTURAL AND NATURAL SCIENCES IN GÖTTINGEN IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Martin Gierl The story related here takes place against the background of a fundamen- tal development in the history of science: the separation of the cultural from the natural sciences in the eighteenth century. The stage on which it played out is the leading university in the Holy Roman Empire, the Uni- versity of Göttingen, with the Society of Sciences, designed by Albrecht von Haller, on one side, and the Institute of Historical Sciences, founded in 1764 by Johann Christoph Gatterer, who held the chair of history from 1759 until his death in 1799, on the other.1 Two academies—Gatterer had originally intended to name his institute “Historical Academy”— confronted each other and engaged in a quarrel. I will demonstrate that Gatterer intended to practise history very much along the lines of the old concept ultimately originating in antiquity, including geography and chro- nology and incorporating the historia naturalis—in the manner of what we would call natural science today. I will also show that while he found favourable conditions for this in Göttingen with respect to geography, his project was at the same time curtailed at the institutional level by the resistance of the Society of Sciences. Focusing on the case of Göttingen, we can advance the following hypothesis: It was for institutional reasons that historiography in the second half of the eighteenth century became 1 I wish to thank the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and the Gerda- Henkel-Stiftung for their support of the research on which this article is based. The offi- cial names or self-designations were Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen [Königliche Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen] and Royal Institute of Historical Sciences [Königliches Institut der historischen Wissenschaften]. Gatterer and eighteenth-century historiography are treated in greater detail in Martin Gierl’s forthcoming Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft. Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Geschichtsschreibung des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (working title); for an excellent introduction to Gatterer, see Peter Hanns Reill, ‘Johann Christoph Gatterer’, in Hans Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Deutsche Historiker (Göttingen 1980), vol. 6, 7–22. © MARTIN GIERL, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004243910_013 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Martin Gierl - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:10:48PM via free access 268 martin gierl a narrative cultural science rather than a social science embedded in both the natural sciences and the specialised jurisprudential environment. The protagonists and opponents in my story include Gatterer, on one side; on the side of the Society of Sciences, orientalist Johann David Michaelis along with mathematician Abraham Gotthelf Kästner; and, midway between these two parties, natural historian Christian Wilhelm Büttner.2 The separation of the cultural from the natural sciences cannot be nar- rated only as an institutional history. Alongside the latter there exists a whole range of discourse histories, all of them just as coherent in them- selves: that of historiography, debates about cultural and linguistic devel- opment, and specialised mathematical and geographical discourse, and as many biographically coherent personal histories as there are actors in the process: that of Michaelis, who directed the Society of Sciences after Haller’s departure, interpreted the Bible from a historical and empirical perspective, and organised Niebuhr’s famous research expedition to the orient; that of Kästner, who was appointed director of the astronomical observatory in the 1760s and who fought to make mathematics an inde- pendent subject; as well as that of Büttner, who linked linguistic analysis with the reconstruction of the history of peoples. The discourse histories, life histories, and institutional histories of the separation of cultural and natural sciences are interlinked, but they do not simply blend into each other and are not simply each a reverse side of, or another perspective on, the other histories. Behind my narrative thus stands a question of general and, in my view, topical—in terms of theory—historiographical interest: How are the institutional, cultural, life, and discourse histories that we historians narrate, and which, as narratives, inevitably have an inner coherence, interconnected? How do the historical fields concerned with institutions, culture, life, and discourses—in terms of both real his- torical events and discourse history—translate from one into the other with respect to communication and interaction? 2 On Michaelis, see Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Ger- many (Cambridge 2007), 31ff. and 165ff.; see also Rainer Baasner, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Aufklärer (1719–1800) (Tübingen 1991). On Büttner, see Manfred Urban, ‘Die Völkerkundli- che Sammlung. Eine im Zeitalter der Aufklärung wurzelnde ethologische Sammlung ihre Entstehung und weitere Entwicklung’, in Dietrich Hoffmann and Kathrin Maack-Rheinlän- der (eds.), “Ganz für das Studium angelegt”. Die Museen, Sammlungen und Gärten der Uni- versität Göttingen (Göttingen 2001), 91–98. On Büttner’s biography, see ‘Christian Wilhelm Büttner’, in Friedrich Schlichtegroll, Nekrolog der Teutschen für das 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1. (1802), in Deutsches Biographisches Archiv (München 2004). Microfiche I 163, 188–216. Martin Gierl - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:10:48PM via free access change of paradigm as a squabble between institutions 269 The answer I can give in the present case is unsatisfactory, or even downright impertinent. Regarding the biographical and discourse histo- ries, I must ask readers to study them elsewhere if they are interested.3 I cannot, therefore, even attempt to outline how discourses, biographies and institutions developed in reciprocal dependency and embedded within their discursive, biographical, and institutional environments. I must begin several steps earlier, by showing that institutions generally function as a kind of “aligner” of discourses and biographies. My theory is that the individual discourses on history, mathematics, geography, etc. are surrounded by an institutional architecture that they share in a histori- cally specific fashion, and that the shape of this institutional architecture determines the scope of any further specialised discourses. Opportunities for action and for asserting one’s interests within an institution depend on how much space is taken up by external interests—by neighbours within the shared institutional architecture, so to speak. In the case under discus- sion here, the development of historiography did not depend directly on the mathematical, philological, and other discourses, but was very much indirectly dependent on how strongly they promoted themselves in insti- tutional terms alongside history. In my view, these types of crucial, non- content-related institutionalising effects of discourses define a central and concrete aspect of their historical weight. The following section outlines Gatterer’s concept of historiography and his plan for an academy. This is followed by a presentation of the connec- tion between historiography and geography, and of the favourable situa- tion Gatterer faced at the outset with regard to geography in Göttingen. The final section contains a detailed account of this particular case. 3 On the history of historiography in the eighteenth century, see Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Stuttgart 1991); Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst. Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860 (Berlin 1996); Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Den- kens an deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1972); Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufklärung. Die Vorgeschichte des Historismus (München 1991); Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley 1975). On geography, see Anne Maria Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound. French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago 1999); Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography. The Political Languages of British Geography. 1650–1850 (Basingstoke 2000). On Gatterer’s attempts to link history and natural history, see Gierl, forthcoming (note 1); id., ‘Das Alphabet der Natur und das Alphabet der Kultur im 18. Jahr- hundert. Botanik, Diplomatik, Linguistik und Ethnographie nach Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer und Christian Wilhelm Büttner’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Ethik der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 18 (2010), 1–27. Martin Gierl - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 09:10:48PM via free access 270 martin gierl History in All Its Breadth The guiding principle Gatterer followed as a historiographer was to process, write, and organise history in all its breadth [in ihrem ganzen Umfang]. The idea was that once all historically relevant, “noteworthy” [merkwürdige] events had been recorded and accurately arranged, it would be possible to chart history, locate each individual event in the overall chain of events, and, ultimately, even trace the causal sequence of historical developments. History
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