I.

To address, in English, the contemporary relevance of Geist in the Geisteswissenschaften, and in the more antiquated-sounding field of Geistesgeschichte, is to be confronted by a case of what Barbara Cassin terms untranslatability. In Being Human, Roger Smith claims that ›the Geisteswissenschaften‹ cannot be translated as ›the human sciences‹, because in that rendering, important resonances of Geist are lost.Footnote 1 Translating Geist as ›mind‹ – a strategy favoured by some translators of Hegel, most notably James Black Baillie, who delivered the first English edition of Hegel’s Phänomenologie in 1910 – is arguably a means of de-idealising Geist to make it amenable to positivist sensibilities.Footnote 2 References to ›the humanities‹ in English are closer to the Geisteswissenschaften in that they refer to disciplines such as classics, history, philosophy and literary studies, and by extension to the ideology of Bildung through which these fields were introduced into Britain by Germanophile mediators such as Matthew Arnold during the nineteenth century, yet this solution also strips them of any claims to systematicity inherent in Wissenschaft.

Writing in 1920, Erich Rothacker was already conscious of how heavily the idealist baggage of Geist weighed upon the future of the Geisteswissenschaften in an age dominated by the natural sciences. »The edifices of the contemporary Geisteswissenschaften,« he writes,

still rest upon the foundations of the great late-romantic sciences […] That these romantic elements are no longer understood, indeed that we must already in some cases interpret the principal positions […] as though they were written in a dead language, does not prevent these ideas from having the liveliest practical influence upon our methodological procedures.Footnote 3

Rothacker was aware that even in the age of positivism, Geist was able to survive by being disguised within other positions. Whereas in France and England, he observes with some irony, the slogan of positivism was »away from metaphysics,« in Germany it arrived as a scarcely veiled »metaphysical revelation« marked with Hegelian remnants.Footnote 4 This »new wave of collectivism,« inspired by stadial theorists such as Auguste Comte in France and Edward Burnett Tylor in Britain, sought to bring stringency to the Geisteswissenschaften by proposing that culture develops according to universal laws, with individual authors being regarded as representative of uniform historical phases.Footnote 5 Rothacker notes that stadial theory permeated the ideas of arguably the two key figures in his account of the late nineteenth-century Geisteswissenschaften: in philology it informs Wilhelm Scherer’s evolutionary distinction between oral and written literature (Natur- und Kunstpoesie), while in his treatment of volume two of Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, Rothacker describes Dilthey as associating metaphysical ideas with a particular phase of human history, thereby implying, in the manner of Comte, their decreased relevance for secularised contemporary life.Footnote 6

As the editors of a recent issue of IASL devoted to the sociology of literature remind us,Footnote 7 the category of Geistesgeschichte was, as early as 1945, subjected to a withering assessment by the émigré Germanist Karl Viëtor. In Viëtor’s words, any sociologist would regard Geistesgeschichte as »the last flickering of a senile idealism enjoying a late summer at the end of the bourgeois age.«Footnote 8 The pitfalls of Geistesgeschichte in Viëtor’s account are associated with Dilthey’s turn towards a philosophy of worldviews: a tendency towards abstraction and typology, according to which the particularity of an author is elided by classification within a larger movement or epoch; a merely vague apprehension of the importance of psychology for the study of literature and a complete neglect of the sociology of literature; and finally a dangerous tendency to relate Geist to the idea of Volksgeist, to the purportedly essential cultural characteristics of a people. This last charge is admittedly directed not at Dilthey, but rather at Joseph Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (4 vols., 1912-1918). Nevertheless, one does not have to look too hard into the history of the DVjs to find similar tendencies in the writings of Erich Rothacker.

While thus very far indeed from being worthy of wholescale rehabilitation, the ideas of Rothacker concerning Geistesgeschichte demand a re-evaluation in terms of their contemporary relevance. Of interest are two facts: first, that Viëtor’s condemnation of Geistesgeschichte mentions neither Rothacker’s name, nor that of the DVjs; second, and as is pointed out by the editors of the IASL special issue,Footnote 9 it was Rothacker who attempted to combine Geistesgeschichte with sociology. This project unfolded under four overlapping labels – Kultursoziologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Kulturanthropologie and philosophische Anthropologie – all of which attempted to concretise Geist, either by relating it to forms of social organisation in a manner that is superficially similar to Marx (Kultursoziologie), or by seeing it as emerging from the biological-cum-cultural characteristics of the human being (Geschichtsphilosophie, Kulturanthropologie, philosophische Anthropologie). In addition, in some of Rothacker’s writings of the 1930s, the concept of Geist takes on völkisch and anti-Semitic contours.

II.

At the beginning of a two-part DVjs review essay (Sammelreferat) treating of several works on human biology and sociology, Rothacker announces that the time has come to replace Dilthey’s Geistesphilosophie with an »earthier and not only spiritual theory of the human being.« Such a theory would examine the »roots, forces, and underlying conditions of concrete spiritual life in landscape, the drives, race, society and the state,« and would transform the »philosophy of absolute spirit (in Hegel’s sense)« into a »philosophical anthropology.«Footnote 10 In the second part of this essay, Rothacker outlines what he regards, quoting Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes, as »the task of the twentieth century,« that of clarifying »the reciprocal relations between Geistesleben or spiritual life (as ideological superstructure or Überbau) and the so-called economic-societal base (Unterbau).«Footnote 11 Although Rothacker uses the terminology of Marx when formulating what he takes to be the central task of the Geisteswissenschaften, it is clear that his references to Überbau and Unterbau take on biological and anthropological nuances that are closer to ideas found in Max Scheler’s writings on the sociology of knowledge, from which Rothacker quotes liberally.

There Scheler proposes that sociology should be divided into two subdisciplines: Kultursoziologie would depend upon »a theory of human Geist,« while Realsoziologie would require »a theory of human drives.« Whereas Kultursoziologie deals with Idealfaktoren belonging to the Überbau, Realsoziologie examines the Realfaktoren in any society, including »the relations of power, the factors of economic production, the qualitative and quantitative conditions of the population, and also the existing geographical and geopolitical conditions.« The function of these Realfaktoren is that of introducing »factors of selection« (Auslesefaktoren) into the cultural environment of any society, which influence the success or failure of cultural productions. It is clear, therefore, that while Scheler conceives of Kultursoziologie and Realsoziologie as separate subdisciplines, it is their interaction that he believes will deliver a comprehensive theory of society: »the final task of sociology,« he writes, lies in examining »the interplay between the ideal and the real, between the spiritually-conditioned and drive-conditioned determining factors […] in the content of human life.«Footnote 12 Far from wishing, therefore, to dispense with Geist in the spirit of radical positivism, Rothacker, following Scheler, sought to reconceive Geist in relation to a base or Unterbau that was as much biological and anthropological as it was strictly economic or social.

It is for this reason that Rothacker’s DVjs review essay singles out Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s »biological worldview« as being »most fruitful for the Geisteswissenschaftler.«Footnote 13 Uexküll stands at the centre of Rothacker’s theory of human cultural environments, an argument first unfolded only a year later, in Rothacker’s Geschichtsphilosophie (1934) and then developed in Probleme der Kulturanthropologie (1942). In Rothacker’s clearest Uexküll-inspired example from the second of those two works, a simple organism such as a tick (Zecke) belongs to a circumscribed environment (Umwelt) that corresponds to the tick’s biological automatisms: light sensors on its skin determine the height to which it climbs on a tree; the smell of approaching animals leads it to release itself from a branch; its sense of temperature allows it to determine whether the animal upon which it now rests is warm-blooded; while its touch sensors enable it to find a clear path to the animal’s skin.Footnote 14 Rothacker agrees with one of the main principles of philosophical anthropology by arguing that humans do not rely on automatisms to the same degree as ticks or other non-human animals. This is because technologies and institutions have been successful in creating a buffer between the human being and the forces of natural selection, so that humans can take up a more flexible attitude to the world, an argument that Rothacker attributes to Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen.Footnote 15

The historical importance of this argument, as already outlined in Rothacker’s Geschichtsphilosophie, is as follows. Because human beings are »cultural beings« (Kulturwesen),Footnote 16 those aspects of reality that awaken our interest (Interesse) are determined by the cultural environments in which we live and act, which in turn inform our »styles of life« (Lebensstile).Footnote 17 Indeed, we do not experience the world directly; we only cognise its appearance or Erscheinung as it is filtered to us by our historically conditioned interests and needs. The contemporary relevance of Rothacker’s argument on this question is such that it is worth quoting here at length:

In this experiencing of the world (Erleben der Welt), namely in concrete experience on the one hand and in concrete worlds on the other, there slumbers a puzzle […] we do not experience the world itself, but only its »appearance«. This epistemological debate, which has been burdened with the unfortunate designations of realism and idealism, cannot be decided upon here, but it is arguably an historical-philosophical and in a broader sense an anthropological task to gain the deepest insight possible into the creation of human »worlds« and the way that they are actually experienced by the historical communities who live and act within them. Is it the same world and reality in which all humans and cultures live? Yes and no!Footnote 18

One of the main concerns of Rothacker’s Geschichtsphilosophie is to understand how different periods in human history give rise to different sets of human interests and create different styles of life. But it is also possible that communities living in the same historical period may have entirely different perceptions of reality. In Rothacker’s thought, the relation between consciousness and reality has the structure of a sieve: depending upon our interests, some phenomena have »significance« (Bedeutsamkeit) for us, and others do not.Footnote 19

Before turning to the contemporary significance of these insights, a critical summary of Rothacker’s treatment of Geist is in order. Already in the 1920s, Rothacker shows an awareness of the need to theorise the related categories of Leben and Erlebnis, an issue already emphasised in Dilthey’s attempts to demarcate a sphere of validity for the Geisteswissenschaften. In Rothacker’s words, »Dilthey alluded explicitly enough to the priority of life over science, to the fact of intuitive wisdom in the historically acquired context of the pre-scientific life of the soul, which has for a long time not been logically exhausted.«Footnote 20 Rothacker is therefore correct to see Dilthey’s emphasis on pre-scientific and pre-logical experience (Erlebnis) – on Geist, in other words – as »the remaining legacy of romanticism and idealism.«Footnote 21 The question, then, is what the Geisteswissenschaften should do with this legacy. In Rothacker’s recommendation of the early 1930s to continue working with Scheler’s dualism of Kultursoziologie and Realsoziologie, the basic structures of idealism are retained in a research programme that calls for an analysis of the »intertwinement of Geist and society.«Footnote 22 But it is also the case that the resistance of Erlebnis and Geist to rational clarification endows them with seductive valences that carry considerable political risk. As Elke Dubbels has argued, insofar as the DVjs was programmatically conjoined to the category of Geist, the way also lay open for its editors to »present Geist as nationally-specific and, when associated with the Volk, to insinuate that it is the subject of history.«Footnote 23

Rothacker’s predilection for the darker varieties of political romanticism on offer in Germany during the early 1930s is the subject of a research literature that is too detailed to be discussed at length here.Footnote 24 The main facts are that Rothacker joined the NSDAP with alacrity in 1933, before signing the loyalty oath to Hitler and offering his services to Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry during the same year. Noting that »the terrible war gave little occasion for cheerful memories,« and claiming that he was »a completely unpolitical person«,Footnote 25 Rothacker’s disingenuous memoir skips lightly over these episodes, which led to his suspension as a university teacher between April 1945 and the winter semester of 1946-47. Already in his DVjs Sammelreferat, Rothacker makes a case for the superiority of European cultural traditions from which he thinks Jews are specifically excluded. Despite their »extraordinary musicality, and their musical and literary educatedness,« writes Rothacker, the »west-European Jews« have never produced a composer or poet of the »rank of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller,« but only »middling talents« such as »Heine, Börne, Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, Offenbach, Bergson.«Footnote 26 Rothacker’s 1938 DVjs essay on the history of German philosophy, on what he calls »the sources of German Geist«, continues in this vein. Based on a lecture delivered at the Italian Institute for German Studies in Mussolini’s Rome, this essay dwells at length on what Rothacker calls the »primordial inclination of Germanic Geist«, which he describes as an »enmity towards form« (Formfeindlichkeit) that derives from a supposed closeness to nature.Footnote 27

All of this may lead one to conclude that, at least in Rothacker’s usage, the category of Geist is so deeply contaminated as to disqualify it from further use. Yet in a similar way to Heidegger, Rothacker is difficult to dismiss, not least because of his importance for later thinkers such as Hans Blumenberg and Jürgen Habermas.Footnote 28 Rothacker’s theorisation of the concept of »significance« (Bedeutsamkeit) is a key source for Hans Blumenberg’s Arbeit am Mythos,Footnote 29 where Blumenberg argues that certain myths can survive successive rounds of cultural selection due to their adaptability to prevailing human interests across different historical periods. In their recent article on Rothacker for the Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman Yos write that »Rothacker’s category of ›interest-taking‹ (Interessenahme) […] remained systematically important« for Habermas, »because, on the one hand, it served as a precaution against a naturalization of the mind (Geist), and, on the other, it fended off any positivist understanding of science according to which even the social sciences deal with nothing but preexisting empirical facts.« Müller-Doohm and Yos argue that in his later thinking of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Habermas eventually surmounted Dilthey’s and Rothacker’s »historicist characterization of competing ›worldviews‹ or ›styles of life‹« by turning towards a theory of intersubjective human interests and a »concept of the lifeworld that is reformulated in terms of a linguistic pragmatics.«Footnote 30 Yet as I will shortly show, in our digital age, even Habermas has begun to concede that such an optimistic theory of pragmatic communication is looking increasingly naïve.

What could one retain, therefore, from the theory of Geist as initially outlined by Dilthey and later anthropologised by Rothacker? First, there is still some utility in a concept that refers to the pre-logical lived experience of cultural groups, not at the nationalistic level of the nation-state, but rather at the micro-level of interest groups within society. Today many of these groups form online. Second, an idealist structure according to which Geist is confronted by something called ›external reality‹ – however heuristically that category might be understood – has the advantage of revealing how, in a culture increasingly dominated by polarised online debate, the same external problems call forth radically different interpretations and solutions proposed by those interest groups. Third, literary canons, which were once thought to reflect something called aesthetic value, are now increasingly shaped by the separated lifeworlds and politico-aesthetic agendas of interest groups operating online.

III.

In a Frankfurter Rundschau interview conducted in 2014, Habermas makes the following comments concerning the impact of the Internet on the public sphere:

I regard the introduction of digital communication – following the inventions of writing and printed books – as the third great media revolution […] But the political accomplishments of a political public sphere do not automatically arise from this development. In the nineteenth-century, with the help of printed newspapers and the mass media in large nation-states, public spheres were created in which the attention of an incalculably large number of people was simultaneously directed towards the same issues […] The Internet does not achieve this in and of itself, on the contrary: it fragments. Think of, say, the spontaneously appearing portals for fans of highly specialised postage stamps, for those interested in European law, or for anonymous alcoholics […] These rooms of communication, closed in on themselves, lack that which is inclusive, the power of the public sphere to draw attention to that which is most relevant.Footnote 31

When reading these remarks, one is reminded of the question posed by Rothacker in his Geschichtsphilosophie: »Is it the same world and reality in which all humans and cultures live? Yes and no!« Today human interests are sieved in ways that Rothacker could scarcely have imagined, and in ways that endanger Habermas’s idea of pragmatic communication within the public sphere. In 2016, these new realities presented themselves most strikingly in the anglophone world, where social media played a decisive role in the Brexit referendum and in the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th US president.

Voters in both elections, especially those who received their information through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, were living in the same countries, but in entirely different online worlds. Perhaps more than any other recent work on this phenomenon, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has demonstrated how social media platforms profit from the »proprietary behavioural surplus« derived from tracking users’ social media preferences. Zuboff decisively shows how, in the digital age, »ownership of the new means of behavioural modification« – essentially advertising, including political advertising, carefully devised and expertly targeted according to user data harvested from social media – »eclipses ownership of the means of production«.Footnote 32 Significantly, the UK tech firm Cambridge Analytica used this form of »micro-behavioural targeting« to inform the social media advertising used by both the Leave and Trump campaigns.Footnote 33

This situation is markedly different from Rothacker’s theory of human interests because the filtering of information no longer takes place solely at the level of individual or collective human consciousness; rather, in the digital age, content accessed online is pre-filtered and individually targeted by machine learning. In this way, the work of Geist has partly been outsourced to artificial intelligence. As Zuboff observes, »Google’s algorithms, derived from surplus, select and order search results, and Facebook’s algorithms, derived from surplus, select and order the contents of its News Feed.«Footnote 34 A society in which an increasing majority of citizens gain their fundamental orientation from algorithm-driven Internet platforms demands a fundamental rethinking of what the Geist in Geisteswissenschaft means. As Cass R. Sunstein has argued, it is already clear that »many people are mostly hearing more and louder echoes of their own voices«, which is »undesirable from a democratic standpoint.«Footnote 35 The matter is pressing precisely because, again to return to Rothacker’s remark, although we may inhabit different online worlds, we also live in the same physical world: a world in which climate change is really happening, and in which the storming of the US Capitol Building really happened.

As literary scholars who will still – for the time being at least – do a lot of our work in the classroom, the digital age demands that we learn more from our students. We are now dealing with undergraduates who interact with texts in ways that are fundamentally different to those of us who began our education in the pre-Internet era. Here, perhaps the most illuminating lessons can be drawn from popular music. During the 1980s in Britain and Australia (the countries with which I am most familiar), popular music taste was decisively shaped by two television programmes on publicly funded broadcasters: Top of the Pops in Britain and Countdown in Australia. These programmes functioned, alongside radio, as the major avenues of music popularisation, with mass audiences watching the same programme in real time. In short: they formed a significant part of the public sphere for popular music. This landscape has now been fragmented by streaming services which, using the behavioural surplus of digital capitalism, know something about our individual musical tastes and so give us more of what they think we want, with each user receiving personalised playlists.

It is likely that the formation of literary taste among our students is already shaped by similar dynamics. What are the implications, for example, of reading texts on electronic devices connected to the Internet? Considerations of cost and convenience may increasingly mean that our students will favour buying e‑books on digital platforms such as Amazon, which will already know their reading preferences. Mark McGurl has recently argued that Amazon – the largest bookseller in the US and the owner of both Goodreads and the audiobook platform Audible.com – »is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail.« McGurl proposes that Amazon has moved the mass literary field decisively towards genre fiction, the embodiment of »market segmentation«. Under this model, books are predominantly no longer sold; as with films on Netflix, access to them is leased, because the book is »not so much an object or even text as the bearer of a service«: that of catering to tastes identified by Amazon’s algorithm.Footnote 36 It is therefore likely that digital capitalism will radically fragment processes of canon formation.

Recently, I have argued that the unavoidable and contentious task of canon formation remains one of the central and idiographic (because ideological and value-laden) tasks of our field.Footnote 37 Thus far, the nomothetic impulses of Digital Humanities have certainly been able to ask interesting questions about the canon, such as, in one case, what are the data-minable prose features of works in English that came to be regarded as canonical during the nineteenth century?Footnote 38 But this is a fundamentally different line of inquiry to the idiographic question of to read or not to read. To better understand a digital age in which literary taste may become increasingly fragmented by the polarised agendas of online communities, and by personalised literary consumption driven by algorithms, my suggestion is that Digital Humanities should critically examine canon formation under surveillance capitalism. The increasingly divisive debates about attaching trigger warnings to canonical literary texts demonstrate that in an epoch such as ours, any stable consensus about what should and should not be read seems increasingly unlikely (notably, trigger warnings first emerged in the blogosphere).Footnote 39 This may mean that some form of systemic pluralism of competing canons should be inscribed into university curriculums, alongside the more active involvement of students in processes of canon formation. We should not just teach the or a canon; we should reflexively thematise canonicity within the context of a fragmented literary culture that is moving increasingly online.

Of interest is the fact that Rothacker’s recommendation for the development of literary sociology during the 1930s takes a similar line. In the second part of his 1932-33 DVjs Sammelreferat, Rothacker regards Levin Ludwig Schücking’s Soziologie der literarischen Geschmackbildung (1923) as demonstrating a dynamic interaction between Geist and society.Footnote 40 Schücking, who was a co-editor of the DVjs from its inception,Footnote 41 conceives of literary sociology in opposition to two preceding tendencies: on the one hand, he rejects Ferdinand Brunetière’s 1890 attempt to apply a natural scientific theory of evolution to the development of literary genres; on the other, and in a similar way to Viëtor, he criticises Geistesgeschichte for making generalisations about how literary works are said to represent the so-called Zeitgeist.Footnote 42

Literary forms and genres, in Schücking’s view, neither develop according to immanent laws in the manner of organisms, nor do they incorporate the general cultural tendencies of an age, because such tendencies do not exist in a uniform way. »There is,« writes Schücking, »no Zeitgeist at all, rather there is, so to speak, a whole series of Zeitgeists,« and these represent »different ideals of society.«Footnote 43 In modern (meaning early twentieth-century) society, literary success depends on how works are circulated by »conveyers of taste« (Geschmacksträgertypen) – critics, schools, universities, theatres, literary clubs, libraries – and the operations of these mediators are said to be highly contingent and far from unified.Footnote 44 Already in the 1920s, therefore, the idea of a stable canon seemed naïve to the sociologically informed literary historian. The further proliferation of »conveyors of taste« through the emergence of an online literary culture has arguably only intensified processes that were already part of modernity at the beginning of the last century. What is decisively different today is the significant role played by non-human agents – profit-driven online algorithms – in the formation of cultural tastes. Understanding these dynamics will be crucial to how we theorise literary culture into the future.