Asko Nivala
My research focuses on nineteenth-century Romanticism and digital humanities. In 2022–2024, I will be the Principal Investigator in the research project Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940 (Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden atlas 1870–1940, The Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Major cultural project grant).
In 2017–2022, I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher with the project Romantic Cartographies. Lived and Imagined Space in English and German Romantic Texts, 1790–1840 (funding: TIAS, 2017–2019 and Academy of Finland, 2019–2022).
In 2015, I defended my doctoral dissertation on the themes of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God in Friedrich Schlegel's early Romantic philosophy of history. A monograph based on that study was published in March 2017 with the title The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History (New York: Routledge 2017). In addition, I have studied the spatiality of thought and concepts, on which I co-edited the book Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge 2016) together with Hannu Salmi and Jukka Sarjala.
Address: Room 313
Cultural history
FI-20014 University of Turku
Finland
In 2017–2022, I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher with the project Romantic Cartographies. Lived and Imagined Space in English and German Romantic Texts, 1790–1840 (funding: TIAS, 2017–2019 and Academy of Finland, 2019–2022).
In 2015, I defended my doctoral dissertation on the themes of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God in Friedrich Schlegel's early Romantic philosophy of history. A monograph based on that study was published in March 2017 with the title The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History (New York: Routledge 2017). In addition, I have studied the spatiality of thought and concepts, on which I co-edited the book Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge 2016) together with Hannu Salmi and Jukka Sarjala.
Address: Room 313
Cultural history
FI-20014 University of Turku
Finland
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Books by Asko Nivala
The chapters of this volume concentrate on the following themes: What were the sites of culture, civilization and Bildung and how were these sites employed in defining these concepts? What kind of borders did this process of definition and its inherent spatial imagination produce? What were the connecting routes between the supposed centers and peripheries? What were the strategies of envisioning, negotiating and transforming cultural territories in early nineteenth-century Europe?
This book adds new perspectives on ways of approaching spatiality in history by investigating, for example: the decisive role of the French revolution, the persistent interest in classical civilization and its sites, emerging urbanism and the culture of the cities, the changing constellations between centers and peripheries and the colonial extensions, or transfigurations, of culture. It also pays attention to the spatiality of culture as a metaphor, but simultaneously emphasizes the production of space in an era of technological innovation and change.
Papers by Asko Nivala
The chapters of this volume concentrate on the following themes: What were the sites of culture, civilization and Bildung and how were these sites employed in defining these concepts? What kind of borders did this process of definition and its inherent spatial imagination produce? What were the connecting routes between the supposed centers and peripheries? What were the strategies of envisioning, negotiating and transforming cultural territories in early nineteenth-century Europe?
This book adds new perspectives on ways of approaching spatiality in history by investigating, for example: the decisive role of the French revolution, the persistent interest in classical civilization and its sites, emerging urbanism and the culture of the cities, the changing constellations between centers and peripheries and the colonial extensions, or transfigurations, of culture. It also pays attention to the spatiality of culture as a metaphor, but simultaneously emphasizes the production of space in an era of technological innovation and change.
My paper focuses on Friedrich Schlegel, who was an influential theo- rist of German Romanticism. Schlegel shaped Herder’s organic metaphors to a new direction to include the possibility of cultural exchange be- tween nations. Schlegel suggested that the circulation of ideas between nations was analogous to infectious diseases. New inventions were like contagions between the organisms. Inspired by the recent invention of smallpox vaccination by Edward Jenner, Schlegel compared the delib- erate adoption of cultural influences to a ‘chemical’ inoculation. The translation of foreign literature to German would provide vaccination against the childhood diseases of young nations. Schlegel also suggested that the Germans should get acquainted with non-European cultures such as India. Thus my paper will provide a more complex view to the organic metaphors of Romanticism by discussing the metaphors of contagion, disease and vaccination as cultural theoretical metaphors.
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. Rather Jakovljević proposes that Schiller's position becomes more understandable in a context of genre-specific readings that take into account all three fields in which Schiller was active: philosophy of history, historiography, and historical drama. In addition to the introduction (Chapter 1) and conclusions (Chapter 5), the book is divided into three chapters that follow this classification.
The introduction is carefully written, and defines the key concepts of the study, namely telos, contingency (Kontingenz), and coincidence (Zufall), and explains the theoretical framework provided by Reinhart Koselleck and Hayden White. Chapter 2 starts with Schiller's inaugural lecture, which again supported the idea that historical development is teleological. In a teleological framework every historical event must be necessary, but Schiller's own work as a historian was in tension with this theoretical assumption of universal history. This problem became evident for Schiller especially when he was working with medieval [End Page 324] sources and the age of Crusades: it was difficult to explain why the Middle Ages were necessary for the universal development of mankind. Highlighting Schiller's aesthetic approach to history, Jakovljević focuses on the metaphors Schiller used. For instance, describing medieval history as "unknown ocean" (ungewisses Meer) implies that historical events are coincidental. This difficulty was related to the premises of the Enlightenment, for the Middle Ages was still mostly seen as an era of religious fanaticism, political despotism, and a multitude of chaotic events resulting from them.
In Chapter 3, the problem of coincidence is now transposed to the question of the historical agency of individuals facing the pressure of social organizations. The most important source in this chapter is Schiller's Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (1788). Of central importance here is the question of the agency that Schiller wants to ascribe to so-called great men such as William of Orange. Jakovljević shows how the agency of an individual was framed by various social institutions, such as the Spanish Inquisition, for example. According to Schiller, "colossal persons" (kolossalische Menschen) are not possible anymore in modern age, which limits the possibility of great men to antiquity. In Jakovljević's reading of Schiller, contingency in history results from the contradiction between the intentions of an individual actor and the competing plans of other persons and institutions.
Among the achievements of Jakovljević's study is that he does not limit it to the philosophy of history and historiography but also focuses on Schiller's historical dramas (Chapter 4). In fact, Schiller's interest in the history of Spain and Netherlands was partly motivated by his historical background work for Don Karlos (1787). Jakovljević tries to show what kind of interaction there was between Schiller's historical and artistic thought, and the way in which Don Karlos elaborates the psychological aspects of historical agency.
Schillers Geschichtsdenken: Die Unbegreiflichkeit der Weltgeschichte is a significant and original monograph. Everybody who works with Schiller or late eighteenth-century philosophy of history in general should explore its rich potential. However, the study is not written in the most pedagogical way. The transitions between sections are sometimes difficult to follow, for the author does not always explain why some of the passages are necessary for answering the research question. At almost four hundred pages, the book would have probably benefited from attempts to streamline its main arguments. But this is a minor criticism: even if the amount of details provided by Jakovljević's book might be tiresome to some readers, the work is an ambitious, original, and philologically well-documented study.
Asko Nivala
University of Turku