Read Online Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford - Free Book Online

are the Good, the True, the Beautiful? For Kant, the moral part came down to what he called the “categorical imperative”: every person must “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” Every act should be done with the conviction that if everyone did likewise, life would be good. Each person’s actions become a mirror of all moral law, and thereby each finds freedom and happiness apart from the dictates of gods or princes. And to serve humanity is to serve God.
    Kant touched off a revolution in humanity’s sense of itself and its imperatives. In Bonn, as in other German intellectual centers, Kant was in the air thinkers and artists breathed. The people around Beethoven were aflame with these ideas. In the end, Kant the man of the eighteenth century became the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic era—which is to say, in the early nineteenth century, Kant occupied the position in philosophy that Goethe did in literature and Beethoven in music.
    The first practical political fruit of the Enlightenment was the American Revolution, its eternal expressions of enlightened ideals laid out in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That sentence distilled the secular and humanistic ethos of the age. Jefferson’s words echoed philosopher David Hume: “Every man . . . proceeds in the pursuit of happiness, with as unerring a motion, as that which the celestial bodies observe.” “The entire pursuit of reason,” wrote Kant, “is to bring about . . . one ultimate end—that of happiness.” This made human well-being a joining of head and heart, a spiritual quest for joy not in heaven but on earth. 20
    Jefferson’s declaration also shows that the Enlightenment did not do away with God but rather placed Him at a remove from His creation: the Creator as cosmic watchmaker who crafted the perfect machinery of the universe and sat back to let His cosmic experiment run, like a wise parent leaving humanity free to find its own path. The goal of life is the pursuit of
happiness
, here and now. Religion and state are different realms.
    The Enlightenment’s determination to separate church and state was a radical departure in any society, Western or otherwise, but, as the founding fathers of the United States recognized, it was a fundamental principle of an enlightened state. An established church and enforced dogma were a guarantee of tyranny, and tyranny of any stripe was anathema to Aufklärers. “To do good wherever we can,” Beethoven would say, “to love liberty above all things, and never to deny truth though it be at the throne itself.”
    To the philosophes, God was a figure beyond the stars, watching all and knowing all, a transcendent moral influence, but one who did not deign to meddle with the perfection of His physics to make miracles. Science had opened the path to that conviction. Isaac Newton made the epochal discovery that the physical laws that rule the whole universe are the same that rule our lives on earth. For the first time in history, the heavens and the earth became part of the same immutable mechanism. 21
    If the Enlightenment was Christian in its foundation and in much of its tone, no longer was any religion presumed to have a monopoly on the divine. Religions were unique to the cultures that shaped and sustained them; in their myriad voices, all religions worshiped the same transcendent and unknowable reality. For the mainstream of the Enlightenment, the most immediate revelation of divinity was in nature, and the truest scripture was found not in a book but in science. 22 Let God rest out beyond the stars in