The Lever As Instrument of Reas - Jocelyn Holland

New Directions in German Studies
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Vol. 25. The Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions
of Knowledge around 1800
by Jocelyn Holland
The Lever as
Instrument of Reason
Technological Constructions of
Knowledge around 1800
Jocelyn Holland
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Jocelyn Holland, 2019
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Cover design by Andrea F. Busci
Cover image: “Diagram of a Lever,” Pierre Varignon, Nouvelle Mécanique, ou,
Statique. Chez Claude Jombert, 1725, n.p. Courtesy The Huntington Library,
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Our consciousness develops from something, that did not yet have
consciousness, our thinking from something, that did not yet think,
our contemplation from something, that did not yet contemplate; our
will from something, that did not yet want; our reasonable soul from
something, that was as of yet not a reasonable soul. A mechanical
lever—which, for this reason, need not be entirely senseless—appears
to be everywhere the first. The ancients saw it too, without making an
image of it, for it was to them the god of gods, before which even Jupiter,
the highest, bent his head. But how have I stumbled upon these hideous
contemplations. In truth, Amalie, it was not my intention…
Letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Princess Adelheid
Amalie Gallitzin Düsseldorf, March 14, 17821
1 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß. Ungedruckte Briefe von und
an Jacobi und Andere. Nebst ungedruckten Gedichten von Goethe und Lenz, vol. 1, ed.
Rudolf Boeppritz (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1869), 53.
viii
Contents
Acknowledgments x
Introduction. An Object and Its Positions: The Lever,

the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point 1
1 The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant 33
2 The Levers of German Romanticism 63
3 The Contested God of Naturphilosophie 111
4 From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology 151
Concluding Thoughts 191
Bibliography 195
Index 204
Acknowledgments
The initial research for this project was funded by a grant from the
Alexander von Humboldt foundation in 2012, which facilitated a
lengthy stay in Berlin for me, my husband, and our then-five-month-old
daughter. The research and writing conducted during the remaining
years would not have been possible without the further support from
my colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, who had complete understanding
of the challenges of pursuing teaching, research, and motherhood at the
same time, particularly after the arrival of my son in 2013. I would also
like to thank those friends who have read and provided feedback about
my work along the way, especially Leif, Gabe, Edgar, and Carolina,
as well as Joel, Rüdiger, and all those who provided an opportunity
to present my work in a critical forum. Finally, I would also like to
thank the administration of the California Institute of Technology for
providing me with significant institutional support that helped me
bring this project to an end.
Introduction
An Object and Its Positions: The Lever,
the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point
I can circumnavigate myself, but I cannot get beyond myself.

I cannot find this Archimedean point.
Søren Kierkegaard1
A stick, coupled with the will to power: levers have existed ever since
early humans desired to increase their strength by instrumental means—
since the advent of technology. At least, that is how one narrative goes.
Another version of the same story suggests that the view of man as
an originally “a-technical being,” may not be correct and that culture,
including technology, is a part of human nature, not simply an extension
of it.2 The Lever as Instrument of Reason is positioned at the intersection
of these two perspectives. It shows how descriptions of the lever and
its resting place—whether envisioned as an ordinary fulcrum or the
idealized Archimedean point—are deeply entangled with descriptions
of the human. In particular, we can observe this phenomenon in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the work of such diverse
thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling,
and Johann Herbart. Around this time, in contexts ranging from moral
philosophy and Romantic poetics to Naturphilosophie and empirical
psychology, the lever was used in such a way as to become deeply
implicated in various cognitive activities, ranging from the act of making
1 Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 186.
2 Hans Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der
Phänomenologie,” in Theorie der Lebenswelt (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 15.
2 The Lever as Instrument of Reason
moral judgments (Kant), to the construction of concepts (Romanticism)

and the emergence and suppression of thoughts (Herbart). Each of the
case studies that informs The Lever as Instrument of Reason is designed
to show how the lever was taken from the field of classical mechanics
and deployed within various contexts associated with the human, even
as the mechanical principles associated with it continued to play an
influential role.
The Lever in Antiquity: Practical Use

and Theoretical Reflection
In order to underscore how the intellectual work done with the lever
around 1800 draws upon a tradition of mechanical thinking, even as it
incorporates the lever into new contexts in unexpected ways, it helps
to have an idea of the historical context within which discussions of
the lever emerged. The purpose of this section and the next is therefore
to highlight a few key moments in the history of the lever. Reflections
about the lever in antiquity are often framed in terms of questions
directed toward those objects that informed the landscape and
seascape of daily life. It is appealing to imagine that ancient Greek and
Roman philosophers looked to the fields and saw levers in the yokes
of the oxen pulling the plows, that they looked at the oars and masts
of their great sailing ships and saw levers that could be optimized for
maximum efficiency, and that, in the marketplace, scales ensured the
physical and economical balance of all transactions. These images need
to be considered with a few caveats. Sylvia Berryman, in The Mechanical
Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy, warns against applying
the term “mechanistic” to early Greek thought and plainly states that
there was no discipline of mechanics before the fourth century bce,
nor were there “mechanical conceptions” of nature.3 Mark J. Schiefsky
has noted that when the science of mechanics in antiquity did emerge,
it encompassed two categories of knowledge, the one theoretical
and the other practical, and he refers to the lever to illustrate how
deeply intertwined they were. The law of the lever, he writes, was a
“paradigm example of theoretical mechanical knowledge . . . stated
and proved by Archimedes as a precise quantitative relationship
between forces and weights.”4 At the same time “any practitioner
who had made use of a lever would be familiar with the fact that it
3 Sylvia Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39.
4 Mark Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice in Heron’s Mechanics,” in Mechanics and
Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution, ed. W. R. Laird and S. Roux
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 15.
Introduction 3
is easier to move a weight if it is placed closer to the fulcrum,” which

makes the lever a “paradigm example of practitioner’s knowledge”
as well.5 For Schiefsky, this means that as much as mechanical
technology applies theoretical knowledge, it is also the case that “new
technologies often preceded any theory that could explain them.”6
One can observe further evidence of the close relationship between
theoretical and practical knowledge in the Mechanical Problems, a well-
known treatise on the lever dating from the third century bce that has
been attributed at various times to Aristotle and those in his school.7
Here, one finds a series of simple, yet fundamental questions: “Why
do the men at the middle of the boat move the boat most? Is it because
the oar is a lever? . . . Why does a steering oar, small as it is, and at
the end of the boat have such force that with one little handle and the
force of one man . . . it moves the great bulk of ships?”8 Questions such
as these demonstrate not only the way in which commonly existing
technologies can lead to intellectual inquiry, but also something that is
unique to the lever itself: the frequency with which it can be discerned
in various contexts.9 The lever, it seems, is embedded in how humans
view the world, and once connections are established—for example,
between a ship’s oars or mast and a lever—they can be invested with
an explanatory power and take on a life of their own. For example,
when Lucretius writes in Book IV of The Nature of Things that it should
come to us as no surprise that the air we breathe as well as the soul
can, “bit by bit,” move the “entire mass” of the human body, he makes
5 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice.”

6 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice.”
7 Anonymous, “The Mechanical Problems in the Corpus of Aristotle,” trans.
Thomas Nelson Winter (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/classicsfacpub/68), 1.
Whereas Winter attributes the authorship of the text to Archytas of Terentum,
others are more skeptical. Michael A. Coxhead limits the identification to
a member of the peripatetic school. See “A close examination of the pseudo-
Aristotelian Mechanical Problems: The homology between mechanics and
poetry as techne” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 43.2 (June
2012): 300–06. Note that this text is sometimes referred to as the “Mechanical
Questions.”
8 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 11–12.
9 E. J. Dijksterhuis sees in the Mechanical Problems the “seed of a general principle
that will later play an important role in mechanics under the name of the
principle of virtual displacements or with an older name that recalls its origin
in the thought process sketched out above [in the Mechanical Problems, JH],
the Principle of Virtual Velocities,” E. J. Dijksterhuis, Die Mechanisierung des
Weltbildes, trans. Helga Habicht (Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag,
1956), 35–36.
an analogy to a ship at sea, but the underlying idea is connected to the

mechanics of the lever:
The gentle breeze, so soft of substance, sets a great ship, great

burden and all, to moving; whatever her speed, one hand controls
her helm and one lone rudder alters her course at will; the sheave,
the tackle, the windlass make light work, again and again, of
shifting heavy weights.10
Attached to this passage from The Nature of Things one also finds a history
of commentaries designed to drive the point home even more clearly,
such as this one by Thomas Creech, dating from the eighteenth century:
This being premis’d, ‘tis easy to understand, why a Sail, swell’d

with wind, makes a Vessel move very swiftly, tho’ the Sail-
yard be not far distant from the top of the Mast: for the Mast is,
as the Lever; the Foot or Bottom of the Mast supplies the Place
of the Pression or Rowler: and the Wind which fills the Sail, is as
the Mover.11
Creech’s commentary, in particular, stands out for the concern with

which he justifies the mechanics of Lucretius’s metaphor, with an eye to
strengthening the initial comparison between breath and wind.
The examples cited above, as persuasive as they may be concerning
the ways in which levers have historically become embedded within our
observations of cultural phenomena, need to be considered alongside
another idea that was widespread in early writing about levers and
simple machines: that technology is fundamentally “unnatural.” The
opening lines of the Mechanical Problems, for example, state that “one
marvels at things that happen according to nature, to the extent the
cause is unknown, and at things happening contrary to nature, done
through art for the advantage of humanity.”12 After adding a quote from
Antiphon, “we win through art where we are beaten through nature,”
the anonymous author of the Mechanical Problems then introduces
the lever as the most fundamental of instruments by which mankind
“wins” against nature: “What a person cannot move without a lever
10 Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, trans. Frank O. Copley (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1977), 103.
11 Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, vol. 1, trans. Thomas Creech (London:
J. Matthews, 1715), 383.
12 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 1.
Introduction 5
is moved—even adding the weight of the lever—easily.”13 In more

contemporary parlance, we say that a lever gives its user “mechanical
advantage,” although we no longer perceive of this advantage as
“unnatural.” Walter Roy Laird and Sophie Roux explain the origin of
this perception in their introduction to Mechanics and Natural Philosophy
before the Scientific Revolution. According to them, when a “machine
moves a large weight with a small power,” it “produces an effect for
human benefit” that was considered “not natural, for it violates the
Aristotelian physical assumption that a moving power must be greater
than the weight it moves.”14 Mechanical theory, with its assumption that
a relatively weak individual can displace a load much heavier than him-
or herself using the right tool for the job, seemed therefore to stand in an
awkward relationship to Aristotelian “natural philosophy” which, up to
the seventeenth century, was primarily a science concerned with motion
and change (and in particular: natural changes such as generation and
growth).15 As Schiefsky has shown, however, mechanical theories that
developed after Aristotle, such as Heron of Alexandria’s, attempted to
reconcile mechanical arts with nature. One of the ways in which this
occurred was by arguing that the principle of the lever was common to
other devices and itself related to natural principles. Heron’s original
manuscript has been lost, but most historians of antiquity accept the
validity of a lengthy passage from the Mathematical Syntaxis written
by the third-century (CE) philosopher, Pappus of Alexandria. At stake
is the question of whether there is a common principle underlying the
five “simple machines” of antiquity, which Heron and Pappus refer to
as “powers”: the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the wedge, and
the screw.
In the Mathematical Syntaxis, Pappus cites Heron as an authority on
the subject:
The five powers that move the weight are like the circles around
a single centre, this is clear from the figures that we have drawn
in the preceding chapters. But I think that their shape is nearer
13 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 1. Readers should be aware that the English

translation, “against nature,” is not uniformly accepted. Sylvia Berryman
has pointed out that “the phrase need not imply transgression against or
opposition to, rather than merely going beyond, a given category” and that in
“the particular case of Aristotle’s use of para phusin, there are reasons not to
understand the Greek phrase to refer to phenomena opposed to or excluded
from natural philosophy altogether” (Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis, 47).
14 Walter Roy Laird and Sophie Roux, “Introduction,” in Mechanics and Natural
Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 3.
15 Laird and Roux, “Introduction,” 2.
to that of the balance than to the shape of the circle, because in

the beginning the first explanation of the circles came from the
balance. For here it was shown that the ratio of the weight hung
from the smaller arm to that hung from the greater arm is like the
ratio of the larger part of the balance to the smaller.16
As much as it is possible to observe circular motion in each of the

machines (an idea that can also be traced back to the Mechanical
Problems), Schiefsky argues that for Heron, at least, the “crucial
step” in linking the five powers is their connection to the balance (a
device that is essentially interchangeable with the lever, as each can
be constructed with a horizontal bar and a fulcrum point).17 These
simple machines might seem to be “wondrous,” but they can still be
“integrated into the explanatory framework of natural philosophy”
such that the mechanical thinking of antiquity is “still part of a science
of nature.”18
Of course, one needs to be careful not to think in terms of a linear
narrative when it comes to innovations in mechanical theory, given
the complicated history of manuscripts being lost or existing only in
various translations. The same holds true when philosophers who
appropriated mechanical ideas for their own thinking reached back
to various elements of antique mechanics that might not have figured
as prominently in contemporary scientific discourse. One could take,
for example, the notion that a lever (or balance) in equilibrium is
not just acting “against nature”—it is also acting against itself, such
that self-opposition is an innate structural feature of the lever in
equilibrium. This perspective of the lever, as a figure of self-contained
opposition, becomes clearer when visualized as balanced around a
fulcrum point, with weights on either side, such as in the following
illustration of mechanical scales, sometimes referred to as the “scales
of justice”.
16 A. G. Drachmann, The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity

(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1983), 81. Also quoted in Schiefsky, “Theory and
Practice,” 31.
17 For another historical point of reference, consider Leonardo da Vinci, who
“instead of the term lever (lieva), prefers balance—sometimes scale, which
for him does not necessarily have equal arms,” Raffaele Pissano and Danilo
Capecchi, Tartaglia’s Science of Weights and Mechanics in the Sixteenth Century
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 3. Pissano and Capecchi also note that Leonardo
“avoids separate treatments of the lever, balance, wheel, and axle . . . considering
all of one type, as defined by the balance” (Pissano and Capecchi, Tartaglia’s
Science of Weight and Mechanics).
18 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice,” 17.
Introduction 7
Figure I.1 “Balanced scale of Justice” by Perhelion (2011) is licensed

under CC0 1.0.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balanced_scale_of_
Justice.svg.
Hans Blumenberg has traced the notion of a “coincidence of

opposites” in Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophy to the discussion of the
lever in the Mechanical Problems,19 where the lever is derived from the
fundamental principle of the circle (the claim Heron later reverses), which
the author understood as embodying a tension of opposing directions.
Or, to provide another example, when Leibniz explains his principle
of sufficient reason, he does so with reference to Archimedes’s treatise,
On the Equilibrium of Planes. In that work, Archimedes’s first postulate
is that “equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium, and equal
weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards
the weight which is at the greater distance.”20 Although the mechanical
theories of equilibrium and the lever that informed Leibniz’s time had
become quite sophisticated, Leibniz reaches back to this first principle:
[Archimedes] takes as given that a balance will remain at rest

when everything is divided equally on both sides and one attaches
19 Hans Blumenberg, “Neoplatonismen und Pseudoplatonismen in der Kosmologie

und Mechanik der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften,
ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 320.
20 Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes, trans. Sir Thomas Heath (New York:
Cosimo, 1897; Reprint 2007), 89.
equal weights to the ends of the lever arms. Then there is in this
case no reason, why one side should sink before the other. Only
through this principle, that a sufficient reason is necessary, why
things behave one way or another, can the godhead be proven, as
well as all further metaphysical propositions or natural theology,
and even to an extent the physical principles independent of
mathematics, the dynamic ones or principles of force.21
Readers will note that Leibniz does not call the principle of sufficient
reason a lever, nor does he content himself with a mere comparison.
The result is neither a simple metaphor, constructed by a basic act of
identification, nor a simile. Instead, one can discern two contexts, one
philosophical and the other mechanical, whose relationship can be
characterized by a reciprocal explanatory affinity. Leibniz’ lever serves
as the illustration or model of a philosophical idea, one where he uses
the lever for philosophical “advantage” in order to apply the idea much
more broadly.
Aspects of the Lever in Renaissance Mechanics

When gaining a perspective of the history of the lever prior to the
eighteenth century, it is also important to acknowledge the fact that the
lever, however intuitive its mechanical properties might seem to be, is
not necessarily a stable object from an epistemological point of view.
The fact that central questions connected to levers were debated well
into the Enlightenment suggests that they were not only instruments
to be integrated within larger physical and conceptual models: under
certain circumstances, they could also acquire the characteristics of
“epistemic things” (Rheinberger) in their own right. One of the key
questions troubling Renaissance philosophers had to do with whether
or not the mechanical principle of the lever should be understood as the
21 I was not able to find a standardized English translation of this passage. Readers
might find it useful to consult the German edition (which is a translation of
Leibniz’ Latin): “Er [Archimedes, JH] nimmt als zugestanden, daß eine Waage
in Ruhe bleiben wird, wenn zu beiden Seiten alles gleich verteilt ist, und man
an den Endpunkten der beiden Hebelarme gleiche Gewichte anbringt. Denn
es gibt in diesem Falle keinen Grund, weshalb eine Seite eher als die andere
sich herabsenken sollte. Einzig durch dieses Prinzip, daß es eines zureichenden
Grundes bedarf, weshalb die Dinge sich eher so als anders verhalten, lassen sich
die Gottheit und alle übrigen Sätze der Metaphysik oder natürlichen Theologie,
ja in gewisser Weise auch die von der Mathematik unabhängigen physikalischen
Prinzipien, d.h. die dynamischen oder die Kraftprinzipien beweisen,” Gottfried
Leibniz, Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, part 1, vol. 3, ed. Ernst
Cassirer, trans. Artur Buchenau (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), 85.
Introduction 9
basis for the other simple machines. As mentioned above, the opinion
of Pappus of Alexandria was that one can find in the lever a unifying
principle or “common denominator” that would connect it to other
simple machines, such as the wedge or the pulley.22 This idea gained
some traction in the Renaissance, most notably through the work of
Guidobaldo dal Monte. Domenico Meli relates how dal Monte helped
popularize the work of Archimedes and Pappus of Alexandria and how,
in the preface of his Mechanicorum liber (Book of Mechanics) from 1577, he
vowed to describe the properties underlying the balance “in order that
my whole work might be more easily built up from its foundation to its
very top.”23
Another important text from Renaissance mechanics was the
Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences of Galileo Galilei. The “two
sciences” of the title are statics (the science of bodies in resting
equilibrium, which relies upon the law of the lever) and the science
of motion. In their commentary of Galileo’s Discourses, Arkady
Plotnitsky and David Reed emphasize that these sciences “are as
much technological as they are natural,” and that means both “pure”
and “applied” sciences of statics and motion.24 Their reading also
underscores the way in which Galileo’s thinking about the lever relies
upon a translation of the physical object into geometric terms. The
lever “provides a geometric configuration or figure . . . that interprets
or realizes the mathematical concept of ratio in the measurement of
moments of heavy bodies.”25 The point of view of the character Salviati
demonstrates the way in which a “geometric representation of a
physical object can be used to make a mathematical argument,” a point
of view that Galileo affirms using the lever.26 The lever thus becomes
paradigmatic for an act of translation between laws associated with
natural phenomena and their geometric representations, which enable
us to visualize the concepts at hand. Benvenuto has also described the
22 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects. The Transformation of Mechanics

in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 27.
23 Dal Monte quoted in Meli, Thinking with Objects, 24.
24 Arkady Plotnitsky and David Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration,
and Science in Galileo’s Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences,” in Configurations
9.1 (2001): 40.
25 Plotnitsky and Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration,” 52. See also
Pissano and Capecchi, who note that “In Le mecaniche Galileo introduced
a concept and a term, that of moment (momento), that will be of great fortune
and adopted, at least in Italy, until the early nineteenth century” (Pissano and
Capecchi, Tartaglia’s Science of Weight and Mechanics, 175).
26 Plotnitsky and Reed, “Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science,” 53.
particular position of the field of statics as existing “between physical

research and pure mathematics.”27 He reminds us that, historically, the
principles of statics have two attributes: they are “propositions with
empirical relevance” and “theorems of a deductive system whose
axioms were so immediate as to require no specific confirmation,” like
the intuition that accompanies the observation of a lever or balance
with equal weights equidistance from the fulcrum.28 The following
chapters contain numerous examples of how this basic idea associated
with the lever—its ability to translate between the empirical and the
theoretical—is retained when the lever is imported from classical
mechanics into other areas of thought.
For all that dal Monte and Galileo worked to secure the lever’s
position, however, other philosophers and mathematicians were
equally invested in its “dethronement.”29 Descartes wrote that “it is a
ridiculous thing to want to use the law of the lever for the pulley, as
Guidobaldo convinced himself he should do,” and readers of Descartes,
such the French mathematician Pierre Varignon, took up the cause for
a “more abstract principle” underlying the simple machines of the
inclined plane, pulley, and screw.30 Benvenuto describes the problem as
a tension between “power” and “act”: either “to focus one’s attention
on power” or “to concentrate on the actual motion of the mobile
body.”31 He reminds us that the quest undertaken by Pierre Varignon
and others to define more general mechanical principles that did not
privilege a particular instrument led to the adoption of the principle
of virtual velocities formulated by Jacob Bernoulli in a letter to Pierre
Varignon dating from January 26, 1717. In the Nouvelle mécanique (New
mechanics), Varignon refers to the contents of the letter when he writes
that Bernoulli, “after having defined there what he meant by the word
energy . . . declared to me that in every equilibrium of forces whatsoever, in
whatever way they are applied to one another, either indirectly or directly, the
sum of positive energies will be equal to the sum of negative energies, taken
27 Edouardo Benvenuto, An Introduction to the History of Structural Mechanics:

Statics and Resistance of Solids (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1991), 14.
28 Benvenuto, An Introduction, 14.
29 Benvenuto, An Introduction, 67.
30 See Meli, Thinking with Objects, 303. For Meli, it is significant that Varignon’s
critique of dal Monte occurs in conjunction with the publication of the Principia
Mathematica: he sees a connection between Newton’s rejection of visual
analogies between projected and orbiting bodies and Dal Monte’s quest for a
“more abstract principle” (Meli, Thinking with Objects).
31 Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 67–68.
Introduction 11
positively.”32 Varignon’s definition of virtual velocities is taken directly

from Bernoulli’s letter:
Given several forces acting in various directions that hold in

equilibrium a point, a line, a surface or a body, let us imagine
applying to the whole system of these forces a slight movement,
either parallel to itself in any one direction or around any one
fixed point. It is easy to see that, because of this movement, each
of the forces will go forward or backward in its own direction,
unless the direction of the slight movement is perpendicular to
one of the forces . . . [These] advances and withdrawals are what
I call virtual velocity.33
Although the details of the debates that centered around the principle
of virtual velocity and the related notion of virtual work go beyond the
scope of the present study, one point of interest here is that the state of
equilibrium is conceived of without any reference to a lever, whether
as a physical body or a geometrical representation. The most important
question is not what the implications are for the history of mechanics,
but rather, and more narrowly, how the advent of the principle of
virtual velocities changes the way in which the mechanical “object” of
the lever as well as the mechanical law associated with it are conceived
of and used in philosophical arguments. In his discussion of Vincenzo
Riccati’s “universal principle of statics,” Benvenuto describes how for
Riccati the “law of the lever” itself was “only an instrument, useful in
research” but which “lacks intrinsic value as a foundation because it is
only a consequence of the general principle.”34 An analogous turn of
phrase is used to describe Lagrange’s work on the mechanical pulley
(or “poliplaste”), when Benvenuto writes that that Lagrange “frees this
object from its material existence and turns it into a pure instrument of
thought” in the Mécanique analytique (Analytical Mechanics).35
It would seem, then, that the question of lever’s “usefulness,”—
regardless of whether it is understood as a mechanical or geometric
object—is perhaps not as straightforward as one would think. I argue
that what is described above as a lack—whereby the law of the lever
becomes “only” an instrument, once it is dethroned as a fundamental
principle for the field of statics—ultimately becomes a gain for other
areas of scientific research. One of the most striking things about the
32 Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 89.

law of the lever is the degree to which it could be deployed across

vast scales. The same age that brought us the most intricate automata,
such as the mechanical musicians constructed by the Droz brothers,
whose near microscopic levers required the use of a clockmaker’s
loupe in order to see, also witnessed the lever used to describe laws of
planetary motion.36 These innovations are connected by the workings
of the lever, which astronomers such as Borelli and Kepler used to
draft their blueprints of the heavens.37 The fact that the lever and its
mechanical laws become topics of interest for other fields however—
such as philosophy, literature, and psychology—raises a new range of
questions. To what degree are these areas of thought changed by the
introduction of mechanical concepts? And, conversely, what happens to
the lever when it is adapted into these unfamiliar environments?
What a Lever Can Be

One of the challenges an investigation into the lever poses is how to
navigate between the vagaries of historical example—the ways in which
levers have been deployed as models in extra-mechanical discourses—
and those contemporary theoretical perspectives that may be useful for
making connections between the historical roles levers play in various
contexts. It is one thing to analyze the mechanical laws associated with
the lever in the writings of Galileo or Varignon, for example, but quite
something else to describe a lever when it is being used heuristically in
a different theoretical context altogether, as shown in the case of Leibniz
and his definition of “sufficient reason,” or, Benvenuto’s assessment
of the lever as “useful in research” for the mechanical theorists of the
Renaissance. To give just a brief example of how varied the metaphorical
terrain can be, one could take the historical example of Pierre Massuet,
who prefers to speak of levers in terms of êtres de raison (beings of
reason) in his Elements of Modern Philosophy (1752),38 whereas the psycho-
logist Johann Herbart chooses Gedankending (thought-thing), a term
popularized by Idealist philosophy that takes on its own idiosyncratic
meaning in Herbart’s writings.39 What kind of descriptive or theoretical
36 Readers interested in this aspect of eighteenth-century mechanics can consult

Simon Schaffer’s essay, “Enlightened Automata” in the volume, The Sciences in
Enlightened Europe.
37 “Several scholars, including Kepler, Descartes, Borelli, and Leibniz, used the
lever in their accounts of circular and orbital motion” (Meli, Thinking with
Objects, 312).
38 Pierre Massuet, Elemens [sic] de la Philosophie moderne, vol. 1 (Amsterdam:
Chatelain et fils, 1752), 264.
39 Johann Herbart, Schriften zur Psychologie 3, ed. G. Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold
Voss, 1851), 367.
Introduction 13
language would be most appropriate for navigating between the lever

as being and thing, a creature of reason and thought? One can contrast
those examples against the work of the historian of science Domenico
Meli or the philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Meli refers to the lever as
a philosophical and mathematical instrument and, more descriptively,
as a “tool of investigation.”40 He also taps into the notion of the lever
as an innately translatable object when he describes “creative and
fertile applications of the lever” that could be both “conceptual and
mathematical.”41 Hans Blumenberg, for his part, puts his finger on the
ineffable quality of the lever when he describes a kind of “hybrid space”
within which the lever functions. With reference to one of Galileo’s
dialogues, Blumenberg comments that the simplicity of devices [Geräte]
such as the lever and balance is such that they approach the “pure
conditions” required for mathematical representation. The common
factor among them—which Blumenberg refers to as highly “artificial”
(perhaps with reference to the suggestion found in the Mechanical
Problems that they operate “against nature,”)—is that something small
moves something big. These objects, he suggests, occupy a hybrid
space between mathematics and physics: the objects involved are
physical, and the method of describing them is mathematical.42 This
theoretical description of a “hybrid space” will prove useful when, in
later chapters, it comes time to analyze the ways in which levers as
“thought-things” are being mobilized, and to what end.
Another fruitful axis of comparison that connects historical
descriptions of the lever to more contemporary theoretical language
centers around analogies between the lever and the human body. As
noted in the opening paragraph, the boundary conditions between
the human and the technical are open to debate, and nowhere is
this more the case than in those instances in which the lever itself is
anthropomorphized and in which the human body itself is associated
with the lever. With regard to the former, one could take as a historical
example Jacob Leupold’s Theatrum Machinarum Generale. Leupold
refers to the longer arm of the lever as the “head” and the shorter
arm as the “tongue.”43 In other words, the lever, that most primitive
of instruments, is described as a monument to the human faculties of
thought and language. The notion of the “body” of the lever appears
40 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 234.

41 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 312.
42 Hans Blumenberg, Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1975), 484–85.
43 Jacob Leupold, Theatrum Machinarum Generale, Schauplatz des Grundes
mechanischer Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Christoph Zunckel, 1724), 8.
in various contexts. In specialized levers, such as ones that were

specifically used for “loading” and “packing,” the relationship of head
and tongue might be reversed. Thus, in Krünitz’s Economic Encyclopedia
“the short round part” is the head and the “longer part” is the tongue, a
state of affairs that comes complete with a piece of mechanical wisdom
almost proverbial in its tone: “Therefore, the larger the head of the lever
is, the more capacity one has to master a burden.”44 Even though the
dominant association of the lever and the human body is usually one
where levers are part of the human body (i.e., when we understand our
arms or legs as levers), this second understanding, whereby the lever
itself is understood in terms of the human body and as an illustration of
ars superat naturam, has an important role to play in my study. Readers
should keep this perspective of the lever as body in mind when they
come to the second chapter, because it will help contextualize German
Romanticism’s more radical claims that the lever—and its fulcrum
point—are equated with the ego.
I would also like to make it clear from the beginning that this
inquiry into the theoretical use of levers in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries outside of classical mechanics is neither focused
on modernity’s fascination with automata, nor is it concerned with the
technologies and discourses on prosthetics that developed in the wake of
increasingly devastating acts of warfare. That is well-traveled terrain—
there are numerous writings on automata and prosthetics to which
interested readers can refer.45 Instead, I focus on a historical tendency to
understand certain aspects of being human, such as making judgments,
thinking, or organizing concepts, in terms of the activity of the lever.
To frame this problem and provide an example from a contemporary
theoretical perspective familiar to most readers, Jacques Derrida’s 1990
essay “Mochlos, ou le conflit des facultés” (Mochlos, or the conflict of
the faculties), is a useful point of reference.
Though Derrida is not the first name that comes to mind when
thinking about the theoretical discussions that incorporate mechanical
terms, mochlos is the Greek word for lever and Derrida refers to it directly
in the last paragraphs of his essay. The main thrust of his argument
has to do not with mechanics but with a different kind of positioning
and leveraging: the responsibility of the academic with regard to the
university. Eventually, however, he calls out for “a new university
44 Johann Georg Krünitz, Oekonomisch-technologische Encyclopädie, vol. 44 (Berlin:

Joachim Pauli, 1788), s.v. “Kopf,” 3.
45 One of the few studies devoted almost entirely to the eighteenth century is
Alison Muri’s, The Enlightenment Cyborg (Toronto: Toronto University Press,
2011).
Introduction 15
law” based on the existing, “traditional law” that will “provide, on

its own foundational soil, a support for leaping to another place.”46
Derrida continues:
We might say that the difficulty will consist, as always, in

determining the best lever, what the Greeks would call the best
mochlos. A mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing
a boat, a wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in short,
to lean on for forcing and displacing. When one asks how to be
oriented in history, morality or politics, the most serious discords
and decisions have to do less often with ends, it seems to me, than
with levers.47
In this passage, Derrida makes an analogy between the endpoints of

the lever and the political ideologies of “left” and “right,” but—after
a detour through Heidegger—it is the lever of the body, articulated
through a quotation from Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, that claims the
final word of the essay:
The fact that Prussian infantrymen are trained to start out with the left
foot confirms, rather than refutes, this assertion [i.e., the assertion that
the right foot has the advantage over the left J.H.]; for they put this
foot in front, as on a hypomochlium, in order to use the right side for
the impetus of the attack, which they execute with the right foot against
the left.48
Derrida—and Kant—go beyond a simple alignment of man and simple

machine, of human and lever, in order to implicate the human body
within acts that are at the same time physical and concerned with
foundations and structures of law and power. The lever, as understood
here, is not contained within the human body, where joints are usually
understood as the fulcrum points for arms and legs. Instead, the body
as (total) lever seeks its fulcrum point at the interface of the human with
its environment. Through the complete overlapping of the physical
interface of body and ground and the theoretical interface of human
ideologies, we are reminded of Blumenberg’s notion of a “hybrid space”
that levers have historically inhabited, and that more contemporary
46 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Logomachia:

The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand, trans. Amy Wygant (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska, 1992), 19.
47 Derrida, “Mochlos.”
48 Derrida, “Mochlos,” 20.
reflections on the lever seem to do as well. Derrida’s comments on the

fulcrum point, or hypomochlion, also remind us that for as long as
there have been theoretical reflections about levers, philosophers have
also pondered the notion of the lever’s resting place. The history of the
lever—in particular, its history as thought-thing—cannot be separated
from the history of the Archimedean point. The following section will
sketch out the historical parameters of this idealized point, which
has actively participated in expanding the borders of knowledge and
sovereignty in the modern era.
Where to Put Your Lever: The Archimedean Point

The above pages have provided a brief overview of the lever’s practical
and theoretical importance in antiquity and the Renaissance and
emphasized the lever’s extreme. I have also introduced a few of the
fundamental ideas associated with the lever, such as its connection to
the body and the “hybrid” space it occupies between mathematics and
physics, each of which will be elaborated in greater detail in the course
of the following chapters. The question has also arisen of how, precisely,
to refer to the lever in the context of this study. Clearly, its instrumental
value should not be underestimated. After all, the lever responds
to fundamental philosophical questions and has demonstrated its
potential to be the instrument of knowledge-building par excellence.
The lever does not usually appear in isolation, however. It is part of a
larger conceptual “apparatus” that includes the mechanical moment,
the state of equilibrium, and of course the fulcrum point (also known
as the hypomochlion, literally that which “rests beneath” the lever).
The lever’s conceptual apparatus also includes an idealized version of
the fulcrum known as the Archimedean point, which is traditionally
associated with an extreme demonstration of the lever’s mechanical
advantage—the ability to displace the world itself. The Archimedean
point provides the most intuitive example of how the lever is useful
beyond the field of mechanics. This section will outline a few of the
most prominent moments in the history of this special point as well as
its connection to those aspects of the lever noted above.
If the history of the lever could be said to have a mantra, it would
probably be this: give me a firm point, and I will move the world, an English
equivalent of the famous dos moi pou sto associated with Archimedes. To
this day, these words continue to refer back to an original scene which
likely has never taken place.49 Still, if there is a foundational moment to
49 Plutarch, recounting the life of the Roman general Marcellus, allows for a
digression in order to relate a few anecdotes from the life of Archimedes,
whose own life is inseparable from the history of mechanics. In the face of a
Introduction 17
the myth of Archimedes—foundational also in the literal sense that the

promised firm point from which to move the earth is itself given a solid
basis of exposition—then it is the moment when the mathematician
single-handedly pulls a fully laden ship from the water. According to
some accounts, this ship was the Syracusia.50 It was no ordinary one, but
rather a world unto itself, complete with baths, horse stalls, sumptuous
chambers, and a court of law for the king. And although historians
are undecided as to whether the lever effect was achieved by a simple
machine, a complex system of pulleys, another device altogether, or if
it even occurred at all, the story contains a simple constellation that can
provide a point of reference for future meditations on the Archimedean
point. It sets up the juxtaposition of land and sea as a promise of the
firm ground of knowledge and mathematical truth as opposed to
the vicissitudes of epistemological uncertainty. It also sets the stage
for a question that will ultimately haunt anyone who tries to claim
Archimedes’s point—in other words, any theorist who, to paraphrase
Hans Blumenberg, prefers a divine perspective to the alternative of
bathing in the immediacy and banality of life: namely, the question
of a subject’s standpoint in relation to his or her own knowledge.51
Archimedes, the Syracusan, dislodges the Syracusia—itself a model
of the political and cultural environment in which he inhabits—from
the water before (again, according to legend) suggesting that a firm
point is all he would need to dislodge the earth itself from its axis.
Modernity’s irritation with this claim led to many mathematical proofs
philosophical “contempt” of mechanics, Archimedes shows king Hiero that

a mechanical demonstration can be a powerful illustration of a theoretical
concept: that something “great” could be moved by a lesser force. “Archimedes,
who was a relative and friend of Hiero, wrote that with a given power he could
move any given weight whatever, and, as it were rejoicing in the strength of his
demonstration, he is said to have declared that if he were given another world
to stand upon, he could move this upon which we live.” It is not at all certain,
however, whether the device was a lever or a simple machine such as the pulley
that relies on the same principle of mechanical advantage: “Hiero wondered at
this, and begged him to put his theory into practice, and show him something
great moved by a small force. Archimedes took a three-masted ship, a transport
in the king’s navy, which had just been dragged up on land with great labour
and many men; in this he placed her usual complement of men and cargo, and
then sitting at some distance, without any trouble, by gently pulling with his
hand the end of a system of pullies, he dragged it towards him with as smooth
and even a motion as if it were passing over the sea,” Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives,
vol. 2, ed. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2007), 31.
50 See John W. Humphrey, John P. Oleson, and Andrew N. Sherwood, Greek and
Roman Technology: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 458.
51 Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2014), 89.
from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century that challenged

its practicality, ultimately leading to disavowals that a so-called
Archimedean point can even exist. This irritation occurs at the same
time as the position of the self with regard to its philosophical endeavors
is increasingly called into question in the wake of Cartesian philosophy.
Bruno Latour describes Archimedes’s lifting of a ship as perhaps
“the oldest public scientific experiment,” one that played an important
role in the relations between rulers and scientists.52 His analysis
describes four “reversals of forces”: that a single person could
theoretically move the world; that “the power of a mathematical
demonstration is greater than all other contrary . . . evidence”; that a
simple, well-designed piece of machinery can change the face of the
earth; that a “little bit of abstract reasoning” can be even more valuable
than actual achievements; and lastly, that a powerful tale such as this
one has a staying power despite historical evidence to the contrary.53
Michel Authier argues along similar lines as Latour, focusing on the
engagement of science and politics in this story. He also makes an
important connection to another (lost) text by Archimedes titled Grains
of Sand. In this text, Archimedes calculated how many grains it would
take to fill the volume of the universe. The question in this context
is also how to manipulate the largest quantity (in this case, through
imagining a number greater than the one which existed at the time in
Greek thought, the “myriad of myriads” or 100,000,000).54 There is a
trajectory here that crosses orders of magnitude in space, from grain of
sand, to ship, to world, to universe.
If it is clear that the history of the Archimedean point is inextricably
linked to that of the lever, it should be equally evident that this
history is much more than a simple fiction, or anecdote. As much
as it is defined by the repetition of words that were never spoken in
the first place and by the search for a fulcrum point that never quite
materializes, it has gained status over time by being coupled with one
of the definitive problems of modernity: the quest for a firm base of
knowledge. This quest can be connected to various theoretical positions
as well as to historical contexts in which the Archimedean point seems
particularly well suited, such as in the epoch when the notion of a
“new world” occupied the European imagination. Georg Harsdörffer
52 Bruno Latour, “The Force and Reason of Experiment,” in Experimental Inquiries,

Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. Homer
Le Grand (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 49.
53 Latour, “The Force and Reason of Experiment,” 50–51.
54 Michel Authier, “Archimède: Le canon du savant,” in Éléments d’histoire des
sciences, ed. Michel Serres et al. (Paris: Larousse, 1997), 109.
Introduction 19
relates of the satirical poet “Euphormio” (i.e., Euphormionis, the pen

name of English writer John Barclay), that he “compares the king of
Spain with this Archimedes, who found the new world—that is, a
place beyond our world—and was able to move it by using golden
levers.”55 The geopolitical and philosophical uses of the Archimedean
point are not necessarily distinct, however. The German philosopher
Adam Weishaupt, in his On Kantian Intuitions and Phenomena (1788),
refers to the Archimedean point when he describes the discovery of “a
transcendental America” (ein übersinnliches Amerika) whose existence
owes itself to our ability to posit a sphere beyond intellectual intuitions,
that is, beyond the phenomenal world.56
The Lever, the Archimedean Point, and the Construction

of Knowledge
Like the lever, the Archimedean point enjoys an amazing degree of
discursive mobility. Both are implicated in those contexts when what is
at stake is the grounding of knowledge. In modernity, this quest evolves
as a bifurcated narrative, where attempts to define a firm point upon
which to ground one’s knowledge and build a philosophical system are
coupled with growing skepticism toward the self-same project. From a
distance, all Archimedean points might appear more or less the same,
but a closer look reveals that each is situated in a particular intellectual
landscape. One of the most dramatic changes in terrain occurs when the
point ceases to be external to the agent wielding the lever and instead
is conceived of as an “interiorized” hypothetical point. Descartes is a
special case in this regard. On the one hand, the interiorization of the
point is implicit, because what is at stake is the certainty of knowledge:
“Archimedes claimed, that if only he had a point that was firm and
immovable, he would move the whole earth, and great things are
likewise to be hoped, if I can find just one little thing that is certain
and unshakeable.”57 The metaphorical language of the Meditations is
not quite aligned with the philosophical language, however. When
Descartes refers to his own situation, he describes himself in “a deep
whirlpool” with purchase neither below nor above as he seeks just one
certain thing.58
55 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae Mathematicae et Physicae, vol. 2, Deliciae

Mathematicae et Physicae (Nürnberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter and the heirs of
Johann Andreae Endter, Senior, 1677), 385.
56 Adam Weishaupt, Über die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen
(Nürnberg: Grattenau, 1788), 91.
57 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (London:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 17.
58 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Philosophical skepticism with regard to the certain thing Descartes

seeks and believes to find in the cogito—as well as with regard to the
Archimedean point—takes many different forms. On the one hand,
there are those critics who try to prove mathematically that such a
point is either impossible or so unrealistic to attain as to be completely
unfeasible. Consider, for example, Alexandre Savérien’s entry on the
lever (le levier) from his Dictionnaire universel de mathématique et de
physique (Universal Dictionary of Mathematics and Physics) from 1754.
After a few admiring words about the mechanical advantage associated
with the lever, he gets down to the business of calculating just how long
a lever one would need to move the earth: “I think one will see with
pleasure the determination of this length”:
The force of a man who presses on a body is estimated to be 100

pounds, and the weight of the earth 39984700118074464789750
pounds. Let us place this weight at the end of a lever at the
distance of 2000 leagues from the point of contact [i.e., the fulcrum
point]. The person or power would have to be at a distance of
3997847001180744647897500 from the point of contact in order to
lift the earth. Lifting it a mile, the pressure traverses a distance of
666307833530107441316 leagues & ¼.59
Savérien neglects to explain how he comes up with the “weight” of the

world—he would have to answer the question: in whose gravitational
field is this weight being calculated? Ultimately, the value of his
calculation lies in the pleasure it provides to the imagination—the
experimental scenario he describes is remarkably short on logistical
detail as well as other, more theoretical concerns. In comparison to
Savérien, the French literary figure Edouard Charton seems more
cognizant of these problems. Charton, whose lever is conceptualized
with somewhat different dimensions in mind, has calculated that “it
would take three thousand years in order to move the earth the millionth
part of a millimeter” and that one would need to increase the lever arm
somewhat in order to take into account “the force of attraction that
59 La force d’un homme qui presse sur un corps est estimée 100 livres, & le poids
de la terre 39984700118074464789750. Plaçons ce poids au bout d’un Lévier à
la distance de 2000 lieues du point d’appui. Il faudra que la personne ou la
puissance soit éloigné du point d’appui de 3997847001180744647897500 [sic]
lieues pour soulever la terre. En l’élevant d’un mille la puissance parcourt
l’espace de 666307833530107441316 [sic] lieues & ¼.” See Alexandre Savérian,
Dictionnaire universel de mathématique et de physique, vol. 2 (Paris: Jacques Rollin,
1753), s. v. “Levier,” 63.
Introduction 21
tends to pull the earth toward the sun.”60 Then there are those, such as
Andrew Motte, whose attention is more focused on the potential limits
of the materials involved: “An Engine framed for that Purpose [i.e., to
displace the earth, J.H.], would operate so very slowly, that not only
Archimedes, but the Earth itself, would come to an End, before the Effect
would be in the least sensible.”61
Most philosophers and mathematicians did not take Archimedes
quite so literally. More in the tradition of Descartes, they used the
Archimedean point as the fixed and certain point of an epistemology
directed toward the reliability of knowledge itself, even if this goes
against the Archimedean tradition. Schelling summarizes the problem
succinctly, without pointing to a solution, with his observation that
“Archimedes demands a firm point beyond the world. To want to find
it theoretically (that means, in the world itself) is absurd.”62 By the
same token, there is a well-documented history of disagreement with
Schelling’s statement. One could instead refer to German Romanticism’s
own appropriation of the Archimedean point as essential to the process
of observing one’s thoughts and the manifold relations of the self. A
fragment from Novalis’s General Brouillon connects Archimedes’s
proverbial call for a fixed point to the formation of an “independent
organ” of observation, one which would witness not only the
phenomena of nature per se, but also the formations, changes, and
mixtures of thoughts and images that are inspired by them.63 The early
German Romantics imagine the fixed point as a paradoxical organ of
observation capable of assessing and encompassing change, internal to
and yet independent of the subject.
After 1800, philosophers return to the question of what service the
failed project of the Archimedean point might be, time and again, and
with increasing urgency. We have Niklas Luhmann to thank for putting
60 Anonymous, “De la vie et des ouvrages d’Archimède,” in Le magasin pittoresque,

ed. Edouard Charton (Paris, 1838), 150.
61 Andrew Motte, A Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, wherin the Laws of Motion,
and the Properties of Those Powers Are Explained and Demonstrated in an Easie and
Familiar Method (London: Benjamin Motte, 1727), 153–54.
62 “Archimed verlangt einen festen Punkt ausser der Welt. Diesen theoretisch (d.h. in
der Welt selbst) finden zu wollen, ist widersinnig.” The quote is from Friedrich
Schelling’s early work, “Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der
Wissenschaftslehre,” written in 1796 and 1797. In Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke,
part 1, vol. 1, ed. Karl Friedrich August von Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg:
Cotta, 1856), 343–542, 400.
63 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Richard Samuel with Hans-Joachim Mähl and
Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln, Mainz: W. Kohlhammer, 1981), 421.
Further references from this edition will be listed by volume, page number, and,
when relevant, aphorism number.
his finger on a problem already present in German Romanticism’s

statements on the point: that of self-implication. For Luhmann,
even the most powerful articulations of the subject as Archimedean
point cannot escape a logic of recursion that prohibits any possible
perspective external to the system within which a subject is defined:
like Kierkegaard, he can circumnavigate himself without moving
in any way beyond himself. In Luhmann’s writing, the modern loss
of an Archimedean point requires a fundamental rethinking both of
epistemology and of sociology. When asked if sociology could offer an
Archimedean point from where to describe all of society, he responded
that today it is no longer possible to imagine such an outside for the
observation of the whole, sociology being no exception.64
In order to illustrate how a critical approach to the Archimedean
point can be theoretically productive, I would like to mention just
one example discussed by Hans Blumenberg in Care Crosses the River.
This work unfolds as a series of short prose pieces, philosophical
meditations unframed by either a preface or an afterword, leaving
the reader to navigate the flotsam of section titles running the gamut
from “Maritime Emergencies” to “Fundamental Differences.” The
latter section contains two references to the Archimedean point in the
context of the science of knowledge, in essays titled “The Building Site”
and “On Board.” In each case, the point is embedded within a broader
concern of epistemological certainty and uncertainty. Blumenberg
frames “The Building Site” in terms of a philosophical interest in the
question of foundations. The question, to what degree a proposed
building site’s suitability for the raising of architectural structures can
serve as a topos for philosophical thinking, can be traced from the first
extensions of the Cartesian into the twentieth century. The extension of
the Cartesian cogito into space (and, implicitly, the positing of the cogito
as the Archimedean firm point) as well as the philosophical systems
of idealism are indebted to this conceit, but in the early twentieth
century such figurative relations are increasingly called into question.
Blumenberg cites the philosophical debates of the Vienna Circle. His
chief example is Moritz Schlick’s essay, “Über das Fundament der
Erkenntnis” (On the Foundation of Knowledge) from 1934, which is
one of the last attempts to fight the proverbial tide by (re-)establishing
the firm ground of knowledge, even though this very insistence also
64 For more information about how systems theory can offer further theoretical
insight on the Archimedean point, readers should consult Edgar Landgraf’s
essay “Circling the Archimedean Viewpoint. Observations of Physiology in
Nietzsche and Luhmann,” in The Archimedean Point: From Fixed Positions to the
Limits of Theory, special edition of SubStance 43.3 (2014): 88–106.
Introduction 23
brands the project as intellectually conservative. Schlick’s work

was, according to Blumenberg, behind the times for its insistence on
“groundwork” when other more appropriate metaphors are available
to describe structures of knowledge. What are the alternatives? “Net”
is a possibility, according to Blumenberg, although its full potential will
only be exploited years later. Otto Neurath’s revival of the encyclopedia
is offered as a more viable alternative mode of collecting knowledge.
The reference here is to the “Unity of Science” movement and the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences, a series of monographs that
eventually included both Neurath’s Foundations of the Social Sciences
and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Blumenberg also
writes about the “institution” of the encyclopedia in the context of the
twentieth century more generally in a passage from The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age where he refers to it with regard to the problem of how to
speak about science without, on some level, also performing science:
While we know more about the world than we ever did before,
this “we” does not by any means mean “I.” The “we” of this
statement confronts the “I” only in the form of institutions—of
encyclopedias, academies, universities. These represent higher-
level agencies [Übersubjekte] that administer knowledge about
reality in space and time and organize its growth.65
One could, perhaps, understand these Übersubjekte as the captains of

what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “Archimedean platforms” in the sense
that they are collectives of historically situated agencies who respond
“in space and time” to conditions on the ground, were it not for
Neurath’s bleak assessment of science in its individual and institutional
manifestations with which Blumenberg concludes the “The Building
Site.” Channeling Neurath, Blumenberg comments: “The condition of
Archimedes, which had understandably already appeared to Neurath
as unrealizable, also meant the theoretical unattainable: ‘We do not
have a stable point from which we could turn the earth upside down:
and, in the same way, we have no absolutely solid ground upon which
we could erect the sciences.’”66 With reference to the IX International
Congress of Philosophy in Paris of 1937, Blumenberg also quotes
Neurath as saying, “We have no absolute foundation from which we
can proceed. . . . Science in all its aspects is always under discussion.
65 Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace.

Reprint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 238.
66 Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010), 74.
Everything flows.”67 With these words, the problem addressed in

Blumenberg’s essay receives its clearest statement: in the end, one is
pulled back into the Heraclitan floodwaters. As it turns out, however,
the question of on what ground one establishes a theoretical basis of
knowledge is still relevant. Blumenberg’s decision to conclude the essay
with the quotation is itself a silent declaration. The lack of a closing
frame in his essay is tantamount to the relinquishing of narrative
purchase. By allowing the quotation to speak for itself, Blumenberg
leaves it an open question, to what extent the further qualification or
leveraging of this sentiment is possible.
The Lever and Its Point: Constructing

a Conceptual Apparatus
Although the case studies that inform The Lever as Instrument of Reason
are situated historically in the decades before and after 1800, the
above reflection on the Archimedean point should show that there are
broader questions to be addressed, both concerning the relationship of
the lever and its resting place to the construction of knowledge, and to
the difficulties involved in positioning the lever relative to ourselves.
Questions such as these demand an approach to the study of the
mechanical lever and its fulcrum point that differ from the concerns
and methodology of a traditional history of science. The distinction
Joseph Vogl makes in the introduction to his Poetologien des Wissens
[poetologies of knowledge], with reference to Foucault, is worth echoing
today due to the pervasiveness of often conservative disciplinary
biases: “A history of knowledge is not a history of science” because
it remains critical of claims made in the name of scientific rationality
and traditional narratives of the history of early modern knowledge.68
I would like to underscore the fact that the following chapters, though
attuned to particular contexts in which the individual authors were
working, do not purport to write a history of science, nor have they
been written using a conventional historical methodology. It is rather
my belief that an interdisciplinary project such as this one, which studies
examples from philosophical, literary, and psychological texts, needs
a more flexible approach. To be sure, disciplinary distinctions are not
simply to be ignored, but neither should they be prohibitive. Christian
Kassung’s study of the pendulum is a good point of reference in several
regards. In The Pendulum. A History of Knowledge, he constructs a model
or conceptual apparatus whose fundamental elements are comprised
67 Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River.

68 Joseph Vogl, “Introduction,” in Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Fink
Verlag, 1999), 10–11.
Introduction 25
of the terms circle, pendulum, and number, because “they mark the
gravitational center of that knowledge that emerges in the pendulum
in the most varied forms.”69 For Kassung, the replacement of a history
of science with a history of knowledge is an important step because
the kind of work he wishes to accomplish requires, as he explains, a
“de-teleologisation” (Entteleologisierung) of historical genealogies
of knowledge in favor of “focusing on the concrete materiality and
practice of the construction of knowledge.”70 Kassung is more interested
in a material history of the pendulum and its connection to symbolic
order than I am to a material history of the lever, but to some degree
his argument is still transferable to my project. The levers in question
do not have to “work” in a positive scientific sense to be of theoretical
interest (and value) for the discourses in which they participate.
By remaining attuned to the function of the lever in various contexts, to
the linguistic environment in which it is embedded, and to the theoretical
concerns that cause its appearance in the first place, it is possible to observe
surprising points of overlap between thinkers usually thought to have
little in common. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg
Lichtenberg once wrote, in the notes of his Waste Books, that “among all
heuristic lifting devices [Hebezeugen], none is more fearsome than that
which I have called paradigms.”71 This study responds to Lichtenberg’s
idea by studying the ability of the specific lifting device known as the
lever to function more generally as a model of thought. In this concluding
section of the introduction, I will provide some background to justify my
decision to focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, outline
my approach and specify which questions in particular this study will
address, as well as give an overview of the four chapters that comprise
the case studies of this project.
As we have seen, the lever is both a very simple object, a tool
used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks of lifting and
balancing, and one whose mechanical law was foundational to the field
of statics through the Renaissance. I have also provided evidence of
the lever’s ability to cross physical scale and to prove itself relevant to
69 Christian Kassung, Das Pendel. Eine Wissensgeschichte (Paderborn, Munich:

Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 11.
70 Kassung, Das Pendel, 23. Kassung gives the example of two pendula associated
with Jean Bernard Foucault: the first, found in his own house; the second, the
famous “Foucault pendulum” that demonstrates the rotation of the earth.
Kassung suggests that only the second is considered successful in a positivistic
sense, but both are interesting for a history of knowledge: “An apparat, which
has never functioned, can become the central Aussagesystem of an archaeology
of knowledge” (Kassung, Das Pendel).
71 Georg Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1975), 455.
both terrestrial and celestial mechanics. Not one of these phenomena,

however, suffices to explain why, in the years around 1800, there is a
proliferation of levers outside of traditional scientific contexts. Jean de
Groot, in an essay on “Motion and Energy,” has noted that “what is
remarkable about the long history of ancient mechanics is that a few basic
principles . . . remained central even as mechanics moved away from
theoretical formulations,” and he cites “Archimedes’s law of the lever”
as a prime example for how “there is something basic about kinematic
principles that keeps them freshly appearing in the history of science.”72
As of yet, though, no one has investigated the parallel observation that
the same phenomenon holds true in areas of inquiry that, at first glance,
have nothing to do with classical mechanics. Why, for example, is it
advantageous for Kant, in his 1763 essay on negative magnitudes, to
use the lever and the concept of equilibrium to explain the process of
making moral judgments? Why do the early German Romantic writers
Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) rely so
much upon the fulcrum and the lever to model their understanding
of the subject, as well as use it as a tool for constructing relationships
between concepts? Even were one to consider the broader historical
backdrop and argue that both the rise of mechanics as a science and
the emergence of a “mechanical philosophy” (however disputed the
definition of this historical phenomenon might be73) have a role to play,
these developments cannot explain the widespread desire to translate
the lever into new contexts and use it as an instrument for working
through problems that seem to have little connection to mechanics.
Such a tendency is even more surprising at a time when organic tropes
and modes of explanation were rapidly gaining in popularity, as is the
case with German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie.74
Although the research underlying The Lever as Instrument of Reason
takes as its point of departure the surprising discovery of the lever’s
transdisciplinary rise in popularity around 1800, what connects the
72 Jan de Groot, “Motion and Energy,” in A Companion to Science, Technology, and

Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, vol. 1, ed. Georgia L. Irby (Chichester, UK;
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 57.
73 For a historical overview, see J. A. Bennett’s essay, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy
and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science xxiv (1986). Bennett suggests
that greater attention be paid to the historical context of mechanical philosophy
(i.e., that it was “not solely an intellectual construction”), and that one
should also consider to a greater degree contributions made by the “practical
mathematical sciences” (Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy,” 24).
74 One can refer to my book, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics
of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge, 2009) for further information
about this historical trend.
Introduction 27
individual chapters and gives coherence to the work as a whole are

further insights into what functions the lever performs. Even as the lever
translates knowledge and mobilizes new ideas among the most diverse
disciplines, these acts of translation participate in a common concern
to use the lever to model certain problems connected with cognition,
intellectual activity, and the ego. In order to see how this is the case, it
is important to note that when the lever and the mechanics associated
with it are imported into areas of thought as diverse as Kant’s precritical
writings, Idealist philosophy, German Romanticism, Naturphilosophie,
and empirical psychology, it is no longer simply being used as a
metaphor of convenience or rhetorical effect. To be sure, there are
numerous “levers of reason” scattered throughout the Enlightenment,
just as one can find multiple references to levers of religion and the state.
Most of these are just the illustration of a basic idea: the augmentation
of human agency. In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, however, I show
that in this time period the lever is also being used in more sophisticated
(and interesting) ways that share some affinity with Hans Blumenberg’s
concept of the “absolute metaphor.” Such metaphors, he writes, have a
“conceptually irredeemable expressive function.”75 Glossing a passage
from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Blumenberg finds an understanding
of metaphor that points to his notion of an absolute metaphor, where
metaphor “is clearly characterized as a model invested with a pragmatic
function” and is “a principle not of the theoretical determination of
what an object is in itself, but the practical determination of what the
idea of it ought to be for us and for the purposive use of it.”76 Such
metaphors cannot be reduced to a single concept or antecedent image
but rather serve as models. One example, which will be discussed in
greater detail in the next chapter, is Hegel’s definition of Aufhebung
(sublation). It is often forgotten that Hegel’s explanation of this concept
in the Science of Logic (1812–16) relies directly on the theory associated
with the lever (Hebel) and the mechanical moment. Rather than using
the lever metaphorically (one will not find any references to a “lever
of sublation” in Hegel’s writing), he uses the lever and the mechanical
theory associated with it to model the challenge that a philosophical
definition and description of Aufhebung presents.
One of the difficulties in writing about the lever lies in the fact
that it is by no means a stable entity. Over time, philosophers and
mathematicians found the law of the lever, which describes it in a state
of static equilibrium, intuitively obvious yet difficult to prove. The
75 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2010), 9.
76 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 10.
initial attempts by Archimedes and Aristotle were disputed and revised

by influential thinkers through the Enlightenment (including Descartes,
de la Hire, Lagrange, and others). They argued about how to provide
a mathematically and philosophically sound basis for the seemingly
self-evident laws describing the lever and, eventually, whether it
should even be seen as the “foundation and pillar” of mechanics.77
Those discussions, which emerged within the context of a widespread
critique of the teleological explanations central to Aristotle’s natural
philosophy,78 lasted through the end of the eighteenth century and
have been described by Benvenuto, Meli, and others. These studies
have inspired me to understand the lever as both historically unstable
and yet, by the same token, uniquely adaptable, and my readings of
Kant, Schlegel, Schelling, and Herbart are attuned to these nuances. I
wish to show that the lever has had more influential role to play in
the history of knowledge than has usually been recognized. Another
important exception can be found in the work of M. Norton Wise and
Crosbie Smith, who refer extensively to the lever and balance in their
work on the history of economics. The context is an argument about the
“rediscovery” of time. In a series of essays gathered under the heading
of “Work and Waste,” they argue that in the course of a “transformation
of natural philosophy in the 1840s,” “temporality now entered in an
essential way into the explanation of natural systems” and that “time
was rediscovered.”79 In the years prior (their argument refers to the
French Enlightenment and British scientific culture through the 1830s),
before the “rediscovery” of time, they suggest, it was the balance that
“served as a model of scientific rationality.”80 They refer to the historical
use of the balance to explain “economies of nature” in contexts ranging
from the solar system to geology, chemistry, biology, and political
economy as something that provided an “explanatory strategy” in
various ways.81 My work on the lever can be seen as a fine-tuning of
77 Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 76.

78 Descartes, Galileo, and Newton “began to criticize the idea that teleological
explanations were appropriate for understanding nature, and advocated in
their place explanations that privileged mechanical causation.” See Peter Dear,
The Intelligibility of Nature. How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16.
79 M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and
Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (I),” History of Science xxvii
(1989): 263.
80 M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and
Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (II),” History of Science xxvii
(1989): 391.
81 They define three aspects, whereby the first identified “an opposition of two
forces, labelled ‘natural,’ ‘constant,’ or ‘regular,’ which would produce an
Introduction 29
this perspective, because it discusses numerous examples where time

does, in fact, figure into the picture in ways that Wise and Smith might
not have anticipated.
In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, I also challenge the teleologically
based assumption that human history can be defined by the invention
of increasingly better tools, an argument that requires both a rethinking
of the relationship between tool and agency and a revision of the
anthropological model of the tool, which understands it as a substitute
limb, in favor of an alternative where the body and tool are one.
It is in this collapse that one can also observe the intersection of the
two cultural histories, of the lever and the Archimedean point, that
inform my project. Just as Blumenberg has argued that our failure to
achieve the Archimedean point—the firm ground of knowledge—is
unavoidable when one attempts to construct a theory of science from
within a scientific mode of thinking, an analogous collapse occurs when
the human and lever are one—when it is no longer possible to separate
agency and instrumentality. The Lever as Instrument of Reason argues
that the potential loss of “firm ground” from which to position oneself
as agent is surprisingly productive, resulting in significant, if widely
varying, philosophical gain.
Overview of the Chapters

Chapter One, “The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant,” focuses on the
precritical essay, “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative
Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1763). This might seem like a peculiar
choice, given that the essay, at first glance, does not seem to have much
to do with mechanics at all. Kant devotes most of the argument to
distinguishing between different modes of negation in mathematical
terms, using the mathematician Abraham Kästner as a reference
point, before turning to the case of psychology (Seelenlehre). As it turns
out, the lever has an essential role to play as the concretization and,
I argue, fundamental embodiment of “real contradiction” (i.e., one
that does not posit a logical impossibility) and active “rest” when in
a state of equilibrium. The lever is also what connects the disparate
bodies of Kant’s essay: from the Spartan mother torn between pride
and devastation, to the learned man whose apparent stillness belies
eternal, timeless stability in the natural state of the system” and the second
“distinguished regular variations, or periodic ‘oscillations,’ controlled by the
constant natural forces, from irregular variations or ‘fluctuations,’ produced by
forces called ‘disturbing’ or ‘accidental’” (Wise and Smith, “Work and Waste
(II),” 391). The third invoked analytic tools (such as variational calculus and
statistical averaging) for locating the “optimum” (natural or average) state of a
particular system (Wise and Smith, “Work and Waste (II)”).
an active mind. With reference to these and other examples, this first
chapter offers an eighteenth-century case for the lever’s use to model
certain aspects of the human psyche, an idea that will return, vastly
reconfigured, in Early Romanticism’s thought experiments, Schelling
and Eschenmayer’s Naturphilosophie, and Herbart’s neuro-mechanics.
Equally integral to this chapter and the project as a whole is the way in
which the lever and, more generally, the concept of equilibrium mediate
between material and abstract domains.
Chapter Two, “The Levers of German Romanticism,” shifts the focus
of the lever as a model of the human from processes of thinking and
judgment to constructions of the self. Part of the continued interest in
Romantic theory and literature today can be attributed to its ability
to undermine the stereotypes that have populated research agendas
since the nineteenth century. Familiar descriptions of Romanticism
as the cult of irrationality, as pure nostalgia for a hypothetical golden
age, and as a purveyor of idealized femininity have, with time, been
exposed to more critical treatment. The most recent scholarship has
taken up Romanticism’s manifold relationships to scientific thinking,
once thought of as beyond its scope. Perhaps the last of Romanticism’s
unchallenged concepts is that of organicism. The “organic” has left its
mark on almost every aspect of early Romantic thought, from the tropes
of its literary works to its aesthetics and its subject theory, and it is a
concept that, at first glance, would seem to have little to do with the
mechanical. In this chapter, I argue the contrary position and show that,
in fact, the lever is deeply ingrained in early Romantic thinking, where
its theory serves as a heuristic tool to model relationships between
concepts, to describe processes of generation of both the individual
and the universe, and, more generally, as a way of addressing potential
contradictions of philosophical thinking through the logic of sublation
embodied by the lever in equilibrium. The analyses of this chapter are
far removed from the mechanical automata of later Romanticism. My
study approaches the problem of a “mechanical” human from a very
different angle: the second part of the chapter addresses the relation of
the lever to early Romantic concepts of the subject to show that it no
longer serves as an instrument for the augmentation of human agency
in the spirit of Archimedes. Instead, it comes to stand in for the agent
itself, such that the subject position and fulcrum point are one.
Chapter Three, “The Contested God of Naturphilosophie,” reveals
how Friedrich Schelling and Carl Eschenmayer remove the lever from
purely mechanical contexts and use it as a model for both the self and
the emergence of self-consciousness. For Eschenmayer, the mechanical
lever is a way to make physical and psychological phenomena “more
visible” (anschaulicher) and he constructs diagrams to make his case. He
provides a theoretical basis that enables us to understand how Schelling
Introduction 31
uses the concept of equilibrium as a bridge between the material and

nonmaterial and the lever as a model for the basis for self-consciousness.
This chapter also exposes the lever’s surprising role in a heated debate
that erupts between Schelling and Eschenmayer around Schelling’s
1809 essay, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
As much as this debate is about God’s relationship to the concepts of
“ground” [Grund] and “non-ground” [Ungrund] it is, surprisingly, just
as much about the status of the lever. Although Schelling’s position
is that the usefulness of the lever and its mechanical theory is “dead”
from a nature-philosophical perspective, Eschenmayer counters with
its apotheosis as the “god” of the philosophy of nature.
The final chapter of the book, “From Naturphilosophie to a
Mechanically Minded Psychology,” confirms that, despite Schelling’s
prediction, the lever’s demise is far from certain. Its resurrection takes
place in the field of psychology, as witnessed by the central role it plays
in what Matthew Bell has called “the two best-known psychological
products of Idealism”: Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts (1817)
and J. F. Herbart’s Text Book for Psychology (1816).82 These two works
go in very different directions: in Eschenmayer’s case, through further
thinking about Schelling’s psychology of the absolute, and in Herbart’s,
through the application of mathematics to psychology. Herbart, best
known for his pedagogical theories, has an avid interest in what he calls
the “statics and mechanics of the mind” where the role of the lever is, in
his opinion, too obvious to ignore. I show how Herbart uses the lever to
develop one of the first mathematically rigorous models of the human
mind: a model where the emergence and suppression of thoughts and
our cognitive states were understood as quantifiable.
In the letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Princess Adelheid
Amalie Gallitzin quoted as the epigraph to this study, one finds
embedded the most prominent themes of the following pages,
including the lever’s connection to consciousness and thinking and,
above all, the way in which it “appears to be everywhere the first.”
For Jacobi, it is a contemplation that generates a degree of discomfort
that derives, perhaps, from the awareness that the lever is, simply put,
an unavoidable component of our worldview. Readers should not be
surprised if, after perusing the following pages, they too are left with a
heightened awareness of the myriad lever effects that inform our daily
activities. It remains a personal decision whether such contemplations
inspire unease or simply greater admiration for the way the simplest of
mechanical objects remains so fundamental to our existence.
82 Matthew Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature and Thought, 1700–
1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164.
One The Balance of Life /
Quantifying Kant
This concept can be extended far beyond the limits of the material world.1
Immanuel Kant
Introduction
All too often, it is the fate of simple things to be overlooked. Such is the case
of the mechanical lever. We can scarcely live an hour of the day without
taking advantage of something that relies on its mechanical laws—leaving,
for a moment, the levers of the body and those which function as extensions
of the body entirely out of the equation. Yet the lever as such is rarely
something that calls attention to itself, perhaps because, pace Archimedes,
it is almost always available to us in the guise of something else. The levers
that we encounter in our daily lives are better known as scissors, hammers,
and bottle openers, each of which operates according to the same principle
of mechanical advantage. And if that weren’t enough, the numerous
metaphorical incarnations of the lever generate a different kind of clutter:
from the eighteenth century onward, many objects conceptually linked to
power and manipulation—in any sense of the word—were at some point
metaphorically attached to a lever. The political, religious and philosophical
texts of the nineteenth century are littered with ideological levers of all
kinds, including the levers of reason, morality, intelligence, and the state.
Clearly, there are historical trends to be observed: in our current climate
of fiscal instability, there is much talk of the “economic levers” and, even
more specifically, the “interest rate” levers being wielded by the monetary
mechanics at the Federal Reserve. In the process of its dissemination as
metaphor, however, the lever tends to lose its specificity as mechanical
1 Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities

into Philosophy,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236.
object, with the result that it could just as well be exchanged with other
instruments of power, such as Nietzsche’s—or Heidegger’s—hammer. In
the introduction to this study, I argued that the most productive approach to
the lever requires thinking of it as more than just a “simple” metaphor such
as one finds in the examples above. I also raised a few alternatives which,
collectively, can help work toward a broader understanding of what a lever
can be. In the most general sense, one can think in terms of a conceptual
apparatus, given that one rarely finds the lever in isolation, but rather
attached to concepts such as equilibrium, power, and advantage, each of
which have their own value in disciplines such as philosophy, literature,
and psychology. The lever, as I understand it, also fulfills some of the criteria
for the somewhat elusive notion of an “absolute metaphor” as defined by
Hans Blumenberg. For Blumenberg, an absolute metaphor has a pragmatic
function as a model. It cannot be reduced to purely terminological claims,
but rather, within a specific historical experience, such a metaphor provides
a point of orientation and helps to structure a world.
To give a sense of the challenges faced when, around 1800, one is
confronted with a lever that refuses the status of simple, rhetorical
ornamentation, I would like to mention an example that will likely
be familiar to many readers before shifting attention to the essay by
Kant that is the focal point of this chapter. The example comes from
the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s discussion of the concept
“sublation” in the Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), which can
also be found in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften
(Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). In these works, Hegel draws
upon the theoretical language associated with the lever to explain
the relationship between the real and the ideal. In the Science of Logic,
when Hegel explains what it means for something to be sublated
(aufgehoben) he reminds us that one of the peculiar features of this word
is that it encompasses two opposed meanings in German: to preserve
and to remove. To illustrate how the word aufgehoben unifies opposed
meanings, Hegel turns to the lever:
Something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with

its opposite; in this closer determination as something reflected, it
may fittingly be called a moment. In the case of the lever, “weight”
and “distance from a point” are called its mechanical moments
because of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the difference
between something real like weight, and something idealized
such as the merely spatial determination of “line.”2
2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82.
The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant 35
With this example, Hegel points to one of the most significant

theoretical features of the lever: its ability to unite two fundamentally
different things—a weight and the linear measurement of its distance
from a fulcrum point—using a logic of the “sameness” of effect. The
lever effectively provides Hegel with a model for both illustrating and
understanding the concept of sublation. We could compare the passage
from The Science of Logic with Hegel’s reference to the “tragic” lever
in his Lectures on Aesthetics. In the context of aesthetics, the lever’s
mechanics play no role whatsoever, such that it might just as well be
a pulley (though admittedly to lesser rhetorical effect). The same does
not hold true for sublation: if we want to understand this concept, and
the negotiation it undertakes between the real and the ideal, one needs
to have some familiarity with both the lever and the concept of the
mechanical moment. It is important to understand how the mechanical
advantage of the lever is translated into philosophical gain. To “grasp”
intuitively the peculiar state of affairs through which force is expended
and, at the same time, held in abeyance, one also needs to have a sense
of the powerful act of translation the lever embodies, whereby one
thing (the real) is understood in terms of something else (the ideal)
quite distinct from it.
As stated in the introduction, one of the tasks of this study is to call
attention to the lever and thereby to defamiliarize it, to pare it down
to its most basic functional relations, and to make it strange enough to
become interesting again. An important first step is to divest the lever
of any requirement of materiality. The levers that swing in and out of
equilibrium in this chapter and the following ones are not necessarily
made of wood or iron. Instead, they are often closer to what mechanical
treatises refer to as “mathematical” rather than “physical” levers, a
distinction that will become clearer with reference to a few of the key
mechanical handbooks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In the posthumously published Nouvelle mécanique ou statique (New
Mechanics or Statics) (1725), Pierre Varignon, a French mathematician
who moved in the circles of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoullis, writes
that the lever is an “inflexible stick” (verge inflexible), with the added
caveat that, for mathematical purposes, it should be considered without
weight.3 Andrew Motte’s more literally minded Treatise of the Mechanical
Powers (1727) only considers the physical lever. He describes it as
“generally in Practice a wooden or iron Bar, when used for the lifting
of Weights” and adds, with an eye for the lever’s versatility, “it comes
3 Pierre Varignon, Nouvelle mécanique ou statique, vol. 1 (Paris: Claude Jambert,

1725), 300.
in Use under many different Forms upon several Occasions of Life.”4

As for the German philosopher Christian Wolff, whose system was an
important reference point for Kant at all stages of his career, he writes
in the third volume of his 1716 Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen
Wissenschaften (Fundamentals of All Mathematical Sciences), dedicated
to mechanics, that the lever is simply “a straight line AB, which lies
in a point C, upon whose one point A the force and on another B the
weight can be applied.”5 For all their differences, in each of these cases,
the emphasis is on the lever as a discrete object (a line, a stick, a bar),
whether physical or not. The entry “lever” from Gehler’s Physikalisches
Wörterbuch (Physical Dictionary) of 1798 takes a somewhat different
approach. Drawing verbatim from the work of two influential German
mathematicians, Abraham Kästner and Johann Erxleben,6 Gehler does
not identify the lever with a material object. Instead, he writes:
If one can think of three points on a firm, inflexible connection

[Verbindung] of bodies, around one of which, the fulcrum, the
entire connection can turn, in that two forces on both of the other
points act in opposition to each other, this connection is called
a lever.7
Gehler’s definition serves as a reminder that, for all that the lever pivots
back and forth between physical and mathematical applications—
between material and immaterial regimes—it is at heart a figure of pure
connection, a Verbindung. Not all connections are levers, but in many
kinds of connections, the minimal requirements for a lever are met. The
following pages and subsequent chapters will show how this general
understanding of what a lever is and can be allows for more flexibility
in identifying levers and the mechanical thinking that informs them.
4 Motte, Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, 65–66.

5 Christian Wolff, Der Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol. 2
(Halle: Renger, 1726), 232.
6 Gehler quotes from Kästner’s Anfangsgründe der angewandten Mathematik
(Fundamentals of Applied Mathematics) (1780) and Erxleben’s Anfangsgründe
der Naturlehre durch Lichtenberg (Fundamentals of the Theory of Nature through
Lichtenberg) (1787).
7 I include the German quote because I will return to this definition on
several occasions in the course of this study: “Wenn man sich an einer festen
unbiegsamen Verbindung von Körpern drey Punkte gedenken kann, um deren
einen, den Ruhepunkt, die ganze Verbindung sich drehen läßt, indem an den
beyden andern Punkten zwo Kräfte einander entgegen wirken, so heißt diese
Verbindung ein Hebel,” in Johann Gehler, Physicalisches [sic] Wörterbuch, vol. 2
(Leipzig: Schwickert, 1789), 565.
In addition to being a figure of connection, the lever also functions

as one of ratio or proportion when its law of equilibrium is taken into
consideration. Like a simple mechanical scale, a lever is in equilibrium
when the product of the weight and the weight’s distance from the
fulcrum on one side is equivalent to the product of a second weight
applied to the lever and its distance from the fulcrum on the other side.8
Apart from being a fundamental law in the field of statics, this aspect of
the lever is also central to the cases I analyze because it entails bringing
two things that are not the same into a relationship of equivalence. As
we saw above, in the example taken from Hegel’s philosophy, the lever
is a simple mechanical device that also allows us to think of one thing
in terms of something else. To that end, it is also a figure of translation.
Translation, in this context, invokes both the materiality of the lever or
scale, as something that balances forces applied to one side and another,
and its ability to mediate differences more generally. The same quality
Hegel identifies when he recognizes the lever’s suitability for mediating
between the real and the ideal makes an argument for why the lever,
when its mechanics are taken into consideration, can be “more” than
metaphor. It is an instrument that preserves differences: it maintains
the equivalence of effect (or mechanical “product”) without claiming
a relationship of identity. As the basic unit of translation, the lever can
therefore do the work of a metaphor while maintaining its integrity—the
lever is the instrument that makes this process of translating differences
into equivalences visible. This is also the key to the lever’s discursive
mobility, to its usefulness as a figure of thought when taken from
mechanics and applied to a number of other discourses. For the lever
to function as a kind of organizing principle, then, there needs to be a
basic willingness to quantify the abstract, so it can bring diverse things
(whether objects, concepts, or something else) into a relationship. As a
consequence, within many of the examples I address in this study one
finds a historical interest in techniques of quantification, whereby things
that were traditionally not thought of in such terms (such as processes
of thinking, or emotions) find themselves subjected to quantitative,
analytical descriptions. There is a unique phenomenon to be observed
here. Even though it is easy enough to understand the lever as something
that lends itself to application, the opposite also holds true. There are
certain contexts where a particular set of concerns will cluster together,
conjoin for the purpose of an experiment in thinking, and concretize in
the lever. One of the objectives of my project is therefore to observe the
conditions under which this phenomenon occurs.
8 This is with reference to “first-class levers,” where the fulcrum point lies in
between the two weights.
The history of the lever that is the focus of this chapter centers
around Kant’s precritical essay, “Versuch, den Begriff der negativen
Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen,” (“Attempt to Introduce the
Concept of Negative Magnitudes to Philosophy”) (1763). For readers
whose knowledge of Kant is based primarily on his three critiques,
the essay on negative magnitudes might seem like an unusual place
to start. After all, mechanical theory is usually not the first association
one might have with Kant’s philosophy at any stage of his career, and
it is therefore reasonable to ask what he knew about statics in general
and levers in particular. Fortunately, Kant’s understanding of classical
mechanics and other branches of scientific knowledge has been well-
documented in recent years by Michael Friedman, Eric Watson, and
Martin Schönfeld, among others.9 We know, for example, that Kant
possessed a thorough knowledge of mechanical theory as articulated
by Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff. Kant’s very first
published essay, “Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces”
(1747), also makes frequent mention of the lever.10 Almost forty years
later comes the publication of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (1786), which contains an entire chapter on mechanics, and
Michael Friedman has shown how Kant’s university lectures of the
summer of 1787 also make reference to the laws of the lever in the context
of chemical theory.11 The “Negative Magnitudes” essay, published in
1763, falls squarely in the middle of this span of years and was written
at a time when Kant engaged with the mathematical and mechanical
theories of Abraham Kästner, Leonhard Euler, Christian August
Crusius, and Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, each of whom are cited in his
9 Of particular interest are the following: Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the
Young Kant: The Pre-Critical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eric
Watkins, Kant and the Sciences (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); and Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992). Friedman’s discussion of how Kant integrates
the mechanics and materiality of the balance and lever into his thinking about
a theory of the caloric is a good reference point (Friedman, Kant and the Exact
Sciences, 297–98). For the reception of Kant’s philosophy in the scientific debates
of the nineteenth century, see Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, The
Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science.
10 The “living forces” (vis viva) debate emerged from a difference in opinion in
how to describe the conservation of energy in a mechanical system (Leibniz
described the living force of a system in terms of the conservation of what
today is called kinetic energy whereas other philosophers, such as Newton and
Descartes, claimed that momentum was the conserved “living force”).
11 Friedman refers to the lectures collected under the title Danziger Physik, See
also his recent work, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical
Foundations of the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 246.
essay. Accepting Kant’s fluency in the concepts of classical mechanics—

regardless of whether one agrees with his conclusions (as in the vis viva
debate)12—is therefore a necessary prerequisite to the present subject
of our inquiry. The driving question, however, takes a much different
form: of interest is not how levers perform in mechanical contexts, but
what happens when the lever and the concepts associated with it are
deployed in other areas of intellectual inquiry. The following reading of
the “Negative Magnitudes” essay will reveal how it is an appropriate
choice in addition to being a surprising one: appropriate because the
entire essay is conceived in the spirit of “application” and “translation”
that the lever itself also embodies, and surprising because the stated
emphasis of Kant’s essay is on mathematics rather than mechanics. For
this and other reasons, my focus on the lever offers a new perspective on
the essay, one that goes against the grain of both Kant’s stated purpose
and how it has been interpreted since its initial publication.
Kant’s essay is a challenging read because its author assumes the
reader’s familiarity with a broad spectrum of knowledge that includes
the Wolffian school, mathematics, and natural philosophy—what we
would today call physics. At the same time, the question that motivates
the essay is, at least from a formal perspective, relatively simple: Is
it possible to take an idea from mathematics and demonstrate its
usefulness for philosophy? This is the question Kant attempts to answer
using the example of negative numbers or “magnitudes.”13 The essay
is divided into three sections. The first contains a general explanation
of what the concept of negative magnitudes entails. Here, Kant makes
a fundamental distinction, one to which he will return throughout
the essay, between “logical” and “real” contradictions. In a logical
contradiction, two opposed predicates attached to an object cannot
coexist, but in the physical world, numerous cases abound. As I will
discuss in detail, Kant’s description of negative magnitudes is modeled
on the notion of real contradictions, where two opposing predicates can
exist; the primary image associated with the idea of a real contradiction
in Kant’s essay is that of a physical body at “rest” when acted upon by
two equal and opposing forces, whereby the word “rest” (Ruhe) is also
the term used in statics to describe a body in equilibrium when acted
12 Historians of philosophy and science such as Henry Michael Southgate have

shown that Kant and others made the mistake of trying to apply a principle
of static mechanics to dynamical systems (where the concept of momentum
becomes relevant). See Southgate’s article, “Kant’s Critique of Leibniz’s
Rejection of Real Opposition,” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for
the History of Philosophy of Science 3.1 (Spring 2013): 91–134.
13 The title is sometimes translated as negative “quantities,” but I have decided to
follow the standard English translation.
upon by contrary forces. In other words, the primary logical distinction

that governs Kant’s essay clearly connects to a mechanical model, and
it is the purpose of the following chapter to show how this connection
resonates in different aspects of Kant’s argument.
The second section of Kant’s essay then tests out a few cases from
philosophy where the concept of negative magnitudes might be useful,
including feelings of pleasure and displeasure, as well as sins of
commission and omission. The final section of the essay then reflects on
how to move from the examples discussed to general statements about
the usefulness of negative magnitudes in philosophy. To that end, Kant
thinks in terms of a universal equilibrium of positions and oppositions
and reflects on the difficulty of quantifying mental activities like the
inception, cessation, and movement of thoughts. There is a tendency
to be observed here, as Kant’s inquiry moves from more “personal”
examples to an interest in the more immaterial and speculative regimes
of psychic processes that, with reference to the mechanics of thinking
itself, anticipates my later discussion of Herbart in surprising ways.
Readers of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay usually devote their
attention to interpreting Kant’s ideas either in the context of the existing
schools of thought that shaped the philosophical discussions the first
half of the eighteenth century, or in anticipation of Kant’s later work.
Martin Schönfeld’s Philosophy of the Young Kant sees in Kant’s essay
a direct challenge to the positions of the School Philosophy associated
with the extremely influential Christian Wolff.14 Henry Michael
Southgate takes a similar approach, claiming that Kant’s essay attempts
to “block off the rationalist escape route” that is, a recourse to “stock
metaphysical concepts,” as well as to argue for a Newtonian science.15
Frederick Beiser, on the other hand, positions the essay in a different
constellation of intellectual concerns, and he sees in it the beginning
of a thought process that will reach its maturity in Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason. In the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, he writes, Kant
showed that “the entire range of our experience could not be expressed
or explained in strictly rational terms according to the principle of
14 In particular, Schönfeld discusses how Kant argued for a stronger distinction

to be made between logical postulates and the physical world: “Perhaps the
central assumption of the traditional logical rationalism was that logic mirrors
the structure of nature—in other words, that logic was supposed to have its
roots neither in social convention nor in psychological make-up, but in the
ontological constitution of reality instead. This very assumption was the target
of the critique of the Negative Quantities” (Schönfeld, Young Kant, 231).
15 Southgate, “Kant’s Critique,” 113.
contradiction.”16 Beiser writes that by demonstrating that “rather than

differing only in degree, the spheres of reason and experience would
differ in kind,” Kant “laid the foundation for his later distinction
between reason and sensibility in the first Critique.”17 John Zammito, in
his Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, also provides a summary
of Kant’s positions (thereby underscoring the conceptual framework
with which Kant’s readers have tended to approach the essay) when
he writes that “it articulated a powerful argument for the discernment
of a difference between the nominal and the real through differences
in the respective theories of negation that attached to them,” “posed
a fundamental challenge to metaphysicians to come up with a better
account of causality,” and “gave vent to some of Kant’s sharpest
castigations of academic philosophy.”18
Each of these readings engages directly with the philosophical
content and historical context of Kant’s essay. What remains to be
desired, however, is a closer attention to language: to Kant’s rhetorical
choices, to his figurative language, to the peculiarity of some of his
examples, as well as to a use of language that sometimes seems at
odds with his stated objectives. To be more precise, despite the fact
that Kant’s essay is dedicated—so its author tells us—to examining the
application of mathematical ideas in philosophical terms emphatically
stated to be “not mechanical,” because such a model is not adequate
for describing those “cases of change” such as occur in the human
soul,19 it is nonetheless completely infused with images, terminology,
and ideas taken from mechanics. This includes obvious examples,
such as the figure of the lever and the related concept of equilibrium,
and less obvious ones, such as words like erwägen and aufheben: words
whose roots can be traced back to the material instruments of the
balance (Waage) and the lever (Hebel), respectively. Already the preface
asserts that the “little observation” upon which the essay is based has
potentially “important consequences”—a claim made in the spirit of the
mechanical advantage of the lever if there ever was one, as Archimedes
would perhaps agree.
I therefore propose to read Kant’s essay with a different set of priorities
and emphases in mind, by paying close attention to its language
through a focus on the mechanics and conceptual apparatus associated
16 Frederick Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development, 1746–1781,” in The

Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 42.
17 Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development.”
18 John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2002), 70.
19 See Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 233.
with the lever. As we will see, the attention this chapter brings to bear
on the overlooked mechanics of the essay actually responds directly
to Kant’s stated project of applying a mathematical concept in new
fields because of primary importance of the lever’s status as a figure
of ratio and translation. I do not argue that the workings of the “soul”
are, in fact, mechanical, but rather that the mechanical language of the
essay will help perform some of the philosophical labor. The impact of
a reading attuned to the rhetorical mechanics of the text is that, through
the work of the lever and related concepts, the distinction between
reason and experience Beiser insists upon is actually undermined. In
other words, although I agree that the “Negative Magnitudes” deserves
to be placed at the beginning of a genealogy, the family tree I describe
reaches through Novalis to Schelling, Eschenmayer, and Herbart rather
than to the later work of Kant.
The first section of the chapter, “Balancing acts,” focuses on the
language of connection (Verbindung) and relation (Verhältnis) in Kant’s
essay and, recalling Gehler’s definition cited above, argues how the
preconditions for thinking about the lever are established before the
lever itself makes an appearance. The second section, “Quantified
pleasure,” explores how the mechanical dynamics of the balancing act
are imported into the essay and revised in the context of equilibrium.
The third section, “Moral mechanics,” shows how each step in Kant’s
argument carries with it a new aspect of the mechanical model (in
this case, through the lever’s ability to define oppositions in terms of
degree, rather than kind). The next section, “About thinking,” will then
underscore the importance of mechanical principles as Kant shifts from
the content to the structure of thinking and introduces a new temporal
dimension to his examples. The final section, “Beyond the material,”
takes its impetus directly from a suggestion Kant himself makes
toward the end of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay. The collective
gain of this chapter is not only to be measured in terms of a different
perspective on Kant’s essay, but also in terms of laying the groundwork
for an argument that is important for my project as a whole: Kant’s
temporalization of the mechanical analogy with the lever to model
thinking is the beginning of a trajectory that leads to the psychological
theories of the nineteenth century.
Balancing Acts
In the introduction to his essay, Kant makes clear that, when testing
out the concept of negative magnitudes in philosophical contexts, he
will be guided by the concept of a “real” opposition, one that does not
posit a logical impossibility: “Two predicates of a thing are opposed
to each other, but not through the law of contradiction. Here, too, one
thing cancels that which is posited by the other; but the consequence is
something (cogitabile).”20 In order to visualize the kind of real contradiction

being described here in contradistinction to a logical contradiction, and
to emphasize the positive nature of an act of negation, it stands to reason
that Kant will first draw concrete examples from the physical world
before testing out the same idea in more abstract scenarios. To illustrate
a logical contradiction, he gives the example of an object in motion
and at rest at the same time. For Kant, this is a logical impossibility
according to the law of contradiction (der Satz des Widerspruchs) that
claims that “A” and “not-A” cannot be true at the same time.21 (It also
shows us that, in an Aristotelian spirit, Kant associates the equilibrium
state with zero velocity; for Newton, however, it is certainly possible
for an equilibrium state to occur at a constant velocity and there will be
cause to return to the idea of “equilibrium in motion” at the end of the
chapter.) In the case of real contradictions, such coexistence is certainly
possible: two predicates associated with a thing can be opposed to each
other without invoking the law of contradiction. Here, Kant provides the
example of a ship at sea held motionless by two winds of equal strength
that blow in opposing directions.22 The product of two canceling forces
is still “something,” and he qualifies that statement by adding that
the “consequence of such an opposition is rest, which is something
(repraesentabile).”23 As I mentioned above, “rest,” in the sense Kant uses
it here, is one of the most common concepts of static mechanics and is
used to describe a state where a body or system is in equilibrium due
to a balance of forces; it is, in fact, the concept upon which this entire
branch of mechanics is based. When one imagines a body subjected
to two equal and opposite forces, each acting as a “predicate,” it does
not require a leap of the imagination to see that this example correlates
precisely to a lever in a state of equilibrium around a fulcrum point. The
logical distinction that governs the entirety of Kant’s essay is framed in
mechanical terms.
20 Kant, “Negative Magnitudies,” 211.

21 See the entry by Laurence R. Horn on “Contradiction” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://
plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/contradiction/.
22 Iain Hamilton Grant remarks that “it is instructive that Kant’s sailing ship
example pitches logical contradiction against opposing forces, since this tallies
with Fichte’s practical–theoretical concept of positing as activity,” in Grant,
Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006),
88. Grant connects the forces of real opposition to the striving of the I and not-I
in Fichte’s model: “The I’s continuous forces and quanta of activity produce and
form reality” (Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling).
23 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 211.
Within the physical example Kant provides, the principle of

connection is crucial, as is the fact that what is being posited is that
the smallest constellation of a particular conceptual scenario. This
constellation is defined by an arrangement of three things: two entities
(call them predicates, forces, or what you will) acting in opposition upon
a separate entity that displays the necessary “rigidity” (conceptual,
physical, or otherwise) to keep this figure of thought from collapsing.
Only then can one understand the “zero” of rest, a “relative nothing”
(verhältnißmäßiges nichts) according to Kant, which is a direct translation
of the “nihilum relativum” one finds in Kästner.24 According to the logic
of a relative nothing, even a negative magnitude is “more” than zero
because it is nonetheless a real magnitude, one that exists in opposition
to the ones conventionally identified as positive.
If we recall Gehler’s description of the lever as an object defined
purely in terms of connectivity, we can see that Kant’s physical example
of the object with forces acting in opposition upon it is essentially in the
same state of equilibrium as a lever would be, if in somewhat simpler
terms: it is an equilibrium of forces as opposed to an equilibrium of
torque. What is interesting is that when Kant shifts his attention from
an example taken from the physical world (opposing forces acting
upon an object) to one that is mathematically grounded—an individual
who has both credit and debt—the mechanical language continues
and even intensifies. As complacent as we are with the thought of
positive and negative magnitudes in “opposition” (Entgegensetzung)
to each other, Kant writes, we should also insist upon understanding
this opposition as a reciprocal relation (Gegenverhältniß) where the
emphasis is once more on connection.25 The word Gegenverhältniß,
which connotes a relation of oppositions, as well as semantically related
words (Verbindung, Verhältniß) occurs frequently in this first section of
Kant’s essay. With the emphasis on relation and connectivity, Kant
constructs the metaphorical image associated with concept of negative
magnitudes in such a way that is compatible with the singular object
of the lever. We have our connection and we have our three points:
through the concept of a relation of oppositions we can envision two
affirmatives that are joined by a relation of opposition based on the
24 Note that Kant possessed the 1759 edition of Kästner’s Anfangsgründe der
angewandten Mathematik.
25 The word Gegenverhältniß is fairly uncommon. Grimm’s dictionary simply
defines it as a “gegenseitiges Verhältniß” and cites two sources, one of them
Kant’s essay and the other Jean Paul’s aesthetics. Of the few (around five)
printed examples I could find from the years preceding Kant’s text, it’s notable
that two of them occur in the texts of Abraham Kästner and Crusius, both of
whom Kant refers to in the “Negative Magnitudes” essay.
equivalence of quantifiably comparable effects. No one would argue

that debts and accumulated wealth are the same, but when we compare
their effects, it makes sense to say that debt is a negative wealth. As is
clear from the first basic rule (Grundregel) of “real contradiction” (also
called “real repugnancy” or Realrepugnanz) formulated in the essay,
Kant is interested in generalizing the principle at work here beyond the
case of positive and negative numbers:
A real repugnancy only occurs where there are two things, as

positive grounds, and where one of them cancels the consequence
of the other. Suppose that motive force is a positive ground: a real
conflict can only occur in so far as there is a second motive force
connected with it, and in so far as each reciprocally cancels the
effect of the other.26
What is remarkable is that this description of real repugnancy,” for all

that it seems as if it too should be situated directly within an example
drawn from physics, comes in the wake of the discussion of abstract
credits and debits. It reinforces the impression that the conceptual
framework of Kant’s essay itself owes a debt to mechanical models.
We can observe in this theoretical language—and not least of all
in Kant’s recourse to the verb aufheben, used here in the sense of “to
cancel”—the preconditions for the concretization of the object prior to
its arrival in the text. The idea that the positive and negative are both, in
a particular sense, “real” and positive affirmations correlates precisely
to a visualization of the lever, which also relies on two real and positive
sources of input to engage with each other around the fulcrum point.
Quantified Pleasure
The purpose of Kant’s essay as stated in the title—to test the
viability of importing a concept from mathematics to philosophy (as
Weltweisheit)—leaves quite a bit to the imagination as to which branch
of philosophy this will entail. As we have seen, in the first section of
Kant’s essay, his examples are drawn from the natural world, like
the physical properties of objects, as well as from simple arithmetic
cases where positive and negative numbers could be applied, such
as debits and credits. The case of the individual who has both credits
and debits to his name, which at first glance seems a rather arbitrary
choice, becomes less so in retrospect when, in the second section of
the essay, Kant turns his attention more directly to cases drawn from

psychology (here: Seelenlehre27) and moral philosophy. In other words,

we will be shown the psychological dynamics of the individual in a
state of debt, and encouraged to understand him as someone who
has choices to make, whether in accordance with or in violation of a
moral law. Having arrived, Kant will be in no hurry to leave this area
of inquiry. In fact, each subsequent step of his argument will take up
various examples drawn from psychology—without, however, leaving
behind the mechanical thinking we have already observed. As a result,
the mechanical models connected to the lever and related concepts will
themselves be drawn into the same psychological framework. It is the
primary reason why I chose Kant’s essay as the point of departure.
We have observed above how Kant’s insistence on a “real” and
“positive” negative (such as provided by the idea of “real repugnancy”)
lends itself to a mechanical model and also considered the example
where two equal and opposite forces of motion are directed toward a
single object. In addition to that particular case, there is another one
Kant takes up that bears directly on the present discussion. He also
mentions the concept of physical “impenetrability” whereby one body
resists the motive force of another through its sheer materiality, such
as where a solid object is held in place by two opposing springs and
the impenetrability of a body acts as its own repelling force, what Kant
calls a “negative attraction.” Just as the example of the object with
two forces acting upon it provided Kant with a point of reference for
the discussion of credits and debits, in an analogous way Kant uses
the example of impenetrability to generalize that forces of repulsion
are as real as forces of attraction: not only to solidify the association of
“real opposition” with the principles of mechanics but also to act as a
backdrop for a more personal (or at least human) scenario. Here, Kant
takes his example from the Seelenlehre with the question of whether
aversion (Unlust) is simply an absence of desire (Lust) or whether it
in itself could form a positive basis for desire diminishing. Can we
speak of aversion as a negative desire in the same framework of real
oppositions set up before? It should be noted that, in the second half of
the eighteenth century, neither linguistic possibility was automatically
assumed—the meaning of Unlust was far from fixed, although there
are divergent points of view about the matter. Zedler’s Universal-
Lexicon, for example, states quite clearly that we are to distinguish
between an “absence of pleasure . . . when we do not sense perfection”
27 Christian Wolff’s metaphysics distinguishes between empirischer (or erfahrender)

Seelenlehre and vernünftiger Seelenlehre, the first referring to empirical psychology
and the latter referring to rational psychology of the late seventeenth through
early nineteenth centuries.
and aversion as the “idea of imperfection, which is always something

real.”28 In Adelung’s Wörterbuch, published some years after Kant’s
essay, the first, admittedly more common, definition is “not merely an
absence of desire [Lust], but also the perceived knowledge of something
unpleasant”; the second definition, however, is simply the “absence of
desire,” although Adelung acknowledges that this meaning is relatively
rare in High German and usually has to do with a lack of appetite.29
These differences can be explained in part based on the function of the
two reference works: Zedler engages with the philosophical milieu (and
in particular: Wolff’s philosophy), whereas Adelung is more concerned
with usage as well as the history of individual words. Such differences
aside, the Un- prefix can be seen as the index of an ambiguity that causes
the meaning to hover between the two modes of negative defined in
Kant’s essay as deprivation and absence.
Kant claims to rely upon his “inner sense” (innere Empfindung) that
aversion is more than the mere absence of desire. He then justifies this
impression with empirical examples drawn from possible experience—
such as the sour taste of a medicine that we know to be good for us. The
more relevant example for our purposes, however, is that of the Spartan
mother. When she receives news of her son’s brave actions in battle, she
naturally rejoices. The question is, what happens to her when this good
news is followed by the report that her son has died for his fatherland?
Kant decides to take a quantitative approach to analyzing the problem
and assigns her pleasure the value “4a.” If Unlust is really nothing more
than the absence of Lust, then her net feeling after receiving the bad news
will still be “4a,” according to the equation Lust (4a) – Unlust (0) = 4a. In
this scenario, the magnitude of her feeling of pleasure will be unaffected
by her son’s death, which is false, according to Kant. If, however, we see
that the degree of her pleasure has been reduced to “3a” after receiving
the news, Kant says, then it is possible to calculate the magnitude of
her aversion to be “a.” The scenario, as Kant describes it, allows us to
conceive of it in the following way: the mother acts as the fulcrum point,
one that is subject to the “effect” of the news (understood as an objective
force, the sheer facts she receives). At the same time, her disposition
(her “Spartan” character) is what influences how the news is taken. In
this model, Kant would be thinking in terms of “torques,” or rotational
28 See Zedler, Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 50 (Leipzig and
Halle: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1746), s.v. “Unlust” (col. 871).
29 See Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart,
vol. 4 (Vienna: B. Ph. Bauer, 1811), col. 876. To give a familiar example, one still
equates an absence of appetite for eating with Unlust, according to Adelung.
forces, since the magnitudes of “a” and “4a” vary, as would the distance
between the fulcrum and the application of the force.30
In this scenario, the intuition supplied by mechanical theory, of
torques in opposition to one another, aligns with the information about
the initial and final condition of the Spartan mother and allows us to
make assumptions about the psychic processes associated with the
feelings of Lust and Unlust. Wolfgang Ritzel’s autobiography of Kant
speculates that he might have adapted this example from Rousseau’s
Émile, where another Spartan mother appears as emblematic of a “good
citizen.” In Émile, the mother receives the news that all five of her sons
have fallen in battle with anger—not over their deaths, but because the
messenger has neglected to mention the most important part: whether
the battle was ultimately lost or won. Ritzel comments that Kant has
“humanized” his Spartan mother, but we can also see that Rousseau’s
example fits neatly into the “false” category of a mother whose pleasure
at the heroism of her sons is unadulterated by grief.
Kant’s willingness to quantify feeling is not in itself remarkable—
one can detect the emergence of such “psychometrics” already in
Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica (Empirical Psychology) and
Philosophia practica universalis (Practical Universal Psychology), published
at the beginning of the eighteenth century.31 Wolff’s commentators have
pointed out that he might have been influenced by what some refer
to as the “personology” of Christian Thomasius, who quantified the
amount of sensuality, ambition, love, and greed.32 In his Vernünfftige
Gedancken von Gott (Rational Thoughts about God), Wolff writes that
aversion “is not a mere absence of pleasure, but rather something real in
itself”33 and refers to pleasure and aversion in terms of degrees (Grade),
or quantitative differences, without assigning numerical or relative
values to specific cases that would allow for the calculation of a ratio.34
30 Thanks are due to my husband Gil for helping to clarify the operative concepts
in this scenario.
31 Wolf Feuerhahn, “Entre métaphysique, mathématique, optique et physiologie:
La psychométrie au xviiie siècle,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger
193.3 (July 2003): 280.
32 See Robert J. Richards, “Christian Wolff’s Prolegomena to Empirical and
Rational Psychology: Translation and Commentary,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 124.3 (June 1980): 229, note 19.
33 Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott (Halle: Renger, 1751), 257.
34 Kant was not the only one to adapt Wolff’s discussion to a quantified
understanding of affect. In a letter from Lessing to Moses Mendelssohn from
1757 that refers to the same sections from Vernünfftige Gedanken quoted above,
Lessing quantifies aversion to an object. He does this once again in terms of
degrees, for example, as “10” as opposed to “1” based on whether it is real or an
imitation (Lessing offers the less example—borrowed from Aristotle—of a living
Wolf Feuerhahn has traced this early history of psychometrics and

shown that for Wolff it is a principle applicable to diverse phenomena,
such as the measurement of our memory and our sense of freedom, as
well as to desire and aversion.35
Of interest here is the way in which Kant tests out different modes
of how to describe the relation of pleasure to aversion following the
example of the Spartan mother. Although he does claim that aversion,
like debt, is more than a mere lack and can easily coexist with desire
(or credit), one could argue that this arithmetically driven model—
though technically accurate—does not seem to capture the full spirit
of opposition as well as a mechanical comparison would. Apparently,
Kant shares this impression, because he then proceeds to map the
experience of desire and aversion in terms of mechanical equilibrium
and the related concept of preponderance:
The lack of both pleasure and displeasure, in so far as it arises

from the absence of their respective grounds, is called indifference
(indifferentia). The lack of both pleasure and displeasure, in so far
as it is a consequence of the real opposition of equal grounds, is
called equilibrium (aequilibrium). Both indifference and equilibrium
are zero, though the former is a negation absolutely, whereas the
latter is a deprivation. The state of mind, in which pleasure and
displeasure are equally opposed so that there is something which
is left over from one of these two feelings, is the preponderance of
pleasure or displeasure (suprapondium voluptatis vel taedii).36
In this passage we can witness even more clearly how Kant’s

mathematical “test case”—the concept of negative magnitudes—relies
upon the language and structure of static mechanics, although in this
case the ideas are being applied to the mind (Gemüth) rather than the
snake as opposed to a painting of one). See Moses Mendelssohn, Sämmtliche

Werke in einem Band (Wien: Schmidt, 1838), 843. Kant’s interest has little to do with
aesthetics, however, and everything to do with the question of a mechanically
inspired approach to describing psychological states. One can also refer in this
context to König, who notes that “the conclusion, that ‘one can actually not
call any quantities negative at all,’ was directed in particular against Christian
Wolff, who in paragraph 18 of his Elements of Mathematical Analysis had defined
negative quantities as ‘the non-presence of the true quantities, through which
they are understood’” (König, Autonomie und Autokratie: Über Kants Metaphysik
der Sitten. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 34.
35 Wolf Feuerhahn, “Die Wolffische Psychometrie,” in Die Psychologie Christian
Wolffs, ed. Oliver-Pierre Rudolf and Jean-François Goubet (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2013), 231.
physical world. According to Kant, a complete absence of desire or

aversion may be thought of as indifference (Gleichgültigkeit, indifferentia).
If there is a lack of desire and aversion, however, as the result of them
being present in equal measure and canceled out (i.e., in the context of
a “real opposition”), then one finds oneself in a state of equilibrium.
Disequilibrium—or, more precisely: imbalance, understood as a state
of “preponderance” (Übergewicht)—describes the state of mind (Der
Zustand des Gemüths) wherein one or the other dominates. Kant thereby
transposes the concept of negative magnitudes, via the structure of
“real oppositions,” from the field of mathematics to the mind. With
the introduction of the concept of equilibrium (Gleichgewicht), he also
continues the theme of mechanics introduced with reference to the
concept of impenetrability. In that case, Kant gave the example of two
opposing springs that held each other immobile. Here, too, we have
a situation comparable to mechanical equilibrium, whereby opposing
forces completely negate one another. According to this description, the
human mind can be understood in terms of quantifiable equilibrium
states whereby nonmaterial entities, such as affects, are understood in
numerical or quantified terms.
Kant’s quantitative thinking about psychic processes may well have
been developed through his reading of Christian Wolff, but it is the
French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Luis Maupertuis whom
Kant mentions directly in the context of the psychometric musings of the
“Negative Magnitudes” essay. Maupertuis’s Essay on Moral Philosophy
(Essai de philosophie morale) attempts to describe the net happiness and
unhappiness of an individual life in terms of sums of the good and
the bad. Kant is dismissive of Maupertuis’s attempt: he questions the
basis of comparison with the comment that “only feelings of the same
kind . . . can feature in such calculations” and wonders how the varied
circumstances of life could provide us with a unit for comparison.37 To
be fair, Maupertuis is less interested in equilibrium states per se than
in the sum total of happiness or unhappiness in the course of a life.
At the same time, there are aspects to Maupertuis’s thinking that bear
upon Kant’s essay more closely than Kant himself acknowledges. As
Maupertuis measures instances of happiness and unhappiness, he
considers two factors: duration and intensity. The former is relatively
easy to measure because it corresponds to chronological time, but the
latter lacks such a reference point. According to Maupertuis, however,
they can still be relativized with regard to each other: “A double
intensity, and a single duration, can make a moment equal to those

whose intensity would be single and the duration double.”38 That is to

say, there is a logic of proportions, ratios, and balancing to be found in
Maupertuis, even if the particular units of measurement can neither be
precisely defined nor quantified on their own. When Kant complains
that Maupertuis’s self-appointed task of quantifying the net happiness
or unhappiness of life is “unsolvable . . . because only equivalent
sensations [Empfindungen] can be summed up, but feeling seems to
be very different according to the diversity of emotions in the very
complex situation of life,” he also seems to neglect the fact that he has
just come close to doing the same thing in the case of the Spartan mother.
In other words, it does not seem strange to him to bring the distinct
impressions of desire and aversion into a single equation, although the
measurement and quantification implied therein forms the cornerstone
of Maupertuis’s project as well. Part of the “messiness” Kant finds
in the equilibrium model of Maupertuis has to do with the fact that
human life is comparable to a multidimensional state, whereby “forces”
of happiness and unhappiness act upon the psyche from many different
directions. In comparison, Kant’s model of psychic equilibrium, as we
saw in the case of the Spartan mother, is far more reductionist than that
of Maupertuis. This same spirit of “reductionism” is also in keeping to
the very common procedure of reducing a multidimensional state of
equilibrium to a single dimension in order to simplify the calculation.
Readers more familiar with the “later” Kant, such as the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science and the Critique of Pure Reason, might
already have Kant’s rejection of psychology as an independent science
in mind. As he states in the Metaphysical Foundations, “the empirical
doctrine of the soul” must be disqualified:
Because mathematics is not applicable to the phenomena of inner

sense and their laws, the only option one would have would
be to take the law of continuity in the flux of inner changes into
account—which, however, would be an extension of cognition
standing to that which mathematics provides for the doctrine
of body approximately as the doctrine of the properties of the
straight line stands to the whole of geometry.39
38 “Une Intensité double, & une Durée simple, peuvent faire un Moment égal à
celui dont l’Intensité seroit simple, & la Durée double (Pierre-Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis, “Essai de philosophie morale,” in Les oeuvres de Mr. de Maupertuis,
vol. 2 (Berlin: Étienne de Bourdeaux, 1753), 233).
39 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael
Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7.
These words remind us that what we have been observing thus far in
the “Negative Magnitudes” essay has the status of atemporal snapshots,
case studies lifted from life experience and relatively quantified without
thought of actual measure or duration. Time has been absent from the
equation and, at least up until this point, it has sufficed to observe that
Kant’s mathematical experiment is equally one in applied mechanics.
The examples Kant has to offer are nevertheless gradually leading
toward mechanical descriptions of the human where the emphasis
is increasingly on processes of thought: on function as opposed to
individual forms or figures. When more attention is brought to bear on
the functionality of the model, time’s role will become more evident.
Moral Mechanics
When Kant expands the scope of his philosophical test cases to see where
the concept of negative magnitudes might be useful, he ultimately
moves beyond desire and aversion to questions of moral law. In the
course of this investigation, he anticipates that some readers will view
his argument as somewhat trivial, merely a “juggling with words”
(Krämerei mit Worten).40 These readers, according to Kant, miss the
point, because they tend to forget that a correct understanding of how
the moral law can be violated requires that we remember the distinction
between the two kinds of negation: lack (Mangel) and deprivation
(Beraubung). To understand why this distinction is important for
Kant in the moral context, however, will require that we return to the
mechanical model.
We can begin with the question of violating moral law in cases where
we either act wrongfully or fail to act when we should: Kant makes the
familiar distinction between crimes of “omission” (Unterlassungsfehler)
and “commission” (Begehungsfehler), noting their correspondence to the
modes of negation defined by absence and deprivation, respectively.
According to Kant, someone who fails to act, when nonaction is in
contradiction to moral law, finds herself in active resistance to the
law, such that the “zero” of her inactivity “is the consequence of a
real opposition.”41 Such a “zero” has the same valence as a state of
mechanical rest. It recalls the example Kant provided in the first section
of the essay where two equal and opposing motive forces (Bewegkräfte)
keep a ship motionless in the waters. In the present example of inactivity,
40 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 224. For those scholars who see connections
between Kant’s essay and topics in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, it might be
of interest that the only other time Kant uses this expression in his published
writing is in the latter text as well.
any compulsion to follow the moral law has been countermanded by an

equal and opposite force to disregard it. Kant suggests that such a case
can be considered in contradistinction to the inactivity of an animal,
whose activity or lack thereof does not make deliberate reference to a
moral law. He uses the counterexample of nonhuman behavior to make
an indirect commentary about the human and, so doing, he ratchets up
the mechanical rhetoric another notch. The animal, writes Kant,
was not driven by inner moral feeling to a good action. And

the zero, the omission construed as a consequence, was not the
product of its resisting that inner moral feeling, nor was it the
result of the operation of a counteracting force.42
In this case, too, the English translation sanitizes some of the more
specifically mechanical language. In the German, the “counteracting
force” is the Gegengewicht (counterweight). Implied is that the model
of weight and counterweight—the “moral feeling” versus the opposing
force of disobedience—does apply for humans. As in the case of the
Spartan mother, our knowledge of mechanics can be deployed for
the understanding of psychic processes—the mechanical concept of
equilibrium allows us to make assumptions about moral behavior. The
conceptual apparatus of equilibrium and lever (or balance) functions
here in such a way that it becomes the organizing principle. We can
also see how such a visualization, which takes up both the terminology
and the theory of static mechanics, without having to take recourse
to the concept of mechanical advantage, is a far cry from stating, for
example, that there is such a thing as a “lever of morality.” Instead, we
have a scenario that strongly emphasizes the functionality of the lever:
moral feelings and their counterweights occupy not only a conceptual
or metaphorical space, they also imply activity and duration. The
temporal dynamic to the model of the lever, only implied here, will be
more fully revealed in the following section on sublation.
First, however, there is one more aspect of Kant’s “moral mechanics”
to consider, one that also relies on the model of the lever. It has to do
with the claim Kant makes that “the sins of commission and the sins
of omission do not differ morally from each other in kind, but only in
magnitude.”43 Kant’s point here is that the logic of “real oppositions” he
now investigates in the moral sphere relies on a process of analogy or
equivalence whereby things that at first glance seem radically different
(i.e., doing something as opposed to doing nothing) are in fact to be
42 Kant, “Negative Magnitudes,” 221–22.

understood as connected “morally” if not necessarily “physically.” As

distinct as a cold-blooded murder might seem from the hesitation to
grasp the arm of a drowning man, from Kant’s moral point of view
they are on the same scale. Nor is this scale an abstraction. Rather, it
is something that is concretized by virtue of the same mechanical
language that runs throughout the essay. Precisely at the moment when
he repeats his point that sins of omission and commission are only to be
distinguished by the “degree of action,” we see materialize that object
which has already been implied both by the shifting weights of moral
choices and by the figure of opposites connected by a scale of gradual
difference. It is the mechanical lever:
But, as far as the moral state of the person responsible for the
sin of omission is concerned: all that is needed for the sin of
commission is a greater degree of action. The situation is like that
of a counterweight at the end of a lever: it exercises genuine force
merely to maintain the burden in a state of equilibrium: there only
needs to be a slight increase of force in order to actually shift the
burden on the other side.44
There are several striking aspects to this passage. Some readers will
take note of the fact that there is no intrinsic positive value attributed to
this moral state of equilibrium. Rather, it is the state of wrongdoing (the
sin of omission) that corresponds to the lever in equilibrium, and the
transfer from one kind of wrong to another that disturbs the balance. In
that regard, it is a testimony to the perfect neutrality of the conceptual
apparatus of the lever that it does not succumb to cultural norms
which would put equilibrium in a positive light and disequilibrium in
a negative one. Another, more structurally defined feature is that the
comparison with the lever is completely self-enclosed and does not
require the appearance of an external hand to displace the weights.
This might seem like an obvious thing to state, but it suggests that the
lever is already to some extent implicated within an understanding
of the human, whereby the body can be read as a kind of “meter”
for the moral mechanics of the mind. We are still far removed from
German Romanticism’s equation of the human with a fulcrum point
within which the entire tension of the lever is captured. Instead, Kant’s
example facilitates two observations. On the one hand, it demonstrates
the lever’s ability to be adapted and recalibrated in various ways,
such that the “zero” of rest responds to the particular demands of a
situation. On the other hand, it shows how the lever breaks down the

illusion that opposites are categorically distinct by operating as a figure

of translation or mediation. Visualizing the lever also entails imagining
a scale where the “slight increase” is merely the differential or smallest
possible conceivable unit in the process of mediating between one
extreme and the other. Kant alludes to this potential for extrapolation
when he refers to detestation as a “negative lust,” to hate as “negative
love,” and to ugliness as a “negative beauty.”45 As counterintuitive as
it might appear at first glance, these equations are structured upon
kinship. They are to be understood as connecting scalar, rather than
categorical, differences. And as much as Kant frames the language of
these equations as a moral mathematics, a moral mechanics is really
what is required to understand them fully.
About Thinking
By now, we have seen several examples of mechanical thinking in
Kant’s essay, ranging from those drawn from the physical world to
those taken from moral philosophy. As different as these regimes might
seem to be, they share a particular structural feature. In each case,
what is brought, either implicitly or explicitly, into the constellation of
force and counterforce that defines the lever derives from an empirical
context (whether the “data” in question comes from the physical
environment or the contents of our thoughts). This scenario becomes a
bit more complex when the dynamics of Aufhebung, a concept that also
participates in the conceptual landscape of Kant’s essay, is taken into
consideration. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the word
Aufhebung is semantically related to the word for lever, Hebel: they share
the stem heb- which means “to lift.” In its most literal sense, the work
that a physical lever performs can be described as an act of “lifting
up” (aufheben). Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon already notes that this word
possesses multiple, contradictory meanings, some of which are worthy
of further contemplation. These include the act of preserving something
for future use and the act of removing something altogether (and the
examples range from household economy to religious contexts). We
can therefore see that, well before Hegel’s famous appropriation of
Aufhebung as a way of mediating between the real and the ideal, it is
a concept that merits special attention. In what follows, I will show
how Kant deploys it in a very striking way, as a means of shifting the
focus of his discussion from the contents of thinking to the structure
of thought itself, all the while relying on the mechanical model to help
make his case.

In response to the question, what happens when we stop thinking of

a particular object, such as the sun, Kant writes,
There exists at this moment in my soul, for example, the

representation of the sun, and it exists in virtue of the power of
my imagination. The next moment, I cease to think of this object.
The representation which was, ceases to be in me, and the next
state is the zero of the preceding one.46
Kant is clear that this “zero” is not the zero of absence, but rather once
again the relative—though fleeting—zero of equilibrium. If, he insists,
we allow the formula “a – a = 0” to describe the progress of a mind
that ceases to think about an object, then this equation is true when the
following conditions are met: “Only in so far as an equal but opposed
real ground is combined with the ground of a is it possible for a to be
cancelled [aufgehoben].”47 The expression “a – a = 0” therefore needs
to be read as a sentence where the direction from left to right across
the printed page indexes the temporality of the process, such that the
zero is allowed to emerge at a particular time. With this example, Kant
transfers the equilibrium point of static mechanics—that is, the fulcrum
point of the lever: instead of being mechanically instantaneous, it
becomes a time integral, and we can see more clearly here than in the
prior examples that one of the functions of Aufhebung in Kant’s essay is
to introduce a temporal dynamic into his mechanical thinking and use
of the lever. This is a much different scenario than, say, the ship kept
immobile between two equal and opposite forces; in that case, when
a “zero” condition of equilibrium between weight and counterweight
was reached, time was excluded from the equation—how long the ship
was moored at sea was irrelevant information. For the purposes of my
larger argument, I situate Kant’s temporalization of the mechanical
analogy to model thinking at the beginning of a trajectory that leads
to the psychological theories of the nineteenth century. What Kant
describes in the narrowly circumscribed context of the replacement of
one thought by another, Johann Herbart will expand upon as he tries
to describe the production and repression of thoughts through more
intricate equations of mechanical equilibrium.
Even though Kant’s real interest lies in the heuristic exploration of
human contexts, where the “forces” in question are psychic, rather than
physical, it is remarkable that he never abandons the physical examples
entirely but rather repeats them throughout the essay, using them as a

foil and also as a persuasive tool for his more speculative comments.
His argument transitions directly from the reminder that a body in
motion will not cease moving partially or fully without an opposing
force, to the following statement:
But also, our inner experience of the cancellation [Aufhebung] of

representations and desires which have become real in virtue
of the activity of the soul completely agrees with this [physical
nature, JH]. In order to banish and eliminate a sorrowful thought
a genuine effort, and commonly a large one, is required. And
that this is so is something which we experience very distinctly
within ourselves. It costs a real effort to eradicate an amusing
representation which incites us to laughter, if we wish to
concentrate our minds on something serious.48
What Kant describes here is nothing more elaborate than the basic
“material” of human social existence: in our environment, that which
makes us smile or feel remorse, and the ways in which circumstances
might also demand that we suppress these reactions. Life, then,
for Kant would seem to be a series of equilibrium moments that are
constantly emerging, being disrupted, and then emerging once again
without any claims to permanence (and Chapter Three will show how
German nature philosophy of the early nineteenth century takes up this
idea and reframes it with a more prolonged reflection on the body, the
lever, and the concept of equilibrium). This is not all Kant has to say on
the matter of thinking, however: he has not quite taken the mechanical
model as far as it is able to go. Although the concept of Aufhebung was
useful in order to consider the progression of thoughts, Kant will reach
to another word, one that has its own mechanically based etymology,
when he turns to the problem of how we observe ourselves as thinkers.
Kant is quick to acknowledge the difficulty involved in thinking
about thinking: “What an admirably busy activity is concealed within
the depths of our minds which goes unnoticed even while it is being
exercised.”49 Such an observation is, of course, itself the product of a
complex process that involves, among other things, an understanding of
oneself as both observer and observed, whereby the former is a product
of the latter. With such a constant exchange of thoughts, it is impossible
to isolate and identify any one particular attempt of the mind to remove
one of the thought images by replacing it with another. To rephrase the
problem in mechanical terms: Kant finds himself hard pressed to define

a subject position that would encompass both the lever and the hand
that wields it. In the process of focusing his attention on this problem,
the verb erwägen enters the discussion for the first time. The meaning
of erwägen is to consider or to contemplate, but also to “weigh” in a
figurative sense. At heart it is also a balancing act, an abstraction whose
material correlate is the Waage (scale). The “contemplation” Kant refers
to emerges precisely at the point where he puts aside the problem of how
one thought ceases and another takes its place—a process that follows
its own logic of equilibrium in successively occurring zero states—in
favor of self-observation. In other words, precisely at the moment when
the agent and lever positions collapse into one, Waage becomes erwägen.
What is it, precisely, that Kant suggests we contemplate in this
context? Contemplation, for the purposes of the “Negative Magnitudes”
essay, is a process by which we become aware of our own unconscious
activities. We are astonished, he writes, when we contemplate (in
Erwägung ziehen) the actions that take place in us without our notice
when we read.50 The fact that ideas emerge and are replaced by others
presupposes “opposed actions” (entgegengesetzte Handlungen) that are
not necessarily accessible to our inner experience. Kant continues with
further reference to the act of contemplation:
If one considers [in Erwägung zieht] the grounds which form

the foundation of the rule which we have here introduced, the
following point will be instantly noticed: in what concerns the
cancellation [Aufhebung] of an existing something, there can be
no difference between the accidents of mental natures and the
effects of operative forces in the physical world. These latter
effects, namely, are never cancelled [aufgehoben] except by means
of a true, opposed motive force [entgegengesetzte Bewegkraft] of
something else. And an inner accident, a thought of the soul, cannot
cease to be without a truly active power of exactly the self-same
thinking subject.51
This passage is remarkable for the clear parallel it draws between

physical and psychic forces, something that Kant’s contemporaries,
such as Moses Mendelssohn, also found noteworthy: in his Letters
Concerning the Latest Literature (1765), and with direct reference to
the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, Mendelssohn comments that one
difference between the interplay of forces in nature and their use as
metaphor to model mental activities is that the former rely upon an

outer force and the latter on an inner force that is contained in the
mind.52 The act of contemplation, however, seems to mediate between
the physical and the psychic spheres when it allows for at least the
illusion of an external point of view to be maintained when it takes the
mind as its object.
There is, Kant plainly states, “no difference” between the forces that
might cause a bodily object to change direction or stay in place, and
those “inner accidents” that act upon our thinking, causing thoughts
to come and go.53 Once again, it is possible to use mechanical theory to
make assumptions about psychic processes. One can use the same kind
of logic as before—thinking about forces in equilibrium—but now add
a different layer of thinking that takes into account a temporal sequence.
Of interest here is the integrated effect of different forces over time,
and it would perhaps be more accurate to refer to them as coordinates
(which is the corresponding concept from physics that would take the
temporal dimension into account). Enabled by the analogical structure
of physical and psychic forces, contemplation as erwägen is Kant’s
response to the introduction of time into the equation. The one who
contemplates is the reader who also examines the process of reading, the
one who sees in the physical world the basis for a comparison to (and a
distinction from) the realm of intellectual activity. These observational
acrobatics are accompanied by a balancing act inherent in both the root
and process of erwägen: just as the concept of equilibrium is grounded
on the material object of the scale, contemplation as erwägen observes a
system in a series of equilibrium states over time through an observation
of the changes in its component parts.
Beyond the Material World

Toward the end of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay, Kant returns yet
again to the problem of how to distinguish between negation as absence
(Mangel) and as privation (Beraubung), highlighting the difficulty
through a contrast between the material and immaterial. The material
world allows us to witness the real opposition of positive grounds with
our own eyes. Because we are Newtonians, rather than Aristotelians, by
training we do not judge objects on the basis of their movement. Instead,
we envision forces of attraction and repulsion at play, whether an object
is in motion or at rest. From the perspective of physical forces, unless
one considers a vacuum, the zero of absence is never an option. In the
middle of these musings, and with reference to the visible evidence of
52 Moses Mendelssohn, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, vol. 21, letter 324
(Berlin and Stettin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1765), 170.
forces in the physical world, Kant invokes the lever for the second time
in the essay, although we will need to look beyond the standard English
translation in order to find it:
It is in exactly this fashion that the weights on the arms of scales

are at rest, if the weights are placed in the scale-pans in accordance
with the laws of equilibrium. This concept can be extended far
beyond the limits of the material world.54
The English translation leaves out an important detail: that the weights
are placed on the scale “according to the laws of equilibrium on the
lever” (nach den Gesetzen des Gleichgewichts am Hebel). The concept to be
extended beyond the material world may be that of equilibrium, but its
motivating image is inseparable from the lever.
It would seem, then, that the lever is much more than just a simple
machine. As a conceptual apparatus positioned to translate between the
material and immaterial worlds, it is a physical instrument of weighing
and lifting that becomes a figurative illustration of the concept of
equilibrium. The lever’s manifold abilities to transpose, transfer, and
translate that we have observed throughout this chapter are referenced
here once more in the very act of transferring a concept—mechanical rest
or static equilibrium—past the limits of the material world. The lever is
therefore both the embodiment of an idea and the very instrument by
which that idea can be promoted beyond its original context.
One might have the impression that, with this most recent theoretical
reflection on the lever, we have moved beyond the idea that it is
connected to certain aspects of the human in Kant’s thinking; such an
impression could not be further from the truth. Even as he muses about
the ability of the lever to function in material and immaterial contexts,
Kant invokes the example of the “most learned man”:
If you ask a man of even the greatest learning at a moment when

he is relaxing and at rest [ruhig] to recount something to you or to
share part of his knowledge of things with you, you will find that
he knows nothing in this state, that he is empty, and that he has
no definite thoughts [Erwägungen] or judgements. But stimulate
him by asking him a question or expressing a view of your own,
and his learning will reveal itself in a series of activities. And the
tendency of that succession of activities will be to make both him
and you aware of his understanding of things.55

Kant’s example seems, at first glance, calculated to tease his readers,

because it is not clear at all whether this most learned man, in his state
of rest, is meant to embody the absence of thought or something akin
to mechanical equilibrium, where thoughts, like physical forces, are
balanced. Asked simply to speak of himself—to reflect upon himself as
thinker, as Kant has just done—he appears empty, devoid of thought,
without the capacity for contemplating his own state of mind. It seems
that, in this case, the interlocutor must be the one to tip the balance, as
it were. Then, in the wake of the interlocutor’s judgments, the most
learned man will be able to articulate his own; and what is more: the
“tendencies” of these thoughts possess a direction. They construct
a discursive continuum between the two the two individuals and
emphasize the shared understanding of two separate minds.
We have come a long way from the irritating narrow-mindedness of
the Spartan mother, who only cares for grief or glory, and have moved
into a realm of psychological activity where the content is of relatively
little importance. It doesn’t matter what our interlocutors say—we
really don’t care what they think. More important is the fact that their
words, when directed at us, create an imbalance. In physical terms, Kant
has substituted his one-dimensional machine (the Spartan mother) with
a (masculine!) multidimensional one. The silence of the learned man,
at first indecipherable as the zero of “something” or “nothing,” reveals
itself as an unstable point of rest. This point presumably corresponds to
more complex activity than the Spartan mother was capable of, because
it requires only the slightest provocation to resume motion in a new,
unexpected direction.
Kant’s learned man might have already caused readers to recall
Heinrich von Kleist’s 1805 essay, Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der
Gedanken beim Reden On the Gradual Perfection of Thoughts while
Speaking). The first-person narrator of Kleist’s essay almost seems to
be a latter-day spokesman for Kant’s learned man: he has knowledge
but cannot necessarily articulate it. He needs the provocation of
conversation rather than the open-ended questions of an academic
examination in order for his thoughts to emerge and refine themselves
through speaking. Other similarities, while perhaps coincidental, are
still worth commenting upon: much like Kant at the beginning of the
“Negative Magnitudes” essay, the narrator of Kleist’s text identifies
himself as a reader of Euler and Kästner. It is difficult to avoid the
temptation of an anachronistic (though not entirely illogical) reading,
one that would point us toward an autobiographical interpretation.
Just as the narrator in Kleist’s text can be read as a fictional voice for
Kleist himself, one wonders whether the “most learned man” might
not be an incarnation of Kant. If that were indeed the case, then the
mechanical descriptions of the human we have, until now, been reading
as intradiegetic would have the potential to take on an extradiagetic

dimension. This would be of interest because it provides even more
evidence for the ability of this mechanical model to encompass both
the lever and the hand—and thereby reconstruct the subject position—
through a self-referential gesture that invokes the philosopher within a
philosophical text.
Conclusion
In this discussion, I have used Kant’s “Negative Magnitudes” essay
as a case study to open my inquiry into how the lever can be used
in ways that both go beyond its origins in classical mechanics and
challenge traditional metaphorical associations. I have shown that
the lever and its mechanics, as taken up by Kant’s essay, embrace a
broad conceptual apparatus that addresses historically important ways
of defining psychological, moral, and social aspects of the human. We
see this in a number of different contexts. One is the development of a
psychometrics that expands from individual to social contexts, where
human interaction is understood as a series of disrupted equilibrium
moments. Another is in the pressure brought to bear on concepts such
as equilibrium and contemplation that has shown how they have the
ability to move between the material and intellectual regimes. Each of
these topics will reappear, in different configurations and with various
points of emphasis, throughout the rest of the book. Meanwhile, a
new narrative of the lever is in the process of unfolding as well, one
whose elements bear marked affinities to an “absolute metaphor” in
Blumenberg’s sense as the lever was used both as a model and a point of
orientation for questions about the human. The end of this discussion,
which only touched upon the problem of a subject position defined in
terms of the lever’s mechanics, also serves as the point of departure for
the next step of my argument, which will trace the conceptual evolution
of German Romanticism’s radical equation of the human as lever.
Two The Levers of German
Romanticism
Atheist is whoever has no sense for mechanics.1

Friedrich Schlegel
Part One: The Tool of Tools

It is a little-known fact that two original thinkers who have come to
stand for Early German Romanticism—Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich
von Hardenberg (Novalis)—were mechanically minded. This chapter
will show that Schlegel and Novalis were not only skilled with levers
and well-versed in mechanical theory, they used their levers to connect
several of the influential movements we associate with European
modernity with the purpose of constructing a new vision of the human.
These movements include Cartesian philosophy and its understanding
of the cogito as point; the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century physics, in which the lever plays a fundamental role; as well as
two schools of philosophy active at the end of the eighteenth century:
the philosophy of the subject as articulated in the work of Fichte, and
the German Naturphilosophie advanced by Friedrich Schelling and
others. For all that Aristotle might have identified the hand as the “tool
of tools” due to its necessity for all acts of “manual” labor,2 for the latter-
day thinkers whose work informs this study, it is the mechanical lever
as an instrument of reason, rather than of the hand, that deserves such
a status.
1 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, ed. Ernst Behler

(Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas Verlag,
1963), 230.
2 Aristotle, de anima, Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1968; Reprint 2002), 149 (431b24).
The observations contained in this chapter are based on a wide array

of notes and literary “fragments” written by Novalis and Friedrich
Schlegel around 1800. These notes have been mined by scholars in the
past for a number of different purposes: most notably, to analyze the
Romantic concept of time,3 to understand Romanticism’s theory of
the subject,4 and, more recently, to explore Romanticism’s interest in
scientific theories and terminology.5 This latter field has learned to reject
the artificial limitations imposed by the “two cultures” debate, as well
as the formalism inherent in thinking purely in terms of “literature and
science,” in order to embrace a wide range of topics limited by neither
disciplinary nor historical boundaries. I would like to briefly situate the
analyses in this chapter in relation to this field before proceeding.
Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine’s edited volume,
Romanticism and the Sciences (1990), is indicative of a moment in the
field’s emergence still marked by a need for self-legitimation. It contains
language that, from today’s perspective, can seem somewhat dated
(see the numerous references to “men of science”). After 2000, such
concerns for legitimacy tend to be relegated to prefaces or footnotes,
as we can already observe in Michel Chaouli’s innovative reading of
Schlegel in The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of
Friedrich Schlegel (2002) and Robert J. Richards’s Romantic Conception of
Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002). These books have
helped to open channels for further research, whether with regard to a
particular scientific field or topic, or within a broader cultural context.6
To this we could add Frederick Beiser’s comment in The Romantic
Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (2003) that one
3 Groundbreaking in this area of Romanticism Studies was Manfred Frank’s

book, Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik (München: Winkler, 1984).
4 For further references on the philosophy of the subject in the years immediately
prior to Early German Romanticsim, see Dieter Henrich, Grundlegung aus
dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus. Tübingen – Jena 1790–
1794 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004) as well as Manfred Frank, The Philosophical
Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán (New York:
SUNY Press, 2008).
5 See also my book, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of
Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge, 2009).
6 Michel Chaouli, for example, argued that the science of chemistry around 1800
provides the “crucial conceptual model” for a radical transformation of literary
poetics (Chaouli, Friedrich Schlegel and the Laboratory of Poetry (Baltimore: JHU
Press, 2002), 2). Robert Richards advocated for complexity when he wrote that
it is “impossible . . . to understand either the more overt or the very subtle
ways romanticism shaped biology in the nineteenth century without coming to
understand the romantic mode of being and thought” and its “heterogeneous
constitution” (Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life. Science and Philosophy in
the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5).
The Levers of German Romanticism 65
needs to remember what constitutes “normal science” around 1800

in the first place or risk succumbing to stereotypes that are “deeply
anachronistic.”7 In my opinion, such anachronisms are symptomatic of
approaches where popular dichotomies such as “literature and science”
are allowed free rein without being anchored in careful, historically
contextualized readings.8 Recently published monographs by Stefani
Engelstein, Christine Lehleiter, and Leif Weatherby, among others,
show that such interdisciplinary work, which transcends the individual
disciplines of the history of science, philosophy, and literary studies, is
entirely possible.9
The questions and thinking that inform this chapter have certainly
been encouraged by the increased scholarly attention given to
connections between German Romanticism and the sciences during the
past years. At the same time, this chapter also responds to a perceived
gap. Still required is a greater diversity of themes and focal points in
the research on German Romanticism and science. It is possible that
the emphasis on the familiar concepts of life, nature, and organicism
has effectively generated a blind spot where other topics of interest
await discovery,10 and one of these topics in particular is the basis of
this chapter. Just as Romantic fragments and aphoristic writing betray a
pervasive interest in organic models of generation, they also demonstrate
a persistent interest in mechanics. The same notebooks in which one
finds ample evidence of Schlegel’s and Novalis’s procreative poetics
7 Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (2003):
83.
8 Outdated ways of thinking have a way of lingering, however. In Frederick
Burwick’s Romanticism: Keywords (2015), one can find the entry on “science”
nestled between “satire” and “sensibility,” but Burwick does not do more than
state that literature bears witness to scientific ideas.
9 Christine Lehleiter’s Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity (Toronto:
Toronto University Press, 2014) takes a close look at the scientific discussions
around inbreeding, cross-breeding, and the inheritance of madness in order to
explore how selfhood was conceptualized around 1800. Stefani Engelstein’s
Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2017) is also interested in genealogy, but focuses on the
“sibling” as a term that questions the “margins of identity” not only in literature
and philosophy but also biology and the sciences of human population diversity,
among other discourses. Weatherby’s Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ:
German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2016) takes up the deceptively simple concept of the “organ” and traces
its emergence in late-eighteenth-century life sciences as well as its philosophical
trajectories as metaphor.
10 The one chapter on science in the most recent edition of the Cambridge Companion
to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), for example, also focuses entirely on the life sciences.
also served as a testing ground for their experimental (and sometimes

radical) thinking about the relationship between the lever and the
human. Many of the relevant notes are connected to their plans for an
encyclopedia project. Others are found in notebooks of philosophical
and literary ideas, including those notes connected to excerpts from
works by Fichte, Schelling, and Eschenmayer, among others. Schlegel
and Novalis borrow from each of these different philosophers and
synthesize diverse philosophical approaches and scientific perspectives
on the lever in order to create something new.
Upon encountering the word “lever” in this context, the first thing
that comes to mind might just be German Romanticism’s fascination
with those complicated lever-figures known as automata, such as
one finds in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Achim von
Arnim. Hoffmann’s Olympia does not make her debut in The Sandman
until 1816, however, and in the years around 1800—the focus of this
chapter—the specter of the uncanny that seems so often to accompany
the mechanical human form is absent from Schlegel’s and Novalis’s own
mechanical meditations.11 As in the prior chapter on Kant, the emphasis
in the present one will be on two central problems: to define the
conceptual apparatus of the lever in the context of German Romanticism
and to analyze what, precisely, this apparatus is mobilized to do. Why
do Novalis and Schlegel join concepts from the wide-ranging fields of
the Romantic encyclopedia project under the sign of the lever? How
are we to understand their equation of the human ego with the lever’s
fulcrum point, both with reference to Romantic theories of the subject
and within the history of mechanics?
As the chapter charts the terrain of a Romantic interest in mechanics
and mechanical topics, it will show how Novalis and Schlegel channel
their mechanical thinking into various practices of construction in
which the lever and its related concepts are implicated. Part of what
defines the Romantic approach to the lever is that Novalis and Schlegel
are just as interested in the construction of levers as they are in those
things that levers enable them to construct. Their theoretical reflections
on the lever, and their willingness to use it as an instrument of reason,
are informed by an awareness of its ability to serve the construction of
knowledge as well as an ongoing inquiry as to what a lever actually
is. The Romantic lever is never transparent in a Heideggerian sense of
11 For insights into the automaton in Hoffmann’s work, see Lienhard Wawrzyn,
Der Automaten-Mensch: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung vom “Sandmann”
(Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976). For a more recent, and broader, perspective on
the significance automaton in European culture, see John Tresch’s Romantic
Machine. Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
being “ready to hand.” Instead, because of their increased awareness

of the tool as tool, Schlegel and Novalis designate the lever as an object
of philosophical inquiry in its own right. With these concerns in mind,
the first part of this chapter will describe German Romanticism’s use of
the lever as tool and pay close attention to the epistemic environment
in which it operates. The second section will then argue that, just as
we saw with Kant, Romantic thinking about the lever and its related
concepts is very much invested in modeling different aspects of the
human. Here, one will observe a peculiar collapse of the distinction
between tool and agency. Much in the Archimedean tradition, the lever
is still used to augment human power, but the critical difference is that
the lever is no longer conceived of as external. Instead, I will show how
it becomes part of how Novalis and Schlegel conceptualize the human
in the first place. Of central importance in this context is the interest they
devote to the hypomochlion, or fulcrum point. Consequently, the third
part discusses Novalis’s equation of the hypomochlion with the human
and Schlegel’s emphasis on the constructive potential of this particular
mechanical point. It shows how Schlegel and Novalis synthesize their
scientific and philosophical work on the lever into groundbreaking
thinking about the human as individual as well as the processes of the
human psyche.
Philosophical Problems and Mechanical Thinking

To understand how German Romanticism appropriates the lever
for itself requires a sense of how the lever has been taken up by
philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Certain key moments of this history have already been described in
the introduction to this study. There, I emphasized the ways in which
the lever was central to theoretical reflections about the possibility of
a common principle joining each of the simple machines, and I also
framed the question of how the lever might be useful in discourses
beyond classical mechanics. The chapter on Kant then contributed
to this historical perspective, with reference to the ways in which
the lever, as a physical and a mathematical object, could navigate
between material and immaterial contexts. The current chapter adds
to these historical perspectives by providing further information that
bears directly on Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking. Even though
much of research on German Romanticism and scientific thinking
has emphasized its connection to the life sciences emerging around
1800, often overlooked are its affinities to a different tradition, usually
referred to as “mechanical” or “corpuscular” philosophy, terms that are
themselves notoriously difficult to define. When conceived of in relation
to texts such as Robert Boyle’s The Origin of Forms and Qualities According
to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1666), mechanical philosophy can be
understood as an approach which, in the words of John Harris’s Lexicon

Technicum (1704), “endeavours to explicate the Phaenomena of Nature
from Mechanical Principles.”12 Rejecting the Aristotelian viewpoint that
there are particular forms and qualities that dictate the tendencies of
objects in the natural world, the mechanical philosopher holds that, as
Daniel Garber writes, “everything, be it terrestrial or celestial, natural
motion or constrained, must be explained in terms of the size, shape
and motion of the parts that make it up, just as the behavior of a
machine is explained.”13 Garber also emphasizes the importance of the
Cartesian idea, as expressed in the Principia philosophiae, that such an
understanding of the machine-like functioning of the universe allows
for our comprehension of one part to be extrapolated to the whole:
In this way, the image of the macrocosm and the microcosm,

central to chymical philosophies and Renaissance naturalism,
found its way into mechanism after a fashion. For the mechanical
philosopher, as for the chymist and the Renaissance naturalist,
what happens at one level reflects and is reflected by what
happens at every other level.14
The willingness and ability to think across scale exhibited by the

mechanical philosophers is also a key element of the Romantic approach:
as Schlegel later observes, every universe has its hypomochlion or
fulcrum point.
One significant historical precedent to German Romanticism is the
interiorization of the Archimedean point associated with Descartes. As
we saw in the Introduction, Descartes’s invocation of a “firm point” is
not only important as a key moment in the history of philosophy by
virtue of advocating a strong rationalism; it is also of great importance
12 See Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” in The Cambridge History of

Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston,
Cambridge Histories Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
13 Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 44.
14 Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 44. Daniel Capecchi has also observed
that the seventeenth-century concept of mechanism “associated nature with a
great machine, a clock, an old concept that in the seventeenth century replaced
the animistic Renaissance idea of nature as a big animal” and “eliminated
philosophy from physics, replacing it with mechanics, the world of efficient
causes of material kind, where all is explained by means of body and motions
(and forces).” See Capecchi, Path to Post-Galilean Epistemology: Reinterpreting
the Birth of Modern Science (New York: Springer, 2017), 230. For a different
perspective, one can consult Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature, which
opens with the observation that “there is nothing inevitable about seeing the
world as a kind of machine” (Dear, Intelligibility, 15).
for the history of the Archimedean point, which is inextricably linked

to that of the lever. Even though Descartes refers to an image attributed
to Archimedes where the human, the lever, and the point upon which
the lever rests are distinct from one another, for his own purposes, he
believes to have found this “immovable” point in a philosophy based
on the concept of the ego as res cogitans. Descartes thereby relocates
the Archimedean point to a position within our own minds, and this
development will continue to inform further thinking about both the
Archimedean point and the lever in German Romanticism.
The second historical precedent comes from the history of science.
Francisco Meli’s book, Thinking with Objects, documents how Kepler,
Bernoulli, Huygens, and many other scientists and mathematicians
used the lever as a model in order explain problems such as oscillation
and collisions. In the case of the Italian scientist Giovanni Borelli, we
learn that the lever was a central element in his attempts to describe
planetary motion. Meli writes that Borelli was, in part, influenced
by Kepler,
not just in his attempt to bring together physics and astronomy

but also in his claim that the satellites’ trajectories are elliptical
and that the sun pushes the planets with a lever, as it were. Borelli
conceived orbital motion as if it were taking place on a rotating
lever moved by the rotating sun.15
These two examples remind us of the ability of the lever to be integrated

into thought experiments adapted to vastly different scales—from
the punctuality of the ego to the vastness of the cosmos. In them, we
also see how the lever and connected concepts (such as the fulcrum
point) can be de- and reconstructed and thereby adapted to different
conceptual problems.
Textbooks of early modern mechanics describe a handful of “simple
machines” and speculate as to the degree to which each might connect
to the same mechanical principles associated with the lever. The
examples from Descartes and Borelli indicate that, more so than the
pulley, the inclined plane, and the other machines, the lever has proven
over time to be remarkably versatile as an instrument of philosophical
as well as scientific thinking.16 Like the scientists and mathematicians
15 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 194. For further information on Kepler’s use of the
lever, see also Alexander Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (Methuen: London,
1980), 190.
16 Michael Wheeler reminds us that one needs to be quite precise, however, when
focusing on Descartes’s use of “machine” and “mechanism” because these
terms are historically variable. Wheeler has shown that when Descartes refers
who come before them, the German Romantics also test out the idea,
to what degree various things can be thought of in terms of the lever.
They use it to model relationships between concepts, to describe
processes of generation of both the individual and the universe, and,
more generally, as a way of reconciling potential contradictions of
philosophical thinking.
To be sure, grouping Schlegel and Novalis in a history that includes
Descartes and Borelli, and to situate German Romanticism within the
trajectory of mechanistic philosophy in general, might seem like a
peculiar idea. Marshall Brown likely spoke for many when he wrote in
The Shape of Romanticism (1979) that the German Romantics “advance
beyond the mechanistic world view,”17 casting that particular worldview
in a pejorative light. In the most recent edition of The Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism devoted to Romanticism, we find that little has
changed.18 In that volume, the word “mechanical” only appears in
contexts where it is used derogatorily and the word “mechanics” occurs
just once in a fleeting reference to Newton.19 In particular, Joel Black’s
essay, “Scientific Models,” deals exclusively with Romanticism’s interest
in organic models taken from the life sciences and Naturphilosophie,
without mentioning other scientific interests that might not fall directly
under the purview of theories of organic phenomena. Of course, there
are exceptions, although the most notable is situated within the French
context. John Tresch’s Romantic Machine (2012) confronts old biases
in Romantic scholarship against all things mechanical and advances
new perspectives. His study unfolds around the central premise that
Romanticism and mechanism have more connections than previously
acknowledged. To argue his case, he considers both the “machines”
themselves and, with great attention to historical detail, the social
context within which they emerged. As Tresch’s reading demonstrates
in the French context, and as I have argued in earlier essays devoted
to these terms, he might mean a “material system that unfolds purely according
ot the laws of blind physical causation,” a material system that fulfills the above
requirements but “to which in addition certain norms of correct and incorrect
functioning apply” or, in some cases, one that fulfills a special purpose. See
Michael Wheeler, “God’s Machines,” in The Mechanical Mind in History, ed.
Philip Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler (Cambridge and
London: MIT Press, 2008), 307–08.
17 Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979), 33.
18 See Joel Black, “Scientific Models,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism,
vol. 5, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
19 Black, “Scientific Models,” 115.
to the German context,20 there is very little reason, especially from the
point of view of Early German Romanticism, to subscribe to a reading
that privileges the organic to the exclusion of the mechanical. By the
same token, I would like to underscore that a focus on the mechanical
is by no means a rejection of organic models: in Romanticism’s case,
the “mechanistic world view” has not been not abandoned, but simply
reconfigured. If anything, one of the most surprising discoveries of this
study is the way in which aspects of the “organic” and the “mechanical”
are able to coexist.
The Levers of Novalis and Schlegel

The chapter on Kant’s “Negative Magnitudes” essay introduced
Gehler’s definition of the lever from the Physical Dictionary
(Physikalisches Wörterbuch), which is important for Schlegel and Novalis
as well. Readers will recall how Gehler, whose discussion of the lever
was taken by Erxleben and Kästner,21 defines it as “a fixed and inflexible
connection of three bodies—or three points—two of which turn around
the third, the fulcrum.”22 This definition does not take into account the
size of the lever, nor is it concerned with material constraints. Instead,
it offers us a virtual lever that is pure connection and, as such, akin
to those rhetorical operations that also forge connections by collecting
disparate units under a single sign. The chapter on Kant also developed
the idea of the lever as a conceptual apparatus that could be mobilized
to respond to a particular philosophical problem. This “apparatus”
could incorporate the mechanical theory associated with the lever as
well as related concepts, such as static equilibrium and the succession
of equilibrium states over time. What was true for Kant holds for
Schlegel and Novalis as well: the lever is extremely adaptable and
can be reconstructed in order to respond to the intellectual interests
of the person who is wielding it. Although Novalis’s and Schlegel’s
levers—and how they use them—do have several things in common,
20 See, for example, my essays, “The Poet as Artisan. Novalis’ Werkzeug and the
Making of Romanticism,” German MLN 121.3 (2006): 617–30; “From Romantic
Tools to Technics: Heideggerian Questions in Novalis’ Anthropology,” The
Aesthetics of the Tool: Technologies, Instruments, and Figures of Literature and Art,
special edition of Configurations 18.3 (Fall 2010); and “In the Spirit of ‘Clever
Inventions and Constellations’: The Mechanics of Romantic Systems,” in
Romantic Circles, Praxis Series, ed. Mark Canuel (Spring 2016), online.
21 Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Anfangsgründe der angewandten Mathematik
(Göttingen: Verlag der Wittwe Vandenhoek, 1780) and Johann Christian
Polycarmp Erxleben, Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre (Göttingen: Johann Christian
Dieterich, 1787).
22 Gehler, Physicalisches Wörterbuch, vol. 2, 565.
the discursive environments in which they emerge are not identical.

To make that distinction clear, the remaining pages of Part One will be
devoted to (re)constructing the lever based on Novalis’s and Schlegel’s
aphorisms before turning in Part Two to the problem of how these
levers are used in relation to the human.
For Novalis, mechanics is not just a science.23 Knowledge of
mechanics brings with it a different way of observing and constructing
relations with the objects in our environment. He certainly had plenty
of experience in that regard, given the fact that he was appointed as
saline assessor after leaving the Freiberg mining academy in May
1799 and held the position until his death in March 1801. During that
time, he was primarily concerned with two projects: the inspection of
the saline facilities in Dürrenberg, Kösen, and Artern, and geognostic
observations (including regional land surveys).24 In the few professional
documents that remain from this time period, it is clear that levers were
not just objects of theoretical reflection for Novalis, but also part of his
daily work-life, as the following note indicates:
Application of the simple lever—with a water tank on the long end

in the theory of mining machinery. Water would fall successively
first in the tank of one lever, then in the tank of the other. Each
could, however, lift the other along with it after the emptying of
its water. If need be, one could mount several levers among one
another—which would then receive water from one another.25
In his introduction to Novalis’s technical and professional writings,

Gerhard Schulz reminds readers that Novalis described his literary
writing as a relatively “minor matter” when compared to his pro-
fessional work and he also suggests that there was more of a recip-
rocal relationship between the two than the early scholarship on
Novalis ever cared to acknowledge.26 Schulz’s observation merits
much more consideration than it has received, and the focus on the
23 For more information on how mechanics related to Novalis’s professional career

and its duties, see Gerhard Schulz’s overview in Novalis, Schriften 3, 697–712.
24 Erik Hansen, Wissenschaftswahrnehmung und –umsetzung im Kontext der deutschen
Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 248.
25 “Anwendung des einfachen Hebels—mit einem Wasserkasten am langen Ende
in der Bergmaschinenlehre. Das Wasser fiele successive bald in den Kasten des
Einen Hebels—bald in den des Andern, nach Ausleerung seines Wassers wieder
mit in die Höhe heben. Allenfalls könnte man mehrere Hebel untereinander
anbringen—die das Wasser von einander bekämen” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 739).
26 See “Einleitung” to Novalis, Schriften 3, 697.
mechanical lever in this study allows the true extent of this reciprocal
relationship to be acknowledged.27
A note from the “mathematical notebook” dated June 23, 1798,
begins with the following observation: the “study of machines forms
the mechanic—and accustoms the mind to clever inventions and
constellations.”28 This sentiment echoes one found in Galileo’s Discorsi,
where he writes that visits to the shipyard of Venice
offer ample opportunity for philosophizing to an enquiring mind,

especially that part of enquiry invoking mechanics; since here all
types of instruments and machines are constantly being put to
work by a great number of artisans, some of whom, partly . . .
through their own observations and their own experiences, are
necessarily greatly expert and highly intelligent.29
Galileo and Novalis clearly understand that the study of machines

encourages an advanced knowledge of mechanics; and for Novalis, if
there is in addition a poetic quality to be found in the mechanical arts,
then it has something to do with creative juxtapositions that create or
reveal surprising affinities. As we have seen, such productive juxtaposing
is well within the purview of the lever as a mediator of differences.
A knowledge of machines also means that the simple concepts we
encounter can be seen for their mechanical and mathematical potential.
In the same mathematical notebook, Novalis asks and answers this very
question: “What is a point—a line—a surface etc., a body—(they are
points of rest,—hypomochlia, axes, spheres.)”30 To say that we can observe
in Novalis’s aphorisms an inclination to see the objects of our world in
terms of a potentially “mechanical” environment—understood in the
most general sense as an environment conducive to unusual couplings,
constructed within a spirit of instrumentality—is still only half of the
27 One can also refer to Schulz’s more recent biography of Novalis from 2012,
Novalis: Leben und Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011).
28 Novalis, Schriften 3.50. Thomas Grosser also glosses this passage when he
comments that Novalis’s interest and expertise in machines served as “schooling
for a plan-oriented type of intelligence, capable of innovation.” See Grosser,
Identität und Rolle. Kontext, Konzept und Wirkungsgeschichte der Genieästhetik bei
Novalis (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991), 112. Grosser, whose emphasis
is on the concept of genius, does not refer in detail either to mechanics or to the
lever in his study, however.
29 Quoted in David Speiser, Discovering the Principles of Mechanics 1600–1800, ed.
Kim Williams and Sandro Caparrini (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 21.
30 Novalis, Schriften 3, 64.
picture, however. We still need to understand the particular role the

mechanical lever has to play.
Novalis’s most thought-provoking statements on the lever emerge
during his reading of Carl August von Eschenmayer’s Säze [sic] aus der
Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt
(“propositions from nature-metaphysics applied to chemical and
medicinal topics” (1797)). Eschenmayer (1768–1852) studied medicine
in Tübingen and Göttingen, and he eventually returned to Tübingen
to become professor of medicine (1811) and later, practical philosophy
(1818).31 Today, he is better known for his nature-philosophical writings
than his medical work, even if he usually appears as a footnote in studies
devoted to those philosophers whose writings he most rigorously
engaged, including Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. His eventual clash
with Schelling—in which the lever has a surprising role to play—will
be discussed in the following chapter on Naturphilosophie. For Novalis,
at least, Eschenmayer’s willingness to use metaphysical arguments in
pursuit of connections between chemistry, the study of electricity, and
medicine earned him the status of a kindred spirit. Eschenmayer himself
envisioned the Propositions as a guidepost for future thinking about
how to apply nature-philosophical ideas more broadly. Because the text
of the Propositions does not itself accomplish the task but merely points
the way, Eschenmayer acknowledges its status as fragment (Bruchstük
[sic]) and encourages his readers by adding: “One can take propositions
from a system and apply them completely unsystematically to objects
of experience, without their most meritorious aspect falling by the
wayside.”32 Novalis seems to have taken this programmatic statement
to heart because, as he read Eschenmayer’s text, he selected various
passages of interest about the lever and added his own commentary.
It is here, however, that one encounters a problem with the critical
edition of Novalis’s writings that needs to be addressed before moving
forward. The editors have formatted the notes collected under the
heading “Kant and Eschenmayer Studies” by using a relatively small
font to denote excerpts from Eschenmayer’s Säze and a larger font to
indicate Novalis’s comments, for example:
The lever’s laws of explanation [p. XIII]
31 For a short biography, see the entry “Eschenmayer, Adolf Karl August (1768–
1852),” in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F.
Klemme and Manfred Kuehn (New York: Continuum, 2010).
32 See Carl August Eschenmayer, Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und
medicinische Gegenstände angewandt (Tübingen: Jakob Friedrich Heerbrandt,
1797), iv.
/One should not speak of quantities, but rather of strengths and

weakness of motion /
Motion is mixed from mass and velocity / elasticity /. The result is
the same—from a single mass and doubled force—and from doubled mass
and a single force.33
I will provide the German text for this and following few citations in
order to give a more precise sense of Novalis’s language, his formatting,
and the degree to which he adopts and modifies Eschenmayer’s
own text:
Erklärungsgesetze des Hebels [S. XIII]

/ Man sollte nicht von Größen, sondern von Stärken und
Schwächung der Bewegung reden. /
Bewegung ist aus Masse und Geschwindigkeit / Schnellkraft/
gemischt. Der Erfolg ist gleich—von einfacher Masse und doppelter
Kraft—und von doppelter Masse und einfacher Kr[aft].
There are interesting details contained in this excerpt. One is that

Novalis turned to Eschenmayer, as opposed to a more canonical source
from classical mechanics, when looking for an explanation of the law of
the lever. Another concerns Novalis’s interest in the most basic laws of
motion, and the fact that he is engaged in making connections between
various physical concepts, such as Geschwindigkeit (velocity) and
Schnellkraft (elasticity). The problem is that the critical edition gives us
the impression that Novalis faithfully transcribed Eschenmayer’s text
and interspersed his own thoughts along the way. When one compares
the small print of Novalis’s “excerpts” with the text of Eschenmayer’s
Propositions, however, it quickly becomes apparent that there are
discrepancies. Some are fairly trivial. For example, in the following
passage from Eschenmayer, which we can understand as the “source”
of the one from Novalis excerpted above, we see that Eschenmayer uses
the verb zusammengesezt (composed) instead of gemischt (mixed), makes
no mention of Schnellkraft (elasticity), and frames the ratios between
mass and velocity in somewhat different terms (though to the same
mechanical effect). I include the German quotes as well to make the
comparisons easier to follow:

Now the quantity of motion is composed from the mass and

its velocity and a half mass with doubled velocity has the same
relation as an entire mass and a single velocity.
(Nun ist die Grösse der Bewegung zusammengesezt aus der
Masse und ihrer Geschwindigkeit, und es verhält sich eine halbe
Masse mit einer doppelten Geschwindigkeit gleich mit einer
ganzen Masse und einer einzelnen Geschwindigkeit.34)
Consider the case of other excerpts in Novalis’s notes, however, such

as this one:
The longer the arm of the lever, the greater the velocity of the force moving
its end.
Consequently, for the establishment of equilibrium—a stronger mass must

hang on the shorter arm, or press upon it—in order to compensate—More
intensity opposed to greater extensity. [p. XIV/XV]
(Je länger der Arm des Hebels, desto größer die Geschwindigkeit der das
Ende desselben bewegenden Kraft . . . Mithin muß zur Herstellung des
Gleichgewichts—am kürzeren Arm eine stärkere Masse hängen, oder darauf
drücken—um so zu kompensiren—Mehr Intensität gegen größere
Extensität. [S. XIV/XV]35)
One is hard pressed to find the corresponding passage in Eschenmayer’s

text on pages xiv and xv, which are indicated, or elsewhere.36 It
would therefore be more accurate to designate Novalis’s “excerpts”
as paraphrases that deviate to varying degrees from Eschenmayer’s
language, and which already bear the imprint of Novalis’s thought
processes. For example, when Novalis suggests that we think about
the “strength and weakness of motion” (von Stärken und Schwächung
34 Eschenmayer, Säze, xiv.

36 In Hans-Joachim Mähl’s preface to this section, one can read the following with
reference to the Eschenmayer studies: “Die Auszüge sind trotz ihrer knappen
Zusammenraffung eng an die Vorlage angelehnt und enthalten nur gelegentlich
selbstständige Zusätze des Novalis, die durch Normaldruck hervorgehoben
worden sind. Diese beziehen sich vor allem auf die Vorrede” (Novalis,
Schriften 2, 332–33). Although the statement that Novalis’s excerpts stay close
to Eschenmayer’s phrasing and “only occasionally contain independent
contributions by Novalis” leaves some room for interpretation, it does not go
far enough to indicate to the reader that these “quotations” of Eschenmayer
need to be compared quite closely to the original.
der Bewegung) in relative terms as opposed to as quantities, we can see

that he follows through with his own suggestion when he repeats the
word “stark” in the context of a “stronger mass” (stärkere Masse) in the
excerpt quoted above. In other words, the excerpt has been influenced
by the rhetoric of the commentary. Given that Novalis’s reception of
Eschenmayer is slightly more complicated than the critical edition
suggests, the following questions arise: Which aspects of Eschenmayer’s
writings on the lever are most germane to the discussion at hand and to
what degree do Novalis’s interventions either pick up on certain ideas
of Eschenmayer’s or point to a new perspective of the lever?
In the chapter on Kant, we saw that there were various ways of
thinking about the lever in the context of eighteenth-century physics and
mathematics. These definitions either emphasized the materiality of the
lever (as “bar” or “stick”) or distanced themselves from it to emphasize
the lever’s immateriality, such as we saw in Gehler’s definition of the
lever as pure “connection.” In Eschenmayer’s Propositions, rather than
describing the lever as a fixed relation between three points or bodies,
Eschenmayer conceives of the lever in terms of force and motion:
We can imagine to ourselves the arms of a lever with their forces

as two magnitudes of motion, and regard the hypomochlion as the
point in which both magnitudes work against each other. Since
the arms of the lever represent lines whose separated endpoints
cannot be moved, without at the same time moving the points at
the center of motion, the moments in which the forces of the lever
work upon the hypomochlion, are therefore the same even with
every inequality in the lengths of the arms.37
The forces Eschenmayer describes refer to the lever’s moment of torque

or Drehmoment, the force of turning. The mechanical “moments” (Zeiten)
of the lever arms refer to the product of the length of the arm multiplied
by the force applied to it. When the moments on either side of the
fulcrum point are the same, the lever is in a state of static equilibrium.
Novalis’s comments that “one should not speak of magnitudes [Größen]
37 “Wir können uns die Aerme eines Hebels mit ihren Kräften als zwei
Bewegungsgrößen vorstellen, und das Hypomochlion als den Punkt ansehen,
in welchem beide Grössen gegeneinander wirken. Da nun die Aerme des Hebels
Linien vorstellen, deren entfernte Endpunkte nicht bewegt werden können,
ohne daß zu gleicher Zeit auch die am Centro motus gelegene[n] Punkte der
Linien bewegt werden, so sind die Zeiten, in der die Kräfte des Hebels auf
das Hypomochlion wirken, auch bei jeder Ungleichheit der Länge der Aerme
dennoch gleich” (Eschenmayer, Säze, xv)
but rather of strengths and weaknesses of the motion,”38 and that the law of
the lever should be conceived of in terms of “more intensity as opposed
to greater extensity,”39 pick up on a tendency already noticeable in
Eschenmayer and develop it further.40 This tendency de-emphasizes the
lever’s “visibility”—that is, as an object best represented by lines, bodies,
and proportionate magnitudes of weight or distances from the fulcrum
point—in favor of a more abstract constellation of forces. It might not
sound like such a significant idea from a purely mechanical point of
view, but from a philosophical (as well as rhetorical) point of view, it
makes quite a bit of difference whether one refers to actual quantities or
relative strengths and weaknesses: whether the lever is defined in terms
of its “parts” or in terms of forces. With this change—which entails a
departure from the geometric visualization of the lever—comes greater
mobility for the lever as object of comparison. Other notes reinforce the
move toward an understanding of the lever simply in terms of force,
such as the following ones from the “Physical Fragments”:
Mechanics comprehends statics and mechanics in the stricter

sense. Change of location is not essential to motion. Weight is the
product of the neutralization of forces, or motions. Mechanics
does not have to do with bodies but rather with weights.
. . .
Neutralized forces are called weights.
The lever must, it seems to me, be explained according to laws of
celestial mechanics—according to laws of attraction. The attraction
is not direct, but rather in relation to a third point—centrally. (On
the central points)41

39 “Mehr Intensität gegen größere Extensität. Mithin muß zur Herstellung des
Gleichgewichts—am kürzeren Arm eine stärkere Masse hängen, oder darauf
drücken—um so zu kompensiren,” (Novalis, Schriften 2).
40 For more information about the important role “intensity” plays in
Englightenment and Romantic thinking, see Erich Kleinschmidt, Die Entdeckung
der Intensität. Geschichte einer Denkfigur im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein,
2004). Kleinschmidt notes how Novalis’s reading of Eschenmayer facilitated the
application of the concept of “gradation” to force (Kleinschmidt 25, n. 43).
41 “Die Mechanik begreift die Statik und Mechanik im strengern Sinn.
Ortsveränderung ist der Bewegung nicht wesentlich. Die Schwere ist das
Produkt der Neutralisation der Kräfte, oder Bewegungen. Die Mechanik hat
nicht mit Körpern sondern nur mit Gewichten zu thun.
. . .
Neutralisirte Kräfte heißen Gewichte [sic]
Der Hebel muß, wie mich dünkt, nach Gesetzen der himmlischen Mechanik
erklärt werden—nach Gesetzen der Anziehung. Die Anziehung ist nicht
The above aphorism recalls the use of the lever in astronomical contexts,
as Meli discusses with regard to Kepler. Eventually, Novalis goes so far
as to imagine a lever that is almost completely disembodied, and the
same tendency becomes more evident in other notes when he writes
that “the lever is absolutely without rigid lines and point of support
to be explained from the theory of force in general—the central forces
in general”42 where “central forces” refer to centripetal and centrifugal
forces.43 According to the scientific idea underlying this aphorism, we
can define what the lever does just as adequately with the concept of
force alone as we can when we rely on Gehler’s definition of a fixed,
inflexible connection of three bodies or points.
What, exactly, does Novalis want to convey with his willingness to
do without the traditional image of a mechanical lever in equilibrium
around a fulcrum point? What is to be gained from a lever described
simply in terms of opposing forces? It is not as if we can do away
with points altogether. Here, it might be helpful to refer to the work
of Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), whose Analytical Mechanics
(Mécanique analytique) was published in Berlin in 1788.44
In the preface to the Analytical Mechanics, Lagrange summarizes one
of the most significant features of his project as follows:
No figures will be found in this work. The methods I present

require neither constructions nor geometrical or mechanical
arguments, but solely algebraic operations subject to a regular
and uniform procedure. Those who appreciate mathematical
analysis will see with pleasure mechanics becoming a new branch
of it and hence, will recognize that I have enlarged its domain.45
Craig Fraser situates this turn away from diagrams within a larger trend
in the eighteenth century that emphasized “extending the domain of
analysis and algorithmic calculation” and “reducing the dependence
of advanced mathematics on geometrical institutions and geometric
aids.”46 When Lagrange derives his general equations of motion, he
directe, sondern in Beziehung auf einen dritten Punct—centralisch (Über die

Centralpuncte),” Novalis, Schriften 3, 77. The editors date the initial drafts of
this manuscript to September or October 1798 (for their discussion, see Novalis,
Schriften 3, 31).
42 “Der Hebel ist schlechthin ohne starre Linien und Unterstützungspunct aus
der Lehre der Kraft überhaupt—den Centralkräften überhaupt zu erklären”
(Novalis, Schriften 3, 470).
43 See Gehler, Physikalisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Centralkräfte” for a description of
these terms.
44 Mécanique analytique, 2 vols (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1788–89).
45 Lagrange, Analytical Mechanics, 7.
46 Fraser, Preface to Analytical Mechanics, vii.
bases his thinking on the principle of virtual work which was already
in place and could describe the “simple” machines of the lever, pulley,
and inclined plane.47
In this regard, Novalis’s suggestion that we think of the lever in terms
of “forces” rather than “rigid lines” seems quite in keeping with a turn
away from visual diagrams, and we can see how such a development
might have ramifications in other intellectual contexts as well. For
example, instead of invoking the lever in the established tradition of
a visual metaphor (along the lines of a “lever of reason,” such as one
finds in Kant and elsewhere), we are left with an abstraction that can
less easily be visualized. Instead, Novalis distills from the mechanics
of the lever a particular rhetorical figure, that of transition and the
preservation of opposites.
Novalis expresses a similar idea in Das allgemeine Brouillon [The
general brouillon] when he describes a “new deduction of the lever,
from the point of lifting etc. through centrifugal force.”48 Taken together,
these notes emphasize to what degree Novalis abandons a formal
description of the lever in favor of its derivation from the concept of
force. Any lingering distinctions between physical and mathematical
levers based purely on the criterion of materiality also become
irrelevant when there is increasingly less of a “body”—imagined or
otherwise—to consider. Novalis’s notes on Eschenmayer allow us to
witness this transformation in thinking directly, as in the following
note where the concept of force takes over the arms of the lever in a
peculiar way:
The hypomochlion is the point of coincidence of the proportional

members. The longer the arm of the lever, the greater the
velocity of the motive force of its end. / more free room for motion
[Spielraum] of the force absolute in itself—greater armature
of force.49
Through the replacement of the lever “arm” with an “armature”

of force, Novalis tests out a philosophical idea through a play on
words. The degree to which his philosophical thinking is connected
to his knowledge of the lever becomes even more apparent when,
47 Fraser, Preface to Analytical Mechanics, ix.

48 “Neue Deduktion des Hebels, aus dem Hebepuncte etc. durch Centrifugalkraft,”
Novalis, Schriften 3, 442–43.
49 “Das Hypomochlion ist der Punct des Zusammentreffens der Proportionsglieder.
Je länger der Arm des Hebels, desto größer die Geschwindigkeit der das Ende
desselben bewegenden Kraft. / freyerer Spielraum der an sich absoluten Kraft—
größere Armatur der Kraft/” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 381).
with reference to his physicist friend Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Novalis

constructs an analogy between “Ritter’s way of handling physics”
and “my idea about the principle of personality in every substance,”
something he equates with the force of the lever’s fulcrum.50 The self-
awareness contained in this aphorism suggests Novalis’s thinking
about the lever is more in line with a philosophical approach (or “way”
of doing something) than an isolated interest. A laconic note, “About
the Lever,”51 found just a few pages later than the aphorism cited above
raises similar questions, namely: To what degree a reflection on the
lever’s instrumentality might be connected to how it facilitates a more
general approach to thinking about certain problems of philosophical
interest. These are questions that ultimately have to do with the
individual, as the notion of a “personality in every substance” and
the formulation of equilibrium in terms of “intensity and extensity”
suggest. The Romantic equation of the lever and the individual will be
addressed in the final section of this chapter.
Novalis and Schlegel share a keen interest in the lever and its
usefulness for philosophical thinking, but they take advantage of
this simple machine in different ways. Whereas Novalis’s aphorisms
engage more directly than Schlegel’s with mechanical laws governing
the lever, and he thinks “about the lever” in such a way as to generalize
from contemporary physical theory, Schlegel’s approach can best be
described as the exploratory creation of levers themselves, which in
turn aligns well with Meli’s discussion of the heuristic value of levers
for the mechanical theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is the functional property of the lever, which is after all a machine for
our use, that allows Schlegel to operate it as an instrument of thought,
as in the following two aphorisms that appear contiguously:
1. Activity (Thätigkeit) and receptivity (Leiden) completely relative.

Substance absolute, only the fulcrum in the (philosophical) lever.52
2. Only through a continuous ever repeated disruption is
life possible.53
It is worth emphasizing that even though Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis

were no strangers to mathematical notation, there are relatively few
50 Novalis, Schriften 3, 574.135.

52 “Thätigkeit und Leiden ganz relativ. Die Substanz absolut, nur d[er] Ruhepunkt
in dem [philosophischen] Hebel” (Schlegel, KFSA 18, 419).
53 “Nur durch eine fortdauernde immer wiederholte Störung ist Leben möglich”
(Schlegel 18.419).
diagrams in their aphorisms, none of which concern the lever. Perhaps

this is due to their focus on the hypomochlion and their interest in
defining the lever as a problem of relative motion and the exchange
of forces. They preserve the notion of lever as a figure of proportion
or ratio found in Gehler’s definition, but replace rigid connections
with the relativity of motion, allowing concepts more mobility to shift
the terms under which their balance might be constructed. In other
words, by freeing the lever from rigidity in multiple ways—whether
understood as a fixed relation or a diagrammed form—and by factoring
in disruption as a permanent companion of the (philosophical) lever—
we see that early German Romantic thinking allows for a peaceful
or at least non-contradictory coexistence of mechanical figures with
the tropes of organic life. The previous chapter on Kant showed how
the apparatus of the lever was used as a way of making or revealing
connections between concepts. Like Kant, Schlegel constructs such a
conceptual lever in order to bring activity, receptivity, and substance
into relation with one another. The content of the aphorism, however,
has greater resonance with the terminology of Fichte and Schelling.
In Fichte’s philosophy, Thätigkeit (activity, understood as the non-
quantified self-positing of the subject in its most basic sense) and Leiden
(passivity or suffering,54 as a quantitative negation) exist in a process of
constant reciprocation. As Iain Hamilton Grant describes it, the I and
the not-I “do not merely coexist, but interact as positing and posited,”
such that “a maximum of the one = a minimum of the other.”55 The
self-positing activity of the subject is limited by an equally “positive”
state: “The opposite of activity . . . is called passivity. Passivity is positive
negation, and is insofar opposed to the merely relative [negation].”56
Kant’s use of the lever was facilitated by an understanding of “negative
magnitudes” as “positive,” though existing in relative tension with
those magnitudes typically understood as positive numbers. In the
Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Entire
Theory of Science) from 1794, Fichte refers to the “striving” (Streben)
of the I and not-I in terms of forces and devotes a paragraph to arguing
that not only their independent striving but also the possibility of
equilibrium between both must be posited.57
54 Fichte underscores the fact that Leiden is not to be understood as a “painful

sensation” and must therefore be abstracted from its usual connotations. See
Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Leibniz: Christian Ernst
Gabler), 135.
55 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 85.
56 “Das Gegentheil der Thätigkeit . . . heisst Leiden. Leiden ist positive Negation, und
ist insofern der bloss relativen entgegengesetzt” (Fichte, Grundlage, 66).
57 Fichte, Grundlage, 282.
Grant has also shown that the discussion of negative magnitudes

in Kant, which “pitches logical contradiction against opposing forces,”
also “tallies with Fichte’s practical–theoretical concept of positing as
an activity.”58 He writes, “Since the forces the I expresses as active
and resistant (I and not-I) have their sources in the I’s infinite striving,
then by the principle of continuity . . . there is no point at which
forces are not operative” and adds that “the I’s continuous forces and
quanta of activity produce and form reality.”59 We can see, then, that
Schlegel’s construction of the lever of Tätigkeit and Leiden is therefore
not a replica of a preexisting lever found in Fichte, but an attempt to
bring a constellation of concepts and ideas already found in Fichte’s
philosophizing about the subject in line with his own thinking.
The concepts found in Schlegel’s lever do not just relate to a
construction of the subject, however. They are also drawn from key
terms in the emerging life sciences and Naturphilosophie. While Fichte
offers a point of reference, whereby the emphasis is on the tension
between the I and the not-I—the basic activities of the self-positing ego,
Schelling offers a second one that is somewhat more in tune with the
scientific context around 1800. The idea expressed in Schlegel’s two
aphorisms—that life consists of a balance between activity and passivity
that is, however, constantly disrupted—is consistent with what one can
find in Friedrich Schelling’s nature philosophy. To make the connection
between the mechanics of the lever and organic processes of life even
clearer, I would add that when the two aphorisms cited above are read
together, they provide a mechanical model for an organic principle, a
lever in a state of constant motion. The fulcrum is a locus of alternation,
the point that embodies the interplay of forces on either side. Much
like the points of indifference between magnetic poles—which are
also privileged points in Romantic thinking60—it serves as a model
58 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 88.

59 Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 88. See also Fichte, Grundlage der
gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, where he makes a comparison to mathematics,
where one abstracts from quality in order to focus on quality. It is “completely
indifferent,” he writes, “whether I call steps forward or steps backward positive
quantities” (Fichte, Grundlage, 133).
60 The concept of indifference was important for German Naturphilosophie around
1800. It is commonly associated with Schelling’s discussion of magnetism in the
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the Von der Weltseele (1798). See
also Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799), where
he describes a state of indifference as one where natural phenomena exist
with the forces acting upon them in balance. For further reference, readers can
consult Bernhard Rang’s Identität und Indifferenz. Eine Untersuchung zu Schellings
Identitätsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 2000). Schelling’s use of
indifference can in turn be traced back to the work of Dutch scientist Anton
for negotiating a relationship between opposing concepts, as a figure

of dynamic opposition. The suggestion that life or living is a process
of repeated disruptions is, as Gabriel Trop has proven, a fundamental
part of Schelling’s concept of equilibrium in nature.61 Schelling’s On the
World Soul (1798) argues that there is an equilibrium to life that must
constantly be disturbed and re-established. In fact, in the same passage
where Schelling makes this claim, he also uses the lever as a metaphor
when he names oxygen and hydrogen (or “phlogistic material”) the
two “negative principles of life in the animal body,” comparing them
to “weights on the lever of life”; they are two principles whose local
disequilibrium allows for the large-scale maintenance of life itself.62 The
significance of the lever in German Naturphilosophie will be discussed
in more detail in Chapter Three. For the moment, the important
thing to keep in mind is that Schlegel’s designation of the lever as
“philosophical” constructs a theoretical relationship that complies with
mechanical law. And though the units of his lever are relatively more
abstract than Schelling’s hydrogen and oxygen, the building blocks
of life itself, there is a shared emphasis on movement and process (as
opposed to the figure of the lever in static equilibrium).
The examples cited above are not isolated cases in Schlegel’s writings,
where one can find blueprints for additional levers. These levers are
constructed from the key concepts that haunt Schlegel’s literary and
Brugmans, who describes a plane of indifference between the two poles of

the magnet. This is an antiquated concept of the magnet, which was replaced
by magnetic fields after Ritter’s death (and later by quantum theory). See
Brugmans, Philosophische Versuche über die magnetische Materie (Leipzig: Siegfried
Lebrecht Crusius, 1784) and also Klaus Stein, Naturphilosophie der Frühromantik
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 12–13.
61 See Gabriel Trop’s recently published essay “Affirmative Disequilibrium:
Hogarth, Schiller, Schelling, and Goethe,” in Statics, Mechanics, Dynamics:
Equilibrium around 1800, ed. Jocelyn Holland and Gabriel Trop, Germanic Review
92 (2017). Trop writes that about Schelling’s Naturphilosophie that it construes life
as an oscillation between mutually exclusive conceptual gestures: life as part of
the order of nature and life as a disruption of the order of nature, both of which
together imply a second-order systemic organization in which contradiction
functions as an internal motor” (Gabriel, “Affirmative Disequilibrium,” 183).
62 “Die beyden negativen Principien des Lebens im thierischen Körper sind
daher phlogistische Materie und Oxygene (gleichsam die Gewichte am
Hebel des Lebens), das Gleichgewicht beyder muß continuierlich gestört und
wiederhergestellt werden,” Schelling, Von der Weltseele—Eine Hypothese der
Höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus, ed. Jörg Jantzen und
Thomas Kisser (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2000), 198. This
stands in contrast to the Hippocratic tradition, which associates disease and
disequilibrium.
philosophical notebooks from the years 1800 and 1801, where one can
find such statements as the following:
Act and hypothesis form a lever, belief is the hypomochlion63
and
Religion is the X of the encyclopedia—philology the hypomochlion.

Art, mythology, poesie the positive arm, philosophy, history
the negative.64
In these cases, we can see that the lever serves as a model or template
that offers a way of articulating possible connections between various
concepts within certain constraints. According to the logic of the lever,
it should make a difference that “belief” serves as a hypomochlion or
fulcrum point, rather than “act” or “hypothesis,” because by granting it
this status Schlegel also posits that belief in some way mediates between
the other two. Such an example also illustrates why it is necessary to
think beyond a metaphorical usage of the lever. After all, it would be
glaringly inadequate simply to describe the first aphorism as a “lever of
act, belief, and hypothesis” in order to try to understand what Schlegel
and other thinkers are doing when they construct the apparatus of the
lever in the first place.
When Schlegel writes that the lever is of the “utmost importance” for
the theory of construction, he underscores its significance in more ways
than one.65 Certainly, no mathematician or engineer would dispute his
claim, but Schlegel’s notion of construction has less to do with bricks
and mortar than it does with conceptual labor. Just as other formulas
found in Schlegel’s notebooks draw upon the language and symbolism
of differential calculus, we see that the logic of the lever allows for
abstract concepts to be treated as discrete quantities, and positioned
into relationships—without, however, losing their dynamic potential or
status as constructions-in-progress. If we think of the lever as a “model,”
then it is one that arrives with a strong sense of its own functionality
already embedded within the larger conceptual apparatus. The broader
implication of constructing and thinking with levers is that one can also
identify both local and global lever effects: in other words, once the
63 “Der Act und die Hypothese bilden einen Hebel, der Glaube ist das Hypomochlion”
(KFSA 18, 404.1002).
64 “Relig[ion] ist das X der Encykl[opädie]—[Philologie] das Hypom[ochlion].
K[unst]. Myth[ologie], [Poesie] der positive Arm, [Philosophie], Hist[orie] pp
der negative” (KFSA 18, 391.845).
65 “Zur Theorie d[er] Construction der Hebel äußerst wichtig” (KFSA 18, 170.550).
relationships are constructed (e.g., between mythology and poesy in

the last of Schlegel’s aphorisms cited above), they will continue to bear
upon our broader understanding. Schlegel alerts us to the fact that there
might be more of a connection between mechanics and the construction
of the encyclopedia project than previously assumed when he mentions
these concepts in tandem,66 but the construction of the conceptual levers
has an even greater ramification: once constructed, the lever effects
continue to operate beneath the surface of the encyclopedia project, even
when the lever or its component parts are not directly mentioned. Now
that we have a better sense of how Novalis and Schlegel approach the
mechanical lever in their writing, it is time to focus on a particular object
acts as a common denominator in their thinking: the hypomochlion.
Part Two: The Point of Points

The examples discussed in Part One of this chapter have shown that,
based on the status of the mechanical lever in the notes and aphorisms
of German Romantic thinkers Schlegel and Novalis, the lever has every
right to replace the hand as a “tool of tools” in its use as an instrument
of reason. Part Two now shifts the focus to that singular point that
defines the lever, the fulcrum point or “hypomochlion,” to show how
this “point of points” is at the heart of German Romanticism’s interest
in the lever. To understand what makes the hypomochlion the most
important point for Schlegel and Novalis, however, requires taking a
step back in order to gain a better understanding of Romantic thinking
about the point in general. It is in Romanticism’s theoretical writing
about the point that we can observe foundations being laid for the
innovation with the hypomochlion.
The Romantic Point

There are two basic aspects to what Schlegel and Novalis do with the
mathematical concept of the point. The first concerns how they use
the point to construct trajectories in the history of philosophy. This is
a question of points in motion that can be charted and visualized with
temporal and spatial coordinates. The second aspect has to do with the
importance of the point for the Romantics’ own project. It has just as
much to do with points in motion as it does with those at rest and—
what should now come as no surprise—reveals itself under the sign
of the mechanical lever whose “conceptual apparatus,” as discussed
in Chapter One, also includes the notion of static equilibrium. As we
will see, Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking about the point connects
to long-standing debates in theology, philosophy and the natural
66 See, for example, KFSA 18, 440.140.

sciences that, collectively, comprise the point’s conceptual history.67 The

Romantic point synthesizes these different traditions: not only through
reflections on the “constructive character” of philosophy in general, but
also by drawing on the specific topics in the history of the point as part
of Romanticism’s own construct of individuality, and this is where the
hypomochlion becomes of utmost importance.
Readers of Euclid will recall that the point was evident enough to
forgo explanation. The definition with which the Elements of Geometry
begins—“a point is that which has no part”68—suffices for the point
to take part in the construction of the circles, parabolas, ellipses and
hyperbolas that comprise the remainder of the thirteen-book treatise.
Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who are also fond of constructing,
definitions, formulae, and levers, as we saw above, use points and
geometrical forms to plot conceptual trajectories. Romantic statements
on the point can be both general, not always distinguishing between
mathematical and physical points, and quite specific, given that they
include other points of interest around 1800 (such as the Fluchtpunkt
or vanishing perspectival point of the work of art and the punctum
saliens William Harvey observes in chick embryos). For both Schlegel
and Novalis, the point is something that can easily, perhaps too easily,
be mobilized, to the degree that its inherent obviousness (or status as
an original intuition) becomes more elusive. Even after he summons
the point to do the work of history, science, theology, and philology,
Schlegel can still ask “Does one know what a point is?”69 However,
when one looks through Schlegel’s and Novalis’s widely dispersed
statements about points, it is possible to identify certain tendencies that
could fall under the rubric of what Novalis fleetingly describes as a
“philosophy of the point,”70 and these tendencies will be instrumental
67 The history of the point prior to Romanticism has been summarized by Friedrich
Kaulbachin in the entry “Punkt, Punktualität,” in the Historisches Wörterbuch
der Philosophie, vol. 7, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), col. 1711–14. The entry begins with
Aristotles and Zenon and ends with Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, but it
leaves out Romanticism altogether.
68 “Σημειον εστιν, ον μερος ονΘεν” Euclid’s commentators have observed that, unlike
his predecessors, Euclid chooses not to define the point, line, and surface by the
subsequent term (e.g., that the point is the end of a line). For further information on
the historical context of this definition, and other possible translations, see Thomas
Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements (New York: Dover, 1956), 155.
69 “Weiß man was ein Punkt ist?” (KFSA 18, 229.427).
70 “Philosophie des Punkts” Novalis, Schriften 3, 151.500. In his book, Die Poetisierung
der Wissenschaften bei Novalis (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), Johannes Hegener reads this
quote in the context of the Romantic theory of the fragment. He observes that
it is the characteristic structure of the fragment to collect “everything into a
in understanding their work on the fulcrum point of the lever. The idea
that we can think of the trajectories taken by Romantic thinking about
the point in terms of “tendencies” comes from Schlegel himself. One of
his better-known aphorisms states that “whoever has a system is just as
spiritually lost as he who has none. One has to combine both.”71 This
is, however, only the second half of the aphorism. Before the question
of a system is even raised, Schlegel claims that “every philosopher also
has his line—tendency, just as his (salient) point and his cycle.”72 These
figures have a rhetorical function: they provide Schlegel with a way of
circumventing the contradiction of having a system and having none,
and they also work historically, allowing him to determine the affinities
between different philosophers over time.
Georges Lemaître, one of the early proponents of the idea that the
universe is expanding, whose name is often mentioned in conjunction
with the “Big Bang” theory, imagined the initial state of the universe as
a “primeval atom.”73 Schlegel, for whom the construction of the world
is as much a poetic as physical phenomenon, thinks of this same state
as a single point from which an infinity can emerge:
Were space full, then time would stand still—that is the 1/0 in the
progression of nature. Also once more a chaos but a much higher,
completely formed [one]. The first chaos is only a point.—From
chaos and allegory the world to be constructed. History of nature
from that 0/1—1/0.—74
point” so that, as Novalis writes, they are both “undetermined” and “absolutely
capable” (Novalis, Schfriften 2, 540.68, quoted in Hegener 334). For further
references to the problem of the point in the critical literature on Romanticism,
see Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (1979); and Martin Dyck,
Novalis and Mathematics, 58–61.
71 “Wer ein System hat, ist so gut geistig verloren, als wer keins hat. Man muß
eben beides verbinden” (KFSA 18, 80.614).
72 “Jeder [Philosoph] hat auch seine Linie—Tendenz wie sein punctum s[aliens]
und seinen Cyclus” (KFSA 18, 80.614). See also Brown’s comments on the
Romantic use of the word Tendenz, with its joint connotations of tension and
striving (Brown, Shape of German Romanticism, 46).
73 Georges Lemaître expresses this idea on several occasions. In “The Beginning
of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,” published in Nature
(May 9, 1931), he imagines a scenario where “the world has begun with a single
quantum,” at which point space and time have no meaning: “They would only
begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided
into a sufficient number of quanta”—an idea which, in contradistinction to Sir
Arthur Eddington, he finds “not at all repugnant” compared to the “present
order of Nature” (Lemaître, “Beginning of the World,” 706).
74 “Wäre d[er] Raum voll so würde die Zeit still stehn—das ist das 1/0 in d[er]
Progreß.[ion] der Natur. Auch wieder ein Chaos aber ein viel höheres, durchaus
The first chaotic point of this aphorism is the beginning of the world
and the world’s construction through allegorical narrative. Schlegel
designates this point as zero, and the history which unfolds from
it is one whose end limit, the end of time, is an infinity thick with
simultaneous points, marked by a neat inversion of zero and one. As
evident as Schlegel’s equation of a beginning point with zero might
seem to be—in particular, given the Romantic fascination for the
figure of creatio ex nihilo75—only relatively recent developments in
mathematics and mechanics make his claim credible in the first place
from a numerical perspective.
Wolfgang Schäffner has shown how, until the seventeenth century,
the Euclidean point of geometry was associated not with zero, but with
one. This correlation had to do with a prevailing distinction between
arithmetic as the science of discontinuous magnitudes and geometry as
the science of continuous magnitudes in place since Aristotle. According
to this way of looking at things, in arithmetic the “one” was considered
the beginning of all numbers, without itself being considered a number.
Schäffner discusses how, according to the older model,
in the same way as the point was the beginning of all geometry,
the number one was the origin of all numbers. Neither of them
was itself a part of its domain, but rather its indivisible limit
and origin.76
Schäffner explains how the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin, in his

1585 work Arithmétique, is in part responsible for changing the status
of the point. Stevin’s Arithmétique begins by defining the concept of
“number” as that “through which the quantity of a thing is expressed”
and claiming that one is also a number.77 Importing the idea of continuous
gebildetes. Das erste Chaos ist nur ein Punkt.—Aus Chaos und Allegorie die
Welt zu construiren. Geschichte der Natur von jenem 0/1—1/0.— --” (KFSA
18, 421.1226).
75 The principle of creation ex nihilo as Schöpfung or Schaffung aus Nichts has an
important role to play in early Romantic thinking, where it is linked to a
gesture of poetic originality (though not, however, to a single act of creation)
and where it also thrives in connection to points such as the punctum saliens
in William Harvey’s embryological work. For more information, refer to my
essay “Lucinde: The Novel from ‘Nothing’ as Epideictic Literature,” Germanisch-
romantische Monatsschrift 54.2 (2004).
76 See Wolfgang Schäffner, “The Point: The Smallest Venue of Knowledge in the
17th Century (1585–1665),” in Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge
in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 60.
77 Schäffner, “The Point,” 59.
magnitudes from geometry into arithmetic, he insists that the one, as

basic arithmetical unit, is divisible into parts and should no longer to
be considered just a unit of counting. As a consequence of the change
in definition, the long-standing equivalence between the one and the
geometrical point was broken. The one is understood to be divisible,
the point is not, and Stevin affirms that the indivisibility of the point
could only correspond to the zero.78 In Signifying Nothing, Brian Rotman
describes the zero in terms of a “meta-sign in relation to the system that
generates it.”79 Because it is both a number and a “sign about numbers,”
he writes, it exists both within and externally to the numerical system.80
This background information about the zero’s special dual status shows
that there is a historical precedent for the primitive ambivalence of the
point as limit and origin in Schlegel’s aphorism cited above on the history
of nature as an oscillation between 0/1 and 1/0, an ambivalence between
being something and being nothing indexed by its theoretical position as
starting limit and its value of “nothing.” It also shows that Schlegel relies
on a modern equation between geometric and arithmetic magnitudes, or
spatial and temporal magnitudes. The function of allegory in that same
aphorism, though by no means self-evident, seems to be to inscribe the
zero of the point into a language of world, history, and nature. The human
“construction” of the world though allegory that Schlegel describes as
the “history of nature” between a zero point and infinity appears in other
fragments as the basic formula of philosophical projects:
There is a [mysticism + critique]/0—like Fichte’s point. Every

[philosopher] has, must have such a point. In Spinoza’s case it
78 Stevin writes: “What does the point have in common with the number one?
Certainly nothing at all, since two units result (as is said) in a number, but two
or even a thousand points will not result in a line. The unit can be divided into
parts . . . but the point is indivisible; the unit is part of the number, but the point
is not a part of the line. Therefore, in relation to the number, the unit is not the
same as the point in relation to the line. What, then, corresponds to the point? I
say it is zero” (quoted in Schäffner, “The Point,” 60).
79 Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 11.
Rotman’s argument is actually much broader: he shows how the introduction
of the zero in mathematical discourse, the initial use of the vanishing point in
perspectival painting, and the invention of imaginary money are all events of
seismic nature for their respective semiotic systems. Each of these three signs,
according to Rotman, has a “natural closure” with regard to the original system
(he gives the example of how the special status of the zero led to the invention
of the algebraic variable that can potentially stand in for all numbers) (Rotman,
Signifying Nothing, 28–32). This “closure” of the system within a “meta-sign,” in
turn, “accompanies a self-conscious form of subjectivity” (Rotman, Signifying
Nothing, 28).
80 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 14.
was probably [mysticism + ethics + logic]/0, since Spinoza is of

an extremely ethical nature. A progressive philosopher has other
inciting points, that not infrequently really limit him, towards
which he adjusts himself pp—thus Descartes for Spinoza, Kant
for Fichte pp. Around such points then remain dark places in
the system. The mixture of the new and the old here often so
indissoluble up until the standstill of all understanding, as in
similar cases in the realm of ethics. The first point can also be
polemical, as with the Skeptics.81
In this aphorism, Schlegel suggests that the point operates both

historically and ahistorically within every system. Every system
has its own unique point from which it emerges (his example is
Fichte), but there are also those points—Schlegel calls them “inciting
points” (veranlassende Puncte)—that apply limits to their immediate
philosophical context (like Descartes for Spinoza, Kant for Fichte).
These other, historically inflected points not only place real constraints
on each new system, they also define “dark places” within it that have
a peculiar status. Given the repeated abbreviation “pp” (per procura),
one could also say that the older philosophers are present in the new
system “by proxy.” They designate moments of cognitive stasis: an
irresolvable conflict of understanding between old and new that
manifests itself as the “standstill of all understanding,” a lacuna in
the historical progression of thought. The irony of the aphorism, that
the “progressive” philosopher integrates radically “non-progressive”
elements within the system, is effectively a paradox that the aphorism
describes and performs at the same time. These elements, defined as
the simultaneity of old and new, are analogous to the condition of
the temporal standstill we have already seen defined as a thickening
of points and the stopping of time. The particular dual historical and
ahistorical status of the point as described by Schlegel also reinforces its
similarity to the mathematical zero according to Rotman’s description
of it as a sign both internal and external to the system that generates it.
Schlegel’s innovation is to reframe the point’s dual status in terms of
81 “Es gibt eine [Mystik + Kritik]/0—wie Fichtes Punkt. Jeder [Philosoph]

hat, muß einen solchen Punkt haben. Bei Spinosa war es wahrscheinl[ich]
[Mystik + Ethik + Logik]/0, da Spinosa eine äusserst ethische Natur ist. Ein
progreßiver [Philosoph] hat andre veranlaßende Punkte, die ihn nicht selten
real beschränken, an die er sich accomodirt pp—so Descartes für Spinosa, Kant
für Fichte pp. Bei solchen Punkten bleiben dann im System dunkle Stellen. Die
Mischung der Neuen und d[er] Alten hier oft so unauflöslich, bis zum Stillstehn
alles Verstandes, wie in ähnlichen Fällen im [ethischen] Gebiet.—Der erste
Punkt kann auch polemisch sein; so beim Skeptiker” (KFSA 18, 80.609).
a historical trajectory and thereby generate a “poetics” of the point by

creating a narrative that remains in tune with its problematic dual status.
From Point to Lever: The Romantic Fulcrum

Schlegel and Novalis’s fascination with the point includes both its
conceptual history as an object of mathematical and philosophical
interest and its potential to be instrumentalized for their own
purposes. What remains to be seen, however, is how these aspects of
the point connect to their thinking about the fulcrum. As discussed at
the beginning of the chapter, Novalis and Schlegel are familiar with
the lever as both a mechanical object and as a philosophical tool. They
of course knew about Archimedes as well as the trope associated with
him: that the history of the lever is a history of the individual’s exercise
of power. This was a view Schlegel and Novalis shared, although they
articulated it in ways that Archimedes could not have imagined. How
they conceive of the relationship between the lever and the individual
is much more indebted to theories of the subject in the late eighteenth
century, and it is here that the fulcrum plays a crucial, indeed
“pivotal” role.
In the same aphorism where Schlegel writes that the lever is of
“utmost importance” for a theory of construction, he continues:
Every universe for example has its hypomochlion as well as its

point of indifference.—Every universe also has its temperature and
certain basic chords. Chord apparently takes place only on the
positive arm, temperature only on the negative [arm]. Both are
however already a return to the center. The human for example
an animal chord but a vegetable temperature…82
The importance of this note lies in the constellation of universe,

hypomochlion, and human. In fact, this note does more than gather
these concepts together in a novel way; it also performs an act of
construction in a literal sense. Here, the Romantic ability to think
with great ease across orders of magnitude is harnessed within a
meditation on the construction of man as lever that connects the
material and the immaterial: animal and the vegetable, sound and heat.
The hypomochlion is central to this scenario: it is the point to which
82 Jedes Universum z.b. hat sein Hypomochlion wie seinen Indifferenzpunkt.—

Jedes Universum hat auch seine Temperatur und gewisse Grundaccorde. Accord
findet offenbar nur am positiven Arm, Temperatur nur am negativen Statt.
Beide sind aber doch schon eine Rückkehr zum Centrum. Der Mensch z.b. ein
animalischer Accord aber eine vegetabilische Temperatur (KFSA 18, 170–71.550).
opposites return and also the one in which they are sublated, much
like the point of indifference. This understanding goes against the
original sense of the word. According to A. G. Drachmann, the term
“hypomochlion” comes from the Greek ibumahliun, meaning “that
which is placed under the lever.”83 For Schlegel and Novalis, however,
the hypomochlion is by no means external to the lever. Instead, it has
been completely internalized, something which we can observe in other
notes as well.
Schlegel has not quite finished with his analogy, however. He
continues by marshaling the particular mechanics of the lever to
strengthen his comparison. Just as the hypomochlion is that point
where opposing forces cancel out, Schlegel writes: “Perhaps the center
in every universe is doubled, in the literal sense heterogeneous, One from
two, two at the same time from different orders.”84 Just as the point and
the zero associated with it transverse two different orders, so too is the
hypomochlion a fundamentally heterogeneous entity. The components
of the heterogeneity are adaptable to context. Above, we saw the
examples of chord and temperature, but the intrinsically doubled
nature of the fulcrum recalls the irreducible “dark places” seen before in
the mixtures of old and new coexisting within a philosophical system.
Constructing the Hypomochlion

So far, we have seen how Schlegel and Novalis construct levers to
perform the work of the encyclopedia project and how they grant
the fulcrum a special status. There are also occasions, however,
when Schlegel and Novalis simply refer to a fulcrum point without
a lever, which raises the joint questions: Are there precedents for this
phenomenon in mechanical theory and how are we to understand it in
the context of Romantic thought?
Evidence for this development can be found in the following three
notes by Schlegel:
Philology is perhaps constructed from the negative arm of

philosophy or of logic and from the positive [arm] of poesie, that
is, classical. Are these both the X or the hypomochlion—or that
which is indifferent?—The hypomochlion of poesie is the fantasy,
83 Drachmann, Mechanical Technology, 52.

84 “Vielleicht ist das Centrum in jedem Universum doppelt im eigentl[ichen] Sinne
heterogen, Eins aus zweien, zwei zugleich aus verschiednen Ordnungen” (KFSA
18, 171.550). Compare with: “Das Construiren d.h. die Dualität gleich in d[er]
Einheit zu deduciren, unmittelbar aus d[em] Mittelpunkt” (KFSA 18, 414.1113).
the [hypomochlion] of philosophy reflection. They therefore have

it in themselves; not so philology.85
Religion is the X of the encyclopedia—philology the hypomochlion.
Art; mythology, poesy the positive arm,—philosophy, history pp
the negative.86
History is the equator, philology the hypomochlion, through
saturation with indifferent poesy and philosophy philology
becomes, in the breath of religion, history.87
Criticism along with rhetoric and grammar everything only
[becomes] hypomochlion. In itself it is not free art. Logic only
transition between physics and morality[.] Only morality
can constitute.88
This cluster of notes, collected in a manuscript given the title “On

Rhetoric and Poesie” by Schlegel’s editors that dates from the end of
1799, allows us to see how Schlegel develops this aspect of his thinking
about the lever and its fulcrum point as a sequential progression that
emerges right before our eyes.
The heuristic quality of this enterprise is evident in the tentative tone
and questioning of the first note, where Schlegel seems neither to be sure
what might be constructed from the lever of philosophy (or logic) and
philology, nor if the lever is even the correct framework for the question,
given that he also refers to the concept of indifference, which is usually
associated with magnetism. At the end of the note, however, he allows
for the hypomochlion to be associated with a single concept, such as
poesy or philosophy. These concepts “have it in themselves.” They are,
85 “Die [Philologie] wird viell[eicht] aus d[em] negativen Arm der [Philosophie]
oder d[er] [Logik] und aus d[em] positiven d[er] [Poesie] construirt i.e.
d[em] Classischen. Sind diese beiden das X oder das Hypomochlion—oder
das [Indifferente]?—Das Hypomochlion der [Poesie] ist d[ie] Fantasie, d[as]
d[er] [Philosophie] die Reflexion. Sie haben es also in sich selbst; nicht so die
[Philologie]” (KFSA 18, 391.844). The editors of the Schlegel edition insert
“dem” in front of “Classischen,” but this adjective seems to modify “Poesie,” in
which case “der” would make more sense.
86 “Relig[ion] ist das X der Encykl[opädie]—[Philologie] das Hypom[ochlion].
K[unst]; Myth[ologie], [Poesie] der positive Arm,—[Philosophie], Hist[orie] pp
der negative” (KFSA 18, 391.845).
87 “Historie ist d[er] Aequator, [Philologie] das Hypomochlion, durch Sättigung
mit [indifferenter] [Poesie] und [Philosophie] wird [Philologie] im Anhauch der
Rel[igion] zur Historie” (KFSA 18, 392.864).
88 “[Kritik] nebst [Rhetorik] und [Grammatik] alles nur zum Hypom[ochlion].
Ansich ist nicht freye Kunst. [Logik] nur Uebergang zwischen [Physik] und
Moral Constituiren kann nur die Moral” (KFSA 18, 392.869).
in a word, self-contained levers, simply defined by their relation to the

fulcrum points of fantasy and reflection. The second note still relies on
the conventional idea of a lever as two arms on either side of a fulcrum
point. In the third, however, we see philosophy and poesy joined
once again at the fulcrum point, with no reference to the arms of the
lever. Instead the fulcrum point is also the focal point of all intellectual
activity of the lever. The fourth aphorism focuses exclusively on the
hypomochlion. In other words, the construction of the hypomochlion
is the construction of the lever. It is the symbolic embodiment of the
conceptual work that the lever does. We can witness this tendency
elsewhere as well, as when Schlegel writes that “mythology is only the
hypomochlion of poesie.”89
Conspicuously absent from Schlegel’s notes is any mention of a hand
or agency external to the functioning of these simple machines. Schlegel
is no Archimedes: there is no fantasy of an ideal point from which to
displace the world. Any “advantage” gained by the conceptual levers
of his notes would seem to be reabsorbed into operational dynamics of
the machines rather than attributed to an external individual. Through
their focus on the hypomochlion, Schlegel and Novalis emphasize the
work it does as a point of mediation on the lever itself as well as how
it embodies the dynamic cancellation and maintenance of opposing
forces. When Novalis refers to the “inner heterogeneity” of the lever
as one of its defining features,90 this is both an acknowledgment of a
mechanical fact and an allusion to the lever’s philosophical utility. To
think with Luhmann, one could also imagine that the hypomochlion
encompasses a distinction and neutralizes it at the same time. In that
regard, it also shares the special status of the “zero” as described by
Schäffner and Rotman as both participatory within and external to a
system. If there is a “zero” associated with the hypomochlion, however,
then it is to be understood as a “mechanical” as opposed to arithmetic
zero. It is the zero of forces sublated in a state of static equilibrium. In
his notes on Eschenmayer, Novalis writes,
Equilibrium—Complete sublation of heterogeneous forces by

one another—so that they are no longer an object, neither for
mathematical construction nor for the analysis of experience.91
89 KFSA 16, 293.486.

90 “Der Hebel ist ein künstlicher mechanischer Körper—daher mit innerer
Heterogeneïtaet” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 109).
91 “Gleichgewicht—Gänzliche Aufhebung heterogener Kr[äfte] durch einander—
so daß sie weder für die mathematische Construction noch für die Analysis der
Erfahrung ein Gegenstand mehr sind. Im Hypomochlion = 0 ist ein absol[utes]
Gleichgewicht. [S. 22/3]” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 383).
Like the lever itself, the hypomochlion emerges in Romantic thinking as

a figure of unity and heterogeneity and in this excerpt we can observe
how Novalis has abstracted the hypomochlion from the context of lever
and posited it as an object of contemplation in its own right. Novalis
calls attention to the fact that the hypomochlion, when circumstances
are conducive to a state of equilibrium, has a way of disappearing. It
is no longer an object and quite literally becomes our blind spot—the
placeholder for that which is no longer visible. The Romantic attention
given to the hypomochlion, however, falls neither in the category of
“mathematical construction” nor in the category of “analysis” in a
technical sense. Schlegel and Novalis can therefore use its liminal status
for their own purposes. When Schlegel writes, as we saw above, that
the hypomochlion of poesie is fantasy, or that the hypomochlion of
philosophy is reflection, or even that such things as criticism, rhetoric
and grammar can be made into hypomochlia, he uses a mechanical
construction. This construction allows the hypomochlion to flicker
into visibility in the moment it is named as such and do the work of
conceptual joining, before disappearing into the greater apparatus of
the encyclopedia project. Through this process, we can observe the
conditions that allow for the coexistence of a heuristic mechanical
framework with key concepts associated with the organic thinking
of Romanticism.
The purpose of this section has been to highlight the idiosyncrasies
in Schlegel’s and Novalis’s writing on the point while, at the same time,
examining ways in which they connect to a tradition of philosophical
inquiry that has struggled with this simple yet elusive concept. To be
sure, the connection between the Romantics and the philosophical
tradition is at times difficult to pin down: Schlegel’s and Novalis’s
narratives of philosophical points seem to harbor their own “dark
places” with reference to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates
on the point. This does not amount to a reinvention of the concept,
however. Rather, Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking takes up several
common problems in the historical debates on the point and reworks
them in ingenious ways. Questions pertaining to the distinction between
mathematical and physical points, the relation of the point to motion,
and the usefulness of the point in the conception and demarcation of
a subject position each have their role to play in Romantic musings on
the point. In particular, there are two scenarios which concretize the
otherwise scattered “philosophy of the point” to which Novalis alludes:
the first is the figure of the trajectory generated by an “inciting” point;
the second is the figure of the mechanical lever. Each of these scenarios
raises—if at times indirectly—the question of individual power, and
each of them can be seen as a response to a potential paradox about the
point’s dual status of being inside and outside at once. For Schlegel,
this leads to the positing of locations of hybridity within the system,

described in terms of doubled historicity and ahistoricity. For Novalis,
the mechanical lever becomes a locus where the individual is effectively
replaced by a balance of forces, an idea that takes the old Archimedean
topos in a new light while at the same time recalling the ambivalence of
the mathematical and the physical point.
Part Three: Pointing toward the Human

We have seen in the first two parts of this chapter how Schlegel and
Novalis integrate the lever into their network of concepts and also how
they grant the hypomochlion or fulcrum point special attention. In this
final section of this chapter, I will show how Schlegel and Novalis connect
the hypomochlion to various aspects of the human. This connection
between the human and the hypomochlion should make more sense
now that examples from German Romanticism’s “philosophy of the
point” have provided the relevant context: for example, Schlegel’s
notion that the mathematical point is also a conceptual beginning point
of a philosophical construction serves as a reminder of how closely
the paths of human intellectual history and the history of nature are
intertwined. What is it, however, that makes the fulcrum so special?
In order to appreciate its unique role, I will refer to just one additional
point by way of comparison. Like the fulcrum, this point exists at the
intersection of mechanical thinking, cultural practices, and, indeed, is
for Schlegel and Novalis connected to concept of life itself. It is the focal
point of geometry and optics.
The optical focus, also known as the “burning point” (Brennpunkt) in
the eighteenth-century German context,92 is in its simplest manifestation
that point where rays of light gather which have been refracted (or
“broken”) by a lens. When Kant proposes, first in the precritical writings
and then again in the Critique of Pure Reason, that there is such a thing
as an imaginary focus which can be used as a reference point for the
joint activity of the reason and understanding, he makes his case by
drawing heavily from optical metaphors.93 The understanding is what
joins the manifold in the object through the use of concepts, and it is the
job of reason to join the manifold of concepts through ideas. When these
92 See, for example, the definition offered in the Physikalisch-Chemisches

Handwörterbuch für Gehlerte und Ungelehrte, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weygandsche
Buchhandlung, 1799): “So nennt man in der Physik den Ort, in welchem die
Brenngläser und Brennspiegel die auf die fallenden Strahlen vereinigen” (380).
Note that the entries in this reference work were compiled from dictionaries by
Gehler’s and Macquer’s.
93 See the Appendix on the “Regulative Use of the Ideas” in the Critique of Pure
Reason.
ideas do not have any basis in possible experience they are described as
transcendental; they cannot provide us direct access to particular objects
through concepts, but they do play an important (even “indispensably
necessary”) role in regulating our faculty of understanding by directing
it toward particular goals. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that
the transcendental ideas
have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use,

namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal
respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at
one point, which, although it is only an idea (focus imaginarius)—
i.e., a point from which the concepts of understanding to not
really proceed, since it lies entirely outside the bounds of possible
experience—nonetheless still serves to obtain for those concepts
the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension. Now of course
it is from this that there arises the deception, as if these lines of
direction were shot out from an object living outside the realm of
possible empirical cognition (just as objects are seen behind the
surface of a mirror).94
Kant describes this illusion as necessary and unavoidable for the

acquisition of knowledge. Transcendental ideas help us direct the aims
of understanding “beyond every given experience” such that it “wants
to take the measure of its greatest possible and uttermost extension.”95
The position of the focal point, in this case, is conceived as beyond
experience, but is integrated into the subject’s cognitive processes.
When German Romanticism takes up the concept of the optical
focus, it also emphasizes the point’s potential to become something
more than a mathematical coordinate. In one fragment, Novalis draws a
connection between light and gravitational force, on the basis that each
has its own focal point. Just as warmth is produced by the gathering of
rays in an optical focus, he writes, so too can energy, action, and life be
the product of a gravitational focus. The German Romantics mine the
metaphorical potential of the focal point as that place where a physical
process occurs: the emergence of heat and even “life” from light—the
emergence of the organic from the inorganic. Novalis’s observation that
“man is a focus of the aether” is a logical extension of this idea.96 Early
German Romanticism does not go so far with the focus as to make it
94 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 591.
95 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 591.
a metaphor for attention,97 but one can observe a certain symmetry:

whereas the focus is permitted to transform from the mathematical to
the physical (and, eventually, to become a metaphor for human activity),
attention, as a psychological process, is decomposed into physical
forces and qualities (diffusion, division, formative power, energy,
extent and even “thickness,” etc.).98 When we look at how Kant and
the German Romantics use the optical point, there are clear differences
to be observed: whereas Kant locates his “focus imaginarius” beyond
experience, yet integrated within the subject’s cognitive activities, the
Romantics allow the focal point to align more directly with man. Despite
these differences, there is also an affinity underlying the Kantian and
Romantic focus which has to do with the way in which they invest it
with a certain ambivalence and allow it to serve as a transitional point,
although the terms of such ambivalence receive different nuances in
each case. For Kant, the focus is an intermediary point between the
unknown and the known, between the empirically inaccessible and the
intellectually imaginable. And for Schlegel and Novalis, whose thinking
relies more heavily on the mechanical theory of the focus, it is also a
point of great potential that heralds the emergence of life from matter.
If we turn back now to the problem of the fulcrum point or
hypomochlion, several differences to the focal point become apparent.
The most obvious has to do with the fact that the fulcrum point,
unlike the focus, is not simply to be understood as a “part,” whether
of the subject or the human individual, but rather comes to stand
in for the whole. Descartes left us with the idea that the one “firm
point” foundational for philosophy is the one we establish by virtue
of the certainty we have in our own cognitive activity. Novalis, who
is attuned to the mathematical and scientific nuances of the point,
has his own understanding of the “pointlike ego” (Punctähnliches Ich),
but he and Schlegel are willing to go even further in their thinking
when it comes to the fulcrum point.99 In no uncertain terms, Schlegel
aligns the hypomochlion directly with the individual when he writes,
“Hypomochlion [is] only symbol, the true is hovering [schwebend]; the
97 One could, however, connect the Romantic thinking about the optical point
to a broader discussion of attention and distraction in the eighteenth century
dominated by the psychology of Christian Wolff and structured around the
concepts of attentio, reflexio, and collatio. John Zammito has commented that
Attentio (“attention”) was the beginning of knowledge in that it discriminated
something from an obscure background, introducing what school-philosophical
language called ‘clarity’” (Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology,
52).
active free human is his own hypomochlion.”100 It is a statement with

strong affinities to the phenomenology of technology that emerges in
the twentieth century. One is reminded, for example, of Don Ihde’s
discussion of embodiment relations, which refer to the “doubled
desire,” as he calls it, for “total transparency and total embodiment”
and “for the technology to truly ‘become me.’”101
That this note is found in close proximity to those from the
Philosophical Fragments where Schlegel writes that every universe has its
own hypomochlion and that the center of every universe is “doubled.”102
It testifies to the fact that the model we are working with here is one
defined by extreme flexibility, rather than rigidity. The equation of the
ego and the fulcrum point has implications that extend from the human
microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. And it bears keeping in
mind that, where mechanical theory is concerned, the hypomochlion
or fulcrum point is the figure of unified duality. In the state of static
equilibrium, it is the point where opposing forces are sublated. This idea
accounts for the above statement that the hypomochlion of the universe
is “doubled,” just as it accounts for Novalis’s blanket statement in The
General Broullion: “The true dividuum is also the true individuum.”103 In
the rest of the chapter, I will give a sense of the far-reaching implications
of the human as hypomochlion in various aspects of Romantic thought.
Implications for the Concept of Agency

What does it mean, precisely, for the individual to be its own
hypomochlion, and to what degree might we connect this idea to the
mechanical theory discussed above where the lever is conceptualized
without rigid arms, simply in terms of force? We are far removed
from those contexts where human strength—whether physical or
intellectual—is augmented through the use of the lever. This scenario,
where the individual is fulcrum and lever at once, is comparable to the
status of the “zero” as described by Rotman, where it exists both as
sign and meta-sign in the numerical system. The Romantics translate
this idea into mechanical terms, so that the human is both instrument
and agent. With his designation of human as hypomochlion, Schlegel
also rewrites the Archimedean fantasy of wielding a mighty lever. For
Schlegel, the freedom of being human is self-sufficiency, that is, the
freedom from being indebted to any external instrument or agency for
100 “Hypomochlion nur Symbol, das wahre ist schwebend; der thätige freie Mensch
ist sein eigenes Hypomochlion” (KFSA 18, 171.560).
101 Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld. From Garden to Earth (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 75.
102 Schlegel, KFSA 18, 171.
the augmentation one’s own power. Far from being a philosophically

conservative maneuver, however, the identification of the individual
with the hypomochlion suggests a state of unlimited potential. The fact
that the status of hypomochlion is granted to the active “free” human
should not be disregarded, because what is implied is a collapse of
two orders that have traditionally been considered in contradistinction
from one another: the concept of freedom, on the one hand, and the
mechanistic determination, on the other. In its sheer punctuality,
Schlegel seems to gift his human-hypomochlion unlimited potential
to increase, expand and develop in any way whatsoever. The removal
of the instrument, along with the internalizing of instrumental agency,
brings things down to a punctual scale where these two orders exist in
perfect ambivalence.
Implications for the Archimedean Point

What happens when the human is equated not only with the
hypomochlion, but also with that most privileged of hypomochlia,
the Archimedean point? It is a question that can be approached from
various angles. The first concerns the concept of freedom which
Schlegel has already marked as essential to the human-hypomochlion
connection. Using Fichte once again as a reference point, we can see
that in his Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Knowledge), the connection
between the human and Archimedean point is articulated within
philosophical thinking about the subject. Fichte, though well aware
of the impracticality—an indeed, impossibility—of ever occupying
the Archimedean point, nevertheless invokes this context in
connection with freedom. He claims that the theoretical construction
of the Archimedean point is an exercise of utmost value for two main
reasons: as an example of the freedom of the mind and in the service
of the argument that there exists no science apart from us. Even as he
introduces the central concept of his treatise, that of a Wissenschaftslehre,
he makes the somewhat anachronistic (though essentially valid) remark
that Archimedes was able to calculate the requirements for a machine
with which to displace the earth from its orbit even with the knowledge
that he would never be able to escape the earth’s gravitational field.104
In other words: the Archimedean point allows the fiction of imagining
a subject position that is distinct from ourselves, however closely we
104 References in this passage are to Fichte’s 1794 essay, “Ueber den Begriff der
Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie,” in Johann Gottlieb
Fichte’s sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. J. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit und Comp, 1845),
29–81; 46. Edgar Landgraf and I also refer to this passage in the introduction
to our collected essays on the Archimedean point. See Holland and Landgraf,
“Introduction,” 55.
are bound to it. For Fichte (and for those twentieth-century thinkers
who, as we saw in the introduction, considered the challenge of
developing “protocols” for scientific language), the freedom of thought
is clearly more important than the acknowledgment that such a project
is theoretically predisposed to fail: theoretical utility outweighs the
practical impossibility. As Edgar Landgraf and I have observed in our
introduction to a collection of essays on the Archimedean point, we
can witness a related example in Early German Romanticism. In his
novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis illustrates the aporetic structure
of the subject position—the theoretical conundrum of observing
oneself, which is essentially the same as recognizing oneself as both
agent and instrument—when Heinrich discovers the book of his own
unfinished life.
Another angle takes a much different perspective, one that
imagines the genesis of the Archimedean point as the emergence
of self-observation:
784. (Basis of Cohesion—of the connection etc. of thoughts—

observation of the thought and procession of images (Bildergang)—
their changes—mixtures etc. Dos me pu sto in the interior—
formation of an observer—of an independent organ—an organ
that specifies all affections relatively—the relations of whose
dimension, motion and production correspond to the similar
relations of the tangents.)105
The phrase dos me pu sto refers to the (apocryphal) words of

Archimedes’s call for firm ground upon which to stand or to rest his
lever. To Schlegel’s equation of the human and hypomochlion—and to
the fundamental aporia of the Romantic subject to be both subject and
object—Novalis adds philosophical detail. In this vision, the fulcrum
point is a locus of connection and cohesion. Its duality derives from
being both the observer and the observed, a nodal point that witnesses
the emergence of self-observation.
Taking a step back, we can see that Schlegel’s and Novalis’s
appropriation of the Archimedean point is far from straightforward.
In their fragments and encyclopedia project, they exhibit a willingness
105 “(Grund der Cohaesion—des Zusammenhangs etc. der Gedancken—

Beobachtung über den Gedanken und Bildergang—ihre Veränderungen—
Vermischungen etc.
Dos me pu sto im Innern—Formation eines Beobachters—eines unabhängigen
Organs—eines Organs das alle Affectionen verhältnißmäßig angiebt—
dessen Dimensions, Bewegungs und Produktionsverhältnisse den ähnlichen
Verhältnissen der Tangenten correspondiren.)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 421.784).
to push the model of human “punctuality” as far as it can go. One

can admire, for example, the hypertrophic Cartesian flair in Novalis’s
assertion that we are “personified, all-powerful points,”106 which goes
far beyond a simple comparison of humans as “pointlike.”107 Schlegel
would likely concur: as humans, we have the ability to recognize
ourselves as the personified trajectories of history, and as the living
blueprints of the world as it has emerged from its point of departure.
Implications for Mental Equilibrium States

As the introduction to this study and the chapter on Kant have shown,
the concept of equilibrium is an indispensable part of the conceptual
apparatus attached to the lever and the fulcrum point, both in
mechanical and extra-mechanical contexts. Schlegel and Novalis also
incorporate equilibrium into their conceptual vocabulary and consider
the compatibility of this mechanical term with intellectual activity. In
Romantic writing on equilibrium, then, we can observe yet another
way in which the conceptual apparatus of the lever participates in the
construction of the human around 1800.
Novalis’s notes and fragments on equilibrium draw from multiple
sources joined by a common interest in applying the language of
mechanical equilibrium to philosophical and poetic contexts. Earlier in
the chapter we have already considered examples from Eschenmayer
and Fichte and Eschenmayer. We saw, in the case of Fichte’s subject
philosophy, that his description of the relationship between the I and
not-I lends itself to comparisons of forces in balance.
In his notes on Fichte, Novalis records the philosopher’s idea of
a “pure ego” (reinen Ich) that brooks neither change nor opposition,
permitting only rest and identity and which only allows for division
with regard to a subject:
The ego is absolutely unity—the subject absolutely divided—

reciprocity of the ego in itself—it wants unity, it wants to be
divided. In the pure ego . . . no change—no opposition—no
continuity—standstill—rest [Ruhe]—identity—With relation to
106 Zur Welt suchen wir den Entwurf—dieser Entwurf sind wir selbst—was sind
wir? personificirte allmächtige Puncte” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 541.74).
107 The perspective underlying Novalis’s idea of the self as point and blueprint of
the world is a relatively modern development that echoes Leibniz’s synthesis
of two philosophical positions according to Michel Serres: whereas for Aristotle
and Descartes the world was a point, and for Pascal and Bruno in every
point there was potentially a world, Leibniz sees “in every real and different
individual, the Universal.” Michel Serres, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles
mathématiques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 739.
the subject its character—activity conditioned by rest [durch Ruhe

bedingte Thätigkeit]—must be a manifold.108
Even the best-known accounts of Fichte’s philosophizing on the subject

and Novalis’s relation to Fichte have tended to downplay the fact that
the language Fichte uses to describe the original unity and division
of the ego is the same that is used to describe mechanical states of
absolute and relative equilibrium.109 The chapter on Kant illustrated
how mechanical concepts of rest and equilibrium played an important
role in his essay on negative magnitudes, where they were used to
describe the activity of the thinking individual in contexts where moral
decisions were made, an idea we had occasion to revisit earlier in this
chapter as well. Now, however, as we explore the various consequences
of the human-hypomochlion connection, we are in a better position
to appreciate Novalis’s unique contribution to this discussion. When
Novalis takes up the concepts of consciousness, equilibrium, and rest,
rather than describing the mechanics of intellectual activity as a simple
conflict of opposing forces, he is more interested in imagining the
environment of the mind where such decisions are made in the first
place. And even though there are numerous references to equilibrium
in Novalis’s work, one aphorism, found in his notes for an encyclopedia
project, stands out above the others:
The temper [Stimmung] of the consciousness—of representation

of every kind is the temper of crystallization, of the formation—
and manifold-making—thus held rest—static force—rationalizing
(equilibrizing) force—proportional force of evolution—a constant
quantity in the shifting alternation (point of rest on the lever).110
108 “Das Ich ist absolut Eins—das Subject absolut getheilt—Wechselwirkung des
Ich in sich selbst—Es will Eins, es will getheilt seyn. Im reinen Ich allein ist
beydes absolut—der Character des Absoluten ist—keine Veränderung—kein
Gegensetzen—kein Fortsetzen—Stillstand—Ruhe—Identität—In Beziehung
aufs Subject muß sein Character—durch Ruhe bedingte Thätigkeit—Ein
Mannichfaltiges seyn” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 133.44).
109 See especially Dieter Henrich, “Fichtes ursprungliches Einsicht” (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klosterman, 1967), translated by D. R. Lachterman as “Fichte’s Original
Insight,” Contemporary German Philosophy 1.9 (1982), and Manfred Frank, The
Philosophical Origins of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-
Zaibert (New York: SUNY Press, 2008).
110 “Die Stimmung d[es] B[ewußt]S[eyns]—des Darstellens aller Art ist die
Stimmung des Krystallisirens, der Bildung—und Vermannichfachung—
also gehaltne Ruhe—statische Kraft—rationalisirende (equilibrirende) Kraft—
proportionlle Evolutionskraft—eine beständige Größe im veränderlichen Wechsel
(Ruhepunkt am Hebel)” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.836).
The tone of the aphorism is much closer to a nature-philosophical

model of the consciousness than it is to Fichte’s discussion of the ego.
Even though it indexes various modes of growth (mineral, organic,
and mathematical), these differences collapse in light of the aphorism’s
essential analogy between representation and relative equilibrium.
We are far from a scenario of absolute equilibrium and very much in a
vibrant, living state of equilibrium where they are allowed to emerge, to
change, and to persist, all the while held in check. In this note, Novalis
has taken his new understanding of the lever as a sheer interplay of
forces without “rigid lines” and combined it with the equation of the
individual with the hypomochlion (or “point of rest”), while at the
same time making clearer than ever that these ideas have something to
contribute to our description of mental processes.
As in the mechanical–theoretical descriptions, the object of the
lever has become almost unnecessary—and even the hypomochlion is
parenthetical—such that in the above quote we are left with a balance of
forces that create a particular Stimmung (which could be thought of as
a “mood” or a “disposition”). The images of rest, of forces in harmony,
or of controlled and balanced mobility, stand in stark contrast to those
cited at the beginning of the chapter in which the point explodes into
geometrical figures of infinite scale, and they also stand in contrast to
the traditional metaphorical usage of the lever that this study distances
itself from. The notion that the hypomochlion acts as a model of
transition between mathematical and mechanical abstractions on the
one hand and the organism on the other, as the aphorism suggests, is also
illuminating with regard to other aphorisms from the same manuscript
where Novalis tests out the lever’s exemplary balance in transitional
moments. A neighboring aphorism, for example, refers to Kielmeyer’s
concept of a balance of compensating forces in the living organism:
“Kielmeyer’s idea about the transition of one force into the other—(of
its successive and simultaneous existence.) (Synthesis of the antique and
modern).”111 And a second aphorism from the same manuscript page
envisions the transition from child to man through designated points
that could chart the change within a greater continuum.112 As fleeting
111 “Kielmeyers Idee vom Übergang einer Kraft in die Andre—(von ihrer
Successiven und Simultanen Existenz.) (Synth[esis] d[er] Antike und Moderne)”
(Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.838). Novalis refers here to Kielmeyer’s theory of a
compensation that maintains a balance of forces in the living organism. The
synthesis of old and new recalls the “dark places” of the philosophical systems
as described by Schlegel.
112 “Inpunctationsmanier der Bezeichnung der Veränderungen des Stätigen. z.B.
Übergang des Kindes zum Manne. Bezeichnung des Übergangs (d[er] Seele,)
mit Puncten” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 432.833).
as these examples are, they show how Novalis integrates the lever
and hypomochlion such that they act indirectly, taking part in a larger
process.113 We can also see that, in general, Novalis distills a particular
rhetorical figure from the mechanics of the lever, the figure of transition
and the preservation of opposites, which already has an established
currency in his scientific and philosophical work as the well-known
phenomena of galvanic chains and the Voltaic pile.
Implications for the Production of Language

The originality in Novalis and Schlegel’s use of the lever and
hypomochlion lies in how they chart new terrain by underscoring their
essential relationship (and even identity) with both the human and
intellectual activity: through the genesis of an organ of self-observation,
in the “temper” of consciousness and, as the next example shows, even
in the formation of language:
The theory of relations belongs to algebra—or the natural history

of quantities.
(The verbs [Verba] are the actual word forces [Wortkräfte]—the
so-called nouns [Substantiva] have emerged from verbs—and
the verbs have emerged from nouns. Motion and rest [Ruhe]—
Variable—constant x. All rest [Ruhe] is figure.)114
There are various points of reference that could be invoked in

order to orient oneself with regard to this aphorism. One could, for
example, refer back to an idea discussed above that Schelling first
articulates in the Ideas and then repeats in the World Soul (a text
also read and noted by Novalis), where he claims that forces of
attraction and repulsion are necessarily in equilibrium in individual
bodies, which is why they keep their form, and that this necessity
is felt only in opposition to the possibility of equilibrium being
destroyed. One could also revisit the passage in the World Soul where
Schelling adds that the only reason we perceive of matter in space
113 The lever therefore belongs to the “indirect tools” of Novalis’s oeuvre and what
has alternately been called his “indirect technique” (Liedtke) and “indirect
construction” (Gaier). See Ralf Liedtke, Das romantische Paradigma der Chemie
(Paderborn: Mentis, 2003); Ulrich Gaier, Krumme Regel (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1970).
114 “Die Lehre v[on] d[en] Verhältnissen gehört in die Algeber—oder die
Naturgeschichte der Größen.
(Die Verbe sind die eigentlichen Wortkräfte—die sog[enannten] Substantiva
sind aus Verben entstanden—und die Verba aus Substantiven entstand[en].
Bewegung und Ruhe—Veränderliche—constante x. Alle Ruhe ist Figur.)”
(Novalis, Schriften 3, 400.691).
is because of its striving for equilibrium: physical bodies are visible

to us because they achieve a relative equilibrium. These ideas help
substantiate Novalis’s understanding of active rest—that is, relative
equilibrium—as figure. The second tradition this aphorism recalls,
if more subtly, is connected to Kant’s use of algebraic notation to
quantify emotions. Both Kant and Novalis use algebraic ideas and
notation to quantify and create relations (in Kant’s case, between
feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and in Novalis’s case, between
words that are not physical objects but are effectively treated as
such). Novalis then takes up both of these ideas from the perspective
of the formation of language. In his vision, words stabilize into
figures: not just rhetorical figures, but actual forms. We can also
observe a certain interplay between the function of nouns and verbs
and their integration into this mode of equilibrium. As suggested by
the German, nouns (Substantive), however abstract they may be, are
rooted in the notion of substance. Verbs, in German (as was the case
in Novalis’s day), are also known as Zeitworte because they express
change and temporality; this aspect is deemphasized by Novalis’s use
of the Latin Verba. Novalis plays with such superficial distinctions,
noting that both verbs and nouns have the ability to transmute, each
into the other, and it is this linguistic phenomenon that underscores
the analogy with mechanical equilibrium as a figure that can join
the material and immaterial. Novalis thereby uses equilibrium to
consider questions of perception not only from the point of view of
consciousness, in the tradition of Fichte, Schelling, or Eschenmayer,
but also from the point of view of a most fundamental poetics, the
emergence and balance of words themselves.115 Such a quantification
of language, as a way of navigating between the world of objects and
the consciousness, also anticipates how Herbart quantifies thoughts
for the purpose of describing equilibrium conditions in the mind.
From the Individual to the Social

The examples from the past few pages have shown how Schlegel’s and
Novalis’s equation of the human and the hypomochlion establishes a
model flexible enough to be transferred to any number of other contexts.
Just as the lever itself is supremely adaptable and able to mediate
and structure relationships of equivalence between the most far-
115 In addition to the two cases discussed above, there are other aphorisms by
Novalis that take up the concept of equilibrium from the point of view of
poetic production: in one case, “wit” [Witz] is defined as both a consequence of
equilibrium’s disruption and as the instrument of its reestablishment (Novalis,
Schriften 2, 424.30); in another case, Novalis refers to a perfect genius (a loose
translation for “eine vollendete, genialische Constitution”) where the inner and
outer senses are in equilibrium (Novalis, Schriften 2, 454.93).
flung concepts, so too does the hypomochlion capture the same spirit
in nuce. And just as we have also seen how the lever is an instrument
of reason that can be useful in scales of magnitude that extend from the
microcosm to the macrocosm, in the concluding pages of this chapter,
I would like to demonstrate that a further implication of the lever’s
structural adaptability is witnessed in Early German Romanticism
when it proves to be not useful for modeling aspects of the social as
well as the individual.
Even as the German Romantics emphasize the self-sufficiency of the
individual as fulcrum, through its very nature of united “dividuality”
they allow for a transition between the individual and the society.
With this thought in mind, one could pursue the relationship between
the mathematical and the physical point even further in the context
of Romantic political thinking. Novalis’s suggestion that we are
“personified, all-powerful points” eventually makes this very transition
from the individual to the political unit of the family when one reads
the same aphorism to the end: “Only insofar as man conducts a happy
marriage with himself—and makes up a beautiful family, is he at all
capable of marriage and family.”116 When he writes about marriage, he
says that this institution is to politics “what the lever is for the theory of
mechanics” and that “the state is comprised not of individual people,
but rather of pairs and societies.”117 For Novalis, then, the basic unit
of the functioning state is not simply the personified point, or the
individual as hypomochlion, but a lever whose two arms connect the
disparate conditions of woman and man. It is striking that the lever in
this description conforms to Novalis’s idea of a balance of forces with
no rigid lines and points. In this model, the relation of the individual
to the machine-state is not simply one of part and whole, which would
be the case of the point-individual who is part of either the greater
mechanical clockwork or an organism. Instead, the disposition of the
pair stands in for the state as a whole, but the pairing of “formed” man
and “unformed” woman suggests that the levers of this particular
mechanism move in a dynamic compensation and transfer of forces.
One could also contextualize this perspective with reference to
Novalis’s view on monarchy as articulated in Faith and Love. There
he writes that monarchy is “a true system, because it is bound to an
116 “Nur insofern der Mensch also mit sich selbst eine glückliche Ehe führt—und
eine schöne Familie ausmacht, ist er überhaupt Ehe und Familienfähig. Act der
Selbstumarmung” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 541.74).
117 “Die Ehe ist für die Politik, was der Hebel für die Maschinenlehre. Der Staat
besteht nicht aus einzelnen Menschen, sondern aus Paaren und Gesellschaften.
Die Stände der Ehe sind die Stände des Staats - Frau und Mann. Die Frau ist der
sog[enannte] ungebildete Theil” (Novalis, Schriften 3, 470.1106).
absolute middle point; to a being, which belongs to humanity, but not

to the state.”118 His description of an “absolute middle point,” which
situates it at the intersection of two orders, captures a similar tension as
the one described in the hypomochlion. Like the zero which is “meta-
sign in relation to the system that generates it,”119 the King, although he
belongs to humanity, “is no citizen of the state, and no state official.”120
In his way, Schlegel also imagines scenarios where the lever concept
as attached to the individual is integrated into social contexts. In his
well-known poetological text, Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation about
Poesy), for example, where a group of friends gathers to discuss various
ideas in a congenial setting, we see the lever mediating differences of
opinion, much as it did in the context of the encyclopedia project’s
conceptual labor. When Ludoviko proposes to put forth his ideas about
whether or not poesie can be taught and learned, Antonio agrees that
this is a worthwhile topic:
Antonio: Let us hear it. I hope we shall find in what you are about
to offer a contrast to Andrea’s “Epochs of Literature.” Thus we
shall be able to use one point of view and one force [eine Ansicht
und eine Kraft] as lever for the others and discuss both the more
freely and incisively, and again return to the greatest problem
whether or not poetry can be taught and learned.121
In this passage, the lever performs two rhetorical functions: it acts as

metaphor for a particular point of view (Ansicht) and offers a model for
118 “Die Monarchie ist deswegen ein ächtes System, weil sie an einen absoluten
Mittelpunct geknüpft ist; an ein Wesen, was zur Menschheit, aber nicht zum
Staat gehört” (Novalis, Schriften 2, 489).
119 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 11. Rotman’s argument is actually much broader: he
shows how the introduction of the zero in mathematical discourse, the initial use
of the vanishing point in perspectival painting, and the invention of imaginary
money are all events of seismic nature for their respective semiotic systems.
Each of these three signs, according to Rotman, has a “natural closure” with
regard to the original system (he gives the example of how the special status of
the zero led to the invention of the algebraic variable that can potentially stand
in for all numbers) (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28–32). This “closure” of the
system within a “meta-sign,” in turn, “accompanies a self-conscious form of
subjectivity” (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 28).
121 “Antonio: Lassen Sie uns hören. Ich hoffe, wir finden in dem was Sie uns geben
wollen, einen Gegensatz für Andrea’s Epochen der Dichtkunst. So können wir
dann eine Ansicht und eine Kraft als Hebel für die andre gebrauchen, und über
beyde desto freyer und eingreifender disputiren, und wieder auf die große
Frage zurückkommen, ob sich Poesie lehren und lernen läßt” (KFSA 2, 311).
social discourse through the image of different perspectives leveraging

one another as the conversation progresses.
Conclusion
The equation of the hypomochlion with the individual has implications
for our understanding of German Romanticism. In the wake of the
mechanistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, and the perception
that Romanticism distances itself both from this philosophy and
from related figures of thought, the incorporation of one of the most
important concepts from mechanics into a model of the subject should
not be underestimated. At the same time, it seems clear that the
presence of the hypomochlion is no real threat to the organic models
that inform Schlegel’s and Novalis’s thinking. Instead, Romantic
system-organs, when examined in terms of their smallest components,
begin to resemble a mechanical assemblage where the fulcrum of the
lever is the figure that defines the smallest possible—and paradoxically
also the largest possible—unit.
This suggests that a more nuanced view is required to understand
precisely how a mechanical concept can be useful when we move
beyond the individual. Perhaps it is the elementary quality of the
hypomochlion as a figure of individual duality that has allowed it
to exist under the radar. Whereas an overt system of multiple levers
would invariably recall older, contested models of the clockwork
universe, a single lever—or even less than that, a single hypomochlion
(and if Novalis has his way, perhaps even less than that: a mere tension
of forces)—allows for mechanical theory to function uncontested in a
less restrictive environment.
Although relations of part and whole are central to Romantic thought,
the hypomochlion possesses a unique mobility. It bridges the conceptual
work of the encyclopedia project and Romantic theories of the subject,
and is equally at home as a model of consciousness, as a description
of the individual, as a conceptual link between concepts drawn from
different disciplines, and as a figure of cosmological reach. As the
embodiment of agency without instrumentality, the hypomochlion is
indebted to a model of the lever built upon pure relationality. Without a
hand to direct it, it becomes organic and self-guiding even as it remains
a figure of unified “dividuality.” In other words, the hypomochlion’s
defining feature is the preservation of a distinction that allows it, with
absolute succinctness, the potential of becoming a system unto itself.
Three The Contested God of
Naturphilosophie
This lever is the god of nature philosophy, and it cannot aspire to

another one.1
Carl von Eschenmayer
Introduction
The previous chapter revealed German nature philosophy
(Naturphilosophie) to be an important—and also surprising—source for
Early German Romanticism’s work on and with the lever, as Schlegel
and Novalis appropriated it as an instrument of reason. Given that the
extent of Friedrich Schelling’s and Carl von Eschenmayer’s engagement
with the lever extends far beyond what we have witnessed thus far, it
would be a mistake to relegate them—or nature philosophy itself—to
the historical background of this study. The purpose of this chapter is
therefore twofold: first, to explore the often-surprising ways in which
Schelling and Eschenmayer integrate the lever into their philosophical
thinking and, secondly, to show that, for all the peculiarities of the
nature-philosophical lever, there are clear connections to be made to
both the Romantic and Kantian levers, connections that once again
implicate the lever in models of the human. Unlike the all-powerful
ego-levers of German Romanticism, however, we will see that there
are limits to how far this connection between the human and the lever
can be pushed from the nature-philosophical point of view. In fact, the
very question of the limits of the lever’s usefulness lies at the heart of a
1 See “Eschenmayer an Schelling. Ein Sendschreiben über dessen Abhandlung:

Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit,”
in Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche, ed. Friedrich Schelling, vol.
1.4 (Nürnberg: Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1813), 38–78, 62.
debate between Schelling and Eschenmayer that will ultimately lead to

its death and, as the following chapter will show, a possible apotheosis.
Before proceeding, I would like to briefly explain what connotations
“nature philosophy” has in the German context for readers who might
be unfamiliar with the term. This task is complicated by the fact that
there was no single understanding of nature philosophy as the term
was used around 1800.2 Much depends on individual philosophers’
mathematical inclinations, on the degree to which they balanced ideas
drawn from the empirical tradition with more speculative thinking,
and on whether or not they accepted the dynamic description of nature
outlined in Kant’s metaphysics. However difficult it may be to provide
a succinct overview,3 there are nonetheless a few basic ideas that will
suffice as background to help underscore the lever’s peculiar role
within this philosophical movement.
One concise formulation of the state of Naturphilosophie just prior to
Schelling’s arrival on the scene can be found in J. S. Beck’s Grundriß der
critischen Philosophie (Outline of the Critical Philosophy) from 1796. In this
text he identifies two strands of Naturphilosophie: the dynamic and the
mechanical.4 Whereas the first strand relies upon “the difference of the
connection of the original forces of expansion and attraction,” that is,
2 One should not think of Naturphilosophie in terms of a single, well-defined

movement, but rather various “nature philosophies” that coexist around 1800,
each with a different emphasis. Or, as Joseph Esposito writes, “In a technical
sense there was no ‘school’ of Naturphilosophie. For one thing, Schelling’s
writings never achieved a final, polished result necessary for use by devoted
followers. Also, Schelling himself moved into other fields, leaving the movement
leaderless. However, there were those to a greater or lesser degree familiar
with Schelling’s work, who accepted the mandate of Naturphilosophie to seek
interrelations among natural phenomena and to eventually bring about a unity
of nature and culture.” Joseph Esposito, Schelling’s Idealism and the Philosophy of
Nature (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Press, 1977), 137.
3 Kenneth L. Caneva likely speaks for many when he writes that defining nature
philosophy is not always “historiographically useful,” although he does
admit that it can be “rendered in terms of a rough set of its principal and most
characteristic concepts and assumptions.” Kenneth L. Caneva, “Physics and
Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance,” Hist. Sci. xxxv (1997): 35.
4 For further information, one can also refer to the entry “Naturphilosophie” in
the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. There one learns that through the
end of the eighteenth century, the philosophy and science of nature—naturalis
philosophia and scientia naturalis—were used interchangeably. At that time,
however, questions arose about the foundation of a study of nature: to what
degree should one base it on speculative, metaphysical claims, on mathematical
premises, and/or on empirical observations?
See Friedrich Kaulbach, “Naturphilosphie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der
Philosophie, vol. 6, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 535–60, 546.
The Contested God of Naturphilosophie 113
the model that forms the basis for Kant’s description of matter, for the
second strand, “the varying figure of the absolutely hard first particles
(atoms) is . . . the principle, from which the specific variation of matter
is derived.”5 With the arrival of Schelling and Eschenmayer, we see not
a rejection of these two models, but rather an attempt, through a project
Schelling refers to as a “speculative physics,” to understand object-
oriented theories of nature as existing within the same continuum as
theories of the ego (a goal which was, in essence, more compatible with
the Kantian understanding of a nature philosophy based on forces of
expansion and contraction). As controversial as it was to suggest that
we see, in the natural world, patterns and structures that mirror those
of the human psyche, Schelling’s embrace of these very ideas also
caused him to be revered—almost literally—by many. One could take
as an example Dr. August Friedrich Hecker, for whom Schelling was
a divine “creator” (Schöpfer) and Schelling’s nature philosophy “the
divinity of the universe . . . far above the common circles of empiricism
and scholastic dust.”6
There will be a reason to return to questions of nature-philosophical
“divinity” at the end of the chapter, although the apotheosis in question
will not be Schelling’s own. For now, it is more useful to supplement
the perceptions of nature philosophy by Schelling’s contemporaries
with more recent perspectives in order to have a sense of how the
kind of nature philosophy associated with the work of Schelling and
Eschenmayer is perceived today. Günter Zöller writes, in mechanical
terms sympathetic to my own study, that Schelling’s philosophy of
nature was “conceived as the systemic counterweight to Kantian-
Fichtean transcendental philosophy and its idealist derivation of nature
from the mind” that preferred the “realist approach of deducing mind
from nature.”7 For all their differences, Schelling and Eschenmayer
shared the belief that the phenomena of the natural world as well as
the laws describing them—such as the law of equilibrium—correlated
to the phenomena of the psyche. In this idea, we can already glimpse a
hint of what is to come where the lever is concerned. According to such
an analogy, it is not a stretch to imagine that those same instruments
that have long championed the rule of human artfulness over nature
could also be applied to the psyche.
5 Jakob Sigismund Beck, Grundriß der critischen Philosophie (Halle: Renger, 1796),
108–09.
6 Dr. August Friederich Hecker, Annalen der gesammten Medicin als Wissenschaft
und als Kunst (Leipzig: C. Salfeld, 1810), 104.
7 Günter Zöller, “Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer,” in Cambridge Companion
to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 208.
It is also helpful to bring to this discussion an idea proposed

by Frederick Beiser, who phrases the chief concern behind nature
philosophy in compatible, if somewhat different terms. Beiser’s
argument has to do with the way the “romantics”—which for him
include Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hegel—confront the perceived
philosophical options available to them in terms of Cartesian dualism
or materialism. Their solution, he argues, was to return to the concept of
matter as living force (vis viva).8 The advantage of this concept was that
it could surmount “the dualism between the subjective and the objective
while still accounting for the differences between them” because one
could now speak in terms of “different degrees of organization and
development of a single, living force.”9 The following pages will make
clear how this powerful idea is intimately connected to their use of the
lever in Schelling’s and Eschenmayer’s writings.
As was the case in the prior chapters, the following reading of the
nature-philosophical lever will also need to move beyond a simple
description of its presence in the writings of Schelling and Eschenmayer
to address the more challenging questions of what the lever is and what
function it serves. This requires close attention to language and rhetorical
figures that goes against the grain of how German nature philosophy
has traditionally been understood. Thomas Broman has assessed some
of the difficulties involved in Schelling’s reception as being divided into
groups that focus either (1) on concepts such as polarity to argue for
the “fruitfulness of some of its doctrines for the later development of
science,” without nature philosophy itself being “taken seriously as a
natural science,” or (2) on nature philosophy as “part of the history of
transcendental idealism in German philosophy and the philosophy of
science.”10 The problem with each of these approaches, he argues, is
that they perceive of the language of Schelling and his followers as a
problem: as something that must be “penetrated” in order to get to the
“doctrines beneath it.”11 He writes that it is
precisely here . . . in the handling of the language of Natur-

philosophie, that I believe historians have gone most seriously
astray. For all its maddening, metaphorical inscrutability, the
language is not something to be “decoded” and thereby swept
8 Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion

to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 32–33.
9 Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” 33.
10 Thomas H. Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine 1750–1820
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 90–91.
11 Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 91.
aside. . . . [Naturphilosophie] redefined the role of language in the

scientific enterprise.12
This point of view is quite compatible with the approach I take as well.
As was the case in the chapter on Kant, where close attention was
paid to his rhetorical choices in the essay on negative magnitudes, in
this chapter I show how the lever is no simple metaphor for Schelling
and Eschenmayer, but rather an instrument of reason in its own right
that operates within a conceptual apparatus that should be familiar
by now.13
Eschenmayer and the Lever of Naturphilosophie

Although Carl Eschenmayer14 is one of the chief proponents of German
nature philosophy, his reception has tended to be overshadowed by
Schelling’s, and he is still largely unknown outside of Germany, where
increasing attention has been paid to his work in recent years.15 One of
the most thorough overviews of Eschemayer’s life is by Walter Wuttke,
who relates that Eschenmayer was born in Neuenbürg in 1768 and
began his philosophical studies in Tübingen in 1783. His father’s death
forced him to abandon these pursuits; at the request of a relative he
moved to Lyon to acquire the necessary skills for becoming a merchant.
The outbreak of the French Revolution once again interrupted his plans,
at which point he transferred first to Stuttgart and then to Tübingen,
where he finished his advanced studies in the faculty of medicine in
1796. From 1797 he worked as a doctor in Kirchheim and Sulz, but in
1811 he was called back to Tübingen to become professor of medicine
12 Broman, Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 91.

13 Jason Wirth’s book, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, expresses a similar idea in
somewhat different terms. According to Wirth, Naturphilosophie is “like doing
philosophy in accordance with nature (not as an elective philosophical topic
. . . ). Not therefore a kind of philosophy, or a topic within philosophy, but
rather a gateway into the originating experience of philosophizing.” See Wirth,
Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (New York: SUNY Press,
2015), 17.
14 For reasons unknown, Eschenmayer’s name has remained an unstable entity
throughout history. His German Wikipedia page lists him as “Carl August von
Eschenmayer (auch: Adolph (Adam) Karl August (von) Eschenmayer)”; the
English page as following: “Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer” (originally
Carl; July 4, 1768–November 17, 1852). In contemporary criticism, one will see
both C. A. Eschenmayer (Beiser) and K. A. Eschenmayer (Snow), along with
other variations.
15 See Cristiana Senigaglia’s recent publication, Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte:
Erlangen 1806 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2016).
and philosophy, a position he held for the next twenty-five years.16

The stations of Eschenmayer’s professional life only provide half the
picture, however. His intellectual interests cannot be summarized as
easily. As is also the case with Schelling, Eschenmayer’s intellectual
pursuits evolved over time and led him in various directions. Jörg
Jantzen characterizes Eschenmayer’s development as one “that
moves in a strangely intricate way between philosophy and practical
medicine, between speculative theology, psychiatry, and spiritism.”17 In
this case, the information provides a sense of the diverse factors that
shaped Eschenmayer’s intellectual trajectory, but it does not answer the
central question of the present study: why does the mechanical lever
accompany Eschenmayer from his influential treatise from 1797, the
Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände
angewandt (Propositions from Nature Metaphysics, Applied to Chemical
and Medicinal Objects), all the way through a treatise on psychology
published some twenty years later?
As a first step toward describing the lever of nature philosophy,
we can consider Eschenmayer’s Propositions, which offers us the first
prolonged look at the lever in this field. Not only does this treatise
attempt, as Durner and others have shown,18 to ground the natural
sciences in dynamic principles, partially as a response to Kant’s
Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science) from 1786, it also offers an unusually
protracted view of nature-philosophical thinking about the lever. It
even understands its own “intellectual burden” in mechanical terms,
such as when Eschenmayer describes in the preface what he hopes to
achieve with his treatise:
16 One can find the above information on pages 258–59 of Walter Wuttke’s
“Materialien zu Leben und Werk Adolf Karl August von Eschenmayers” in
Sudhoffs Archiv 56.3 (1973): 255–96.
17 Jörg Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling. Die Philosohpie in ihrem Übergang
zur Nichtphilosophie,” in Religionsphilosophie und speculative Theologie. Der Streit
um die göttlichen Dinge (1799–1812) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), 74.
18 See Manfred Durner, “Die Naturphilosophie im 18. Jahrhundert und der
naturwissenschaftliche Unterricht in Tübingen: Zu den Quellen von Schellings
Naturphilosophie” in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 73 (1991): 100; Paul
Ziche, Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie
Schellings und Hegels (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1996),
212–16 and 218–20; and Manfred Durner, “Theorien der Chemie,” in
Wissenschaftshistorischer Bericht zu Schellings naturphilosophischen Schriften
1797–1800 in the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, series 1, supplementary volume to
volumes 5–9, ed. Manfred Durner, Francesco Moiso, and Jörg Jantzen (Stuttgart-
Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1994).
As to what completely concerns the achievement of the challenge

itself, it is too big for the half of a human life. If we assume that the
direction of the path which we should take in the natural sciences
is correctly determined for us, but the burden which we should
displace is too big for the forces of an individual, then nothing
remains but the joining of several forces. If several forces are
combined to a total force, then the path, which the burden takes, is
the diagonal line.—If the direction of the diagonal is determined,
then the relation of the angles under which the various forces
work together must also be determined.
In other words, the moments [required], in order to find such a
relation, could be the subject of this text.19
Here, Eschenmayer combines two mechanical ideas: the problem of

individual as opposed to mechanical advantage, and a situation where
multiple forces are applied to a particular object (which was usually
diagrammed as a parallelogram of forces). Eschenmayer modestly
admits that, on his own, he is inadequate for the job of “displacing”
the intellectual burden he has tasked himself with. For that reason, he
writes, his treatise should be read as a fragment (Bruchstük),20 and only
through the combination of his work and that of others will this group
lever be able to displace the load it has taken on. With the addition of
extra forces, however, comes the need for more complex calculations
to see what path (or “diagonal line”—the vector sum of the combined
forces) the burden will follow. This as-of-yet uncalculated path is the
direction projected for Naturphilosophie in the years to come.
To organize his thinking, Eschenmayer divides his treatise into
propositions relating to chemistry, mechanics, and pathology. The
most significant statements on the lever occur, as one would expect,
19 Was vollends das Leisten der Forderung selbst betrifft, so ist sie für die Hälfte
eines Menschenlebens zu groß. Gesezt, die Richtung des Wegs, den wir in der
Naturwissenschaft nehmen sollen, seye uns von der Philosophie aus richtig
bestimmt, aber die Last, die wir fortwälzen sollen, für die Kräfte eines einzeln zu
groß, so bleibt nichts übrig, als die Vereinigung mehrerer Kräfte. Wenn mehrere
Kräfte zu einer Totalkraft zusammengesetzt werden, so ist der Weg, den die
Last nimmt, die Diagonallinie.—Ist nun die Richtung der Diagonale bestimmt,
so muß auch das Verhältniß der Winkel, unter denen die verschiedene [sic]
Kräfte zusammenwirken, bestimmt seyn. Etwa die Momente, um ein solches
Verhältniß zu finden, könnte der Gegenstand dieser Schrift seyn” (Eschenmayer,
Säze, vi). I include most of the German quotations for Eschenmayer in this
chapter, since there is neither an English translation nor an updated German
edition.
20 Eschenmayer, Säze, vi.
in the section on mechanics, but equilibrium, which previous chapters

have shown be an integral part of the lever’s “conceptual apparatus,”
is a constant theme throughout. Eschenmayer also makes a case in
the preface for the exemplarity of the lever as defined by its ability
to transcend simple categorical definitions. Citing the concept of
irritability (Reizbarkeit), one of the central phenomena in the discussion
of organic life around 1800,21 he suggests that the reason why this
concept was even introduced in the first place was because of the
perceived difficulty in bringing animal motion under the same laws
as the mechanical ones found in the theory of the lever: “One does
not consider,” he writes, “that these laws are themselves applied and
stand under the condition of even higher laws, which metaphysics
demonstrates.”22 Eschenmayer then proceeds to explain the lever’s law
of equilibrium, first in terms of the equivalence of two quantities of
motion (Bewegungsgrößen) composed of mass and velocity, and then in
terms of force and mechanical moments.23 Eschenmayer demonstrates
to his readers the remarkable adaptability of the lever and its ability to
bring different concepts (such as mass and velocity, or spatial distance
and force) into relationships of equivalence.
The section in Eschenmayer’s treatise devoted to chemical
propositions—simply titled “something for chemistry”—introduces a
fundamental idea that will prove central to his discussion of the lever
in the following section on mechanics. The “something” Eschenmayer
has in mind for chemistry is to strengthen its connection to dynamics,
beginning with the basic idea that “the existence of matter can be
thought simply through the assumption of two original forces—these
forces are the forces of attraction and repulsion.”24 This idea is central
to Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy, and Jörg Jentzen and others have
discussed how both he and Schelling understood all materials of nature
as the quantified modification of these forces, extending over a scale
21 For a quick overview of the competing perspectives and suggestions for

further reading, see the entry on Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland in The
Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F.
Klemme and Manfred Kuehn (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 362–65.
22 “Man bedenkt nicht, daß diese Geseze selbst angewandte sind, und unter der
Bedingung noch höherer Geseze stehen, die die Naturmetaphysik darlegt”
(Eschenmayer, Säze, xiii).
23 See Eschenmayer, Säze, xiii–xv.
24 “Die Dynamik belehrt uns, daß sich die Existenz der Materie blos unter der
Annahme der Konkurrenz zweyer ursprünglichen Kräfte denken lasse – diese
Kräfte sind die Attractions- und Repulsionskraft” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 2).
that reaches from 1/∞ (a maximum limit for the force of attraction) to ∞
(a maximum limit for the force of repulsion).25
Without suggesting that we reduce the concept of matter to force,
Eschenmayer encourages us to think of matter in terms of degrees, such
that “a degree of matter” would be “a quantity of the relationship in
which the forces of attraction and repulsion stand toward each other.”26
The various possible ratios of these two forces, quantified onto a scale,
would then correlate to all the different materials in existence.27
To illustrate his point, Eschenmayer provides his readers with this
diagram:
Figure 3.1 Scale depicting various “degrees of matter,” based on the

respective ratios of positive and negative forces.
Source: Eschenmayer, Propositions, 12. Year: 1797.
In the diagram, A = the force of attraction and B = the force of
repulsion.28 Each member of the series represents a different quantitative
possibility that, in turn, corresponds ideally to a different material
found in nature. Jörg Jantzen has traced the ideas represented in this
diagram back to a dispute between Eschenmayer and Schelling on the
construction of “qualities.” He connects Schelling’s Kantian-influenced
understanding of qualities as “various modifications of the basic forces
25 See Jantzen, Naturphilosophie nach Schelling, 155. Jentzen refers to Schelling’s 1797
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, where Schelling writes that “alle Qualitäten”
are to be observed “nur als verschiedne Modifikationen und Verhältnisse der
Grundkräfte.” Jentzen accidentally omits the words “und Verhältnisse” from
his quote, but for our purposes they are of the utmost importance: it is precisely
the notion of ratio and relation that lays the groundwork for a productive
comparison with the lever.
26 “Qualitäten der Materie sind daher Grade und ein Grad Materie ist irgend
ein Grössenverhältniß, in welchem die Attraction und Repulsion zu einander
stehen” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 37).
27 See also the letter from Eschenmayer to Schelling written in Kirchheim, July
21, 1801, in Aus Schellings Leben, vol. 1, 1775–1803, ed. Gustav Leopold Plitt
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869), 336–43.
28 In Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie Schelling
und Hegels, Paul Ziche shows how the concept of “line” is used to model
the concepts of identity and difference for both Schelling and Hegel (Ziche,
Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle, 200). In particular, he describes
how the “line of cohesion” (Kohäsionslinie) in Schelling’s work was applied to
both the magnet and the mechanical lever. Ziche does not refer to Eschenmayer
in this context.
[i.e., of attraction and repulsion J.H.]” to Eschenmayer’s diagram,

which is, according to Jantzen, an attempt to encompass Schelling’s
idea “through a kind of mathematical progression, which in particular
expresses gradation.”29 Jantzen also reminds us that, already in the
Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Draft of a System
of Nature Philosophy) from 1799, Schelling expressed his dissatisfaction
with mathematical representation of quality.30
Eschenmayer has no such qualms, however: even in his later
work, he will continue to use quantitative thinking, no matter how
speculative the context. Returning now to the Propositions, we can see
that Eschenmayer keeps the ideas underlying this diagram as well as
other quantitative figures as a point of reference, even as he shifts his
focus from chemical to mechanical propositions:
If it is the business of dynamics to develop the concept of matter

with regard to the category of quality, and if the application of
those propositions to chemistry showed us that this science has to
do with degrees of reality, then it is left to the business of mechanics
to demonstrate these degrees of reality in relation to one another
in order, where possible, to find the laws of their equilibrium.31
Chemical affinity, then, should be understood as the process through

which matter, in its qualitative relations (as expressed by the diagram
above), strives for equilibrium. According to Eschenmayer, the laws
of mechanics can be applied to this same theory when we understand
mechanical equilibrium as the opposition of two “degrees of reality.”32
To clarify this idea, he takes recourse to the lever:
Here one only refers to a relative equilibrium, in which the effects

of two forces are not cancelled, but rather thought of as equal.
An absolute equilibrium exists where two forces are completely
cancelled, so that they no longer remain an object for mathematical
construction or for analysis. Symbolically, we can conceive of an
absolute equilibrium on the lever. As long as force [Kraft] and
burden [Last] are somehow distributed on the arms of the lever,
29 Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling,” 74–75.

30 Jantzen, “Eschenmayer und Schelling,” 76.
31 “Wenn es das Geschäfte der Dynamik ist, den Begriff der Materie in Rücksicht
auf die Kategorie der Qualität zu entwickeln, und die Anwendung jener Säze
auf Chemie uns zeigte, daß diese Wissenschaft es mit den Graden der Realität
zu thun hat, so bleibt jetzt noch das Geschäfte der Mechanik übrig, diese Grade
der Realität in Relation zu einander darzulegen” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 21).
32 Eschenmayer, Säze, 22.
a calculation of the magnitude of motion also takes place, but

if I think of force and burden joined in the hypomochlion, then
the magnitude of motion = 0. This is the absolute mechanical
equilibrium, which is no longer an object for the mathematician.33
Given that the lever and the concept of equilibrium are able to act as
a conceptual bridge between the fields of chemistry and mechanics, it
is difficult to overemphasize the centrality of the lever and its law of
equilibrium to Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical thinking.34 Even
concepts which, at first glance, would seem to have little to do with the
mechanical theory of the lever are drawn into its orbit. For example,
when Eschenmayer thinks about the balance of attractive and repulsive
forces in various materials, he transposes these concepts to the relation
of elasticity (which increases in relation to the force of repulsion) and
mass (which increases in relation to the force of attraction): “Thus
a material of single mass and double elasticity would maintain
equilibrium with a material of doubled mass and single electricity.”35
He then makes his comparison more explicit: “Since elasticity behaves
precisely as velocity did in the above proposition, from which the
law of the lever was derived, both of them must therefore be able to
be returned to one another, and to deliver the same results in their
application to mechanical or dynamic quantities.”36 To drive the point
home, Eschenmayer introduces the example of water temperature.
33 “Es ist hier aber nur von einem relative Gleichgewicht die Rede, in welchem
die Wirkungen zweier Kräfte nicht als aufgehoben, sondern nur einander
gleich gedacht werden. Ein absolutes Gleichgewicht ist da, wo zwei Kräfte
ihre Wirkungen ganz aufheben, so daß sie weder für die mathematische
Konstruktion noch für die Analysis der Erfahrung ein Gegenstand mehr sind.
Wir können uns symbolische Weise ein absolutes Gleichgewicht am Hebel
denken. So lange Kraft und Last auf irgend eine Weise an den Aermen des
Hebels vertheilt sind, so findet auch eine Berechnung der Grösse der Bewegung
statt, so wie ich aber Kraft und Last im Hypomochlion vereinigt denke, so ist
die Grösse der Bewegung = 0. Diß ist das absolute mechanische Gleichgewicht,
das für den Mathematiker kein Gegenstand mehr ist” (Eschenmayer, Säze,
22–23).
34 Ziche has also noted that Eschenmayer turns often to the lever in his discussion
of chemical and magnetic phenomena and that it has achieved “the role of a
general illustration of the eschenmayerian method of construction” (Ziche,
Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle, 214).
35 “Es wird daher eine Materie von einzeler [sic] Masse und doppelter Elastizität
mit einer Materie von doppelter Masse und einzeler [sic] Elastizität das
Gleichgewicht halten” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 24).
36 “Da sich die Elastizität eben so verhält, wie in dem obigen Saz [sic], aus welchem
das Gesez des Hebels abgeleitet wurde, die Geschwindigkeit, so müssen
sich beide auf einander zurükbringen lassen, und in ihrer Anwendung auf
“Every temperature of water between its boiling point and freezing

point can be understood as having emerged from two different
temperatures, of which the one is larger, the other smaller, than the
middle temperature.”37 Because every temperature can be understood
as a composite of the weight of the water and the “degree of elasticity
of the warmth,” it can therefore, “according to the analogy with the
lever, be called a quantity of motion, and the middle temperature can
be seen as a common hypomochlion, against which two such quantities
of motion are working.”38 If one recalls the proposition associated
with the mechanical lever that says in the case of equal weights and
velocities that the distance from the fulcrum point must also be the
same, then, Eschenmayer argues, it must also be true that in the case of
equal masses of water, the negative and positive degrees of elasticity
are also in equilibrium: “Thus the mechanical law of the lever can be
applied precisely to dynamic quantities.”39 Here, too, Eschenmayer
provides another diagram to illustrate his point:
Figure 3.2 Scale depicting equilibrium in terms of temperature.

Source: Eschenmayer, Propositions, 27. Year: 1797.
On the left of the diagram, one can imagine a quantity equivalent to

two quarts of water at 32 degrees (the freezing point). On the right, there
mechanische oder dynamische Grössen gleiche Resultate liefern” (Eschenmayer,

Säze, 25).
37 Eschenmayer, Säze.
38 “Jede Temperatur ist zusammengesetzt aus dem Gewicht des Wassers und
aus dem Elastizitätsgrad der Wäreme und kann daher nach Analogie mit dem
Hebel eine Bewegungsgrösse genannt werden, und die Mitteltemperatur kann
als ein gemeinschaftliches Hypomochlion angesehen werden, gegen welches
zwei solche Bewegungsgrössen hinwirken” (Eschenmayer, Säze).
is one quart of water at 212 degrees (the boiling point). The numerical
average of 32 and 212 is 122, but the diagram illustrates how, when
these two quantities of water are mixed, then, according to the law of
the lever, because of the difference in volume, the middle temperature
will actually be 92, which is where the fulcrum point is marked on
the diagram.
What, then, can we learn from Eschenmayer’s levers? We could
begin with the simple observation that, to judge from the Propositions,
Eschenmayer is more willing to use diagrams than Schlegel and
Novalis were. At the same time, it is important to ask what, exactly,
the diagram is supposed to represent. Eschenmayer’s diagrams do not
depict a particular object or piece of laboratory equipment. Instead,
the diagrams visualize a philosophical idea as well as a theoretical
outcome. That means they also have a heuristic function akin to the
tendency of Blumenberg’s absolute metaphors to act as a “model” and
“point of orientation” that guides our thinking and “gives structure to a
world.”40 Once the basic law of the lever is understood, one can apply it
even in contexts where one would not usually think to apply it (such as
water temperature). According to Eschenmayer’s Propositions, the lever
functions as an instrument of reason when we can use it to develop
and visualize particular intuitions we might have about physical
processes and then verify whether or not these intuitions are correct.
Eschenmayer’s comments about the lever can also be understood
within a broader tendency toward simplification: analogical thinking is
economical when the same observations or intuitions can be reapplied
productively in different contexts. The quantification of nature and
natural processes is important in this regard, and Eschenmayer writes
that it is “an essential advantage of the dynamic way of looking at
things that it excludes the multiplicity of specifically different materials
and views the entire manifold of nature in terms of degrees.”41
Certainly, the figure of the mechanical lever retains its usefulness in
the context of dynamical philosophy—perhaps more than Eschenmayer
is even aware of. He continues, “Indeed, hereupon rests the place of
mediation [Vermittlungsort], in which the most contradictory opinions of
the physicists can be compared as well as the propositions of metaphysics
for all possible hypotheses, which the investigator of nature desires to
establish.”42 According to the theoretical scenario described, could one
40 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 22.

41 “Es ist ein wesentlicher Vortheil der dynamischen Vorstellungsart, daß sie
die Multiplicität specifisch verschiedener Materien ausschliesset, und alle
Mannigfaltigkeit der Natur als Grade ansieht” (Eschenmayer, Säze, 44).
not think of this “place of mediation” as a hypomochlion that balances

various intellectual “forces,” such as physics and metaphysics? If so,
then it would seem that the model of the lever is even more deeply
entwined in Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical thinking than one
would have suspected at first glance: even as we investigate the levers
of nature philosophy in the next few pages, it bears keeping in mind
that, for Eschenmayer at least, the lever acts as one of the governing
structural ideas of nature philosophy itself. Indeed, the fundamental
notion connecting physics to metaphysics seems deeply indebted to the
mechanics of the lever.
To understand the full extent of Eschenmayer’s investment in
the lever—and to see that his thinking about its usefulness extends
beyond the Propositions—requires a brief look into his second major
publication, devoted to magnetic phenomena: the Versuch die Geseze
magnetischer Erscheinungen aus Säzen der Naturmetaphysik mithin a priori
zu entwikeln (Attempt to Develop the Laws of Magnetic Phenomena A Priori
from Propositions from Nature Metaphysics), from 1798. From our present-
day perspective, it might seem peculiar to think about magnets and
levers in relation to one another but, as we already observed in the
Propositions, Eschenmayer is committed to his belief that mechanical
phenomena obey “higher” metaphysical laws and that one way of
showing this is by rethinking them in terms of the key concepts of
attraction and repulsion. The strength of this analogy is what carries the
lever to prominence in the Laws, and it is reinforced when Eschenmayer
writes, “Dynamics had proven that if those two forces bind themselves
on one and the same location . . . intuition would remain empty. For
the dynamic concept of absolute connection, mechanics now posits
the concept of an absolute equilibrium.”43 He repeats several of the
same ideas from the Propositions, sometimes verbatim (among others:
that “absolute dynamic equilibrium” can be expressed mechanically
in terms of equal mechanical moments on the lever, which will then
find itself in a state of rest).44 When he refers to the lever’s usefulness,
however, Eschenmayer lingers on one word in particular: that we use
the lever to make things anschaulicher.
Readers familiar with the German intellectual tradition will already
be aware that the word Anschauung, often translated as “intuition,” has
43 “Die Dynamik hätte erwiesen, daß wenn jene beide Kräfte sich an einem
und ebendemselben Ort binden . . . die Anschauung leer bleibe. Für den
dynamischen Begrif absoluter Bindung sezt nun die Mechanik den Begrif eines
absoluten Gleichgewichts” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 73).
44 Eschenmayer, Geseze, 73–74.
a long history in German philosophy.45 It is frequently associated with

the work of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between empirical
intuitions (sense impressions) and the “pure” intuitions of space and
time. In more common usage, its most basic definition is to regard
something: either in the physiological sense of a looking at an object
that sits before us on the table or in the intellectual sense of observing
something with the “eyes of the mind,” as Goethe would say.46
Eschenmayer uses it in the latter sense, but the phrasing of his examples
suggests that he is still sensible of how the object of the lever operates
within a physical environment, in experimental settings: “We have a
relative, dynamic equilibrium in experience on positive and negative
electricity when they are separate from one another, and in experience
we have a relative, mechanical equilibrium clearly on the lever, as soon
as force and burden lie beyond the hypomochlion.”47
In the Propositions, we observed how Eschenmayer uses the
correspondence between dynamic and mechanical equilibrium to
rephrase the inverse relationship of mass and velocity in terms of
density and elasticity. Eschenmayer rehearses these arguments in
the Laws and adds, “At least this agreement gives us the advantage
that we can represent the propositions for dynamic quantities
more visibly [anschaulicher] on the lever.”48 Just as a physical lever
gives a “mechanical advantage” over the object to be displaced by
augmenting our natural physical strength, a conceptual lever provides
an “intellectual advantage” by making something more apparent or
easier to understand that was not fully clear to us before. Eschenmayer
uses his conceptual lever to develop his thinking even further by
applying the same logic to magnetic phenomena. Of interest is not that
Eschenmayer does this in the first place—after all, it is part and parcel
of the nature-philosophical spirit to see a congruence between various
kinds of physical phenomena—but rather how he does it. He begins
45 For an introduction that focuses on the particular problematic of Anschauung,

evidence, and the construction of knowledge, see Sibylle Peters and Martin
Schäfer, “Intellektuelle Anschauung”: Figurationen von Evidenz zwischen Kunst und
Wissen (Berlin: transcript Verlag, 2004).
46 See Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes,’” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75.1 (2001).
47 “Ein relatives dynamisches Gleichgewicht haben wir in der Erfahrung an
der + und – Elektrizität, wenn sie ausserhalb einander sind, ein relatives
mechanisches Gleichgewicht haben wir in der Erfahrung deutlich am Hebel,
sobald Kraft und Last ausserhalb dem Hypomochlion liegen” (Eschenmayer,
Geseze, 80).
48 “Diese Uebereinstimmung gibt uns wenigstens den Vortheil, daß wir die Säze
für dynamische Grössen öfters anschaulicher am Hebel darstellen können”
(Eschenmayer, Geseze, 82).
by conjuring once again the row +nillustrated

-n
in the first of the diagrams
above, which reached from A.B. to A.B. Eschenmayer adjusts the
terms, however, replacing the “AB” terms in cases where n = ∞ to n = 1
with p.M. (“positive magnetism”) and the “AB” terms in cases where
n = −1 to −∞ with n.M. (“negative magnetism”). He then describes the
conditions under which absolute equilibrium would be understood
on the magnet. As with the case of absolute rest on the lever, the net
“sense” or “perception” (Empfindung) equals zero. In the case of a
disruption, however, the two magnetic forces will enter a relation of
relative equilibrium:
The main conditions of a relative equilibrium for dynamic

quantities, however, are that, just as on one side elasticity
increases, on the other the density would have to increase, just as
on the lever, where on one side the velocity increases, just as mass
on the other; should this also apply to the magnet, then it too must
have two sides like the lever, where for both of these dynamic
quantities an equally large field of play [Spielraum] is found, so
too with the magnet, the positive row must go over through zero
into the negative row, and from this follows that which also takes
place on the lever, that elasticity and thickness must grow in equal
relation with the distance from the hypomochlion or zero point.49
Phrases such as “just like on the lever,” “if this should also apply to
the magnet, then like the lever, it too ” and “from there follows, what
also occurs on the lever” reinforce the idea that the lever serves as
an instrument of reason, a heuristic tool for understanding diverse
natural phenomena. These expressions also testify to the lever’s
versatility. Once the initial congruence between mechanical and
magnetic equilibrium has been established, the lever is able to generate
expectations and confirm observations. The connection between levers
and magnets might strike present-day readers as strange, given that
for Eschenmayer there is little difference between the two, regarding
49 Die Hauptbedingungen aber eines relative Gleichgewichts für dynamische

Grössen sind, daß so wie auf einer Seite die Elasticität zunimmt, auf der andern
die Dichtigkeit wachsen müsse, gerade wie am Hebel, wo auf einer Seite die
Geschwindigkeit eben so wächst, wie auf der andern die Masse; soll diß auch
für den Magnet gelten, so muß er auch wie der Hebel zwei Seiten haben, wo für
diese beide dynamische Grössen ein gleich grosser Spielraum statt findet, auch
bei ihm muß die positive Reihe durch die Null in die Negative übergehen, und
daraus folgt, was auch beim Hebel statt findet, daß Elastizität und Dichtigkeit
in gleichem Verhältniß mit der Entfernung vom Hypomochlion oder Nullpunkt
wachsen müssen” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 84).
both their physical properties and their visualization. In each case,

he imagines two interacting forces mapped into a spatial diagram
whose chief coordinates are two endpoints and a central point, be it
hypomochlion or “zero point.” It is worth noting that Eschenmeyer
does not provide overly specific diagrams either of levers or of magnets:
their theoretical compatibility conforms completely to an abstraction
based on a kind of diagrammatic minimalism.
As for the diagrams that already exist, such as the line of gradation
that quantifies the various qualities of matter, Eschenmayer is willing
to reinterpret those in the context of magnetic phenomena as well. If, he
writes, we imagine the distance from the hypomochlion to be “d,” then the
transition from positive to negative magnetism on a magnet would look
like this (where “P” = positive magnetism and “N” = negative magnetism):
Figure 3.3 Scale depicting various ratios of positive and negative

magnetism.
Source: Eschenmayer, Laws, 85. Year: 1798.
Eschenmayer acknowledges that there are two possible paths to take
when discussing the most important observations and experiments on
the magnet: either one begins from the point of view of cases conceived
a priori in order to generate a set of predictions about how the magnet
would behave in various circumstances, or one can begin on the basis
of empirical observation and then strive for a theoretical explanation.
Perhaps more for convenience than out of philosophical conviction,
Eschenmayer opts for the latter, but it is a decision with which he seems
to be not entirely comfortable. After discussing three different scenarios,
he again raises the topic, and the lever is the instrument of choice to
help resolve the conflict: “In order to follow this explanation step by
step and to make it clearer in the visualization [in der Anschauung], I
choose the lever.”50 Eschenmayer then proceeds—step by step—to
revisit the conditions under which one can describe the absolute and
relative equilibrium of magnetic phenomena. There is, however, a limit
to how well the lever can serve Eschenmayer, and he reaches this limit
50 “Um dieser Erklärung Schritt für Schritt zu folgen, und sie in der Anschauung
deutlicher zu machen, wähle ich den Hebel” (Eschenmayer, Geseze, 100).
when he attempts to account for the two points of indifference on a

magnet. There is no equivalent of a lever with two hypomochlia: it is a
“circumstance which cannot be illustrated at all on the lever, which is
why this image only partially fulfills the demand of visualization [die
Erforderniß der Anschaulichkeit]”.51
That the lever is mentioned even in cases where it is no longer of great
use testifies to the degree to which it is ingrained in nature-philosophical
thinking, but it is also remarkable how, in the very act of defining the
lever’s limits, Eschenmayer makes one of the clearest programmatic
statements about why philosophers use it: because it enables them
to respond to the “demand of visualization.” Such a statement also
offers a reason for the lever’s longevity in philosophical thinking: there
is a need to preserve a relatively simple model, one which acts as a
philosophical firm point, or fulcrum point, even (or perhaps: above all)
in times of rapidly growing complexity. There will be cause to return to
this idea in the discussion of Schelling. As for Eschenmayer, in the years
following the publication of his two nature-philosophical treatises, he
directs his attention away from the lever to focus on a variety of other
concerns, including his medical practice, his political pursuits, and
the investigation of animal magnetism. In fact, the lever makes only
two other significant appearances in Eschenmayer’s writing: in an
argument with Schelling that erupts in their correspondence, and in the
publication of the Psychologie in drei Theilen (Psychology in Three Parts)
of 1817. These two additional appropriations of the lever will have a
significant role to play in this chapter and the next.
Schelling and the Construction of the Ego

The examples taken from Eschenmayer’s Propositions (1797) and
Laws (1798) illustrate how his knowledge of mechanics and physical
law allowed him to use the lever heuristically, as an instrument of
reason, and as a “model” toward which he could orient himself. We
also observed how, for Eschenmayer, the lever facilitated connections
between various physical phenomena not usually associated with one
another, much as it did in the Romantic fragments and notes connected
to their encyclopedia project. What still remains to be established is the
connection between the lever and the ego such as we observed in the
51 “diß ist aber ein Umstand, der am Hebel gar nicht darstellbar ist, weswegen
dieses Bild die Erforderniß der Anschaulichkeit nur zum Theil erfüllt”
(Eschenmayer, Geseze, 112). Paul Ziche discusses a similar case in the context of
the general deduction in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism He notes
that for all that the magnet has two points of indifference, “Schelling’s image
of the magnet does not distinguish itself from the image of the lever” (Ziche,
Mathematische Modelle, 202).
context of German Romanticism. This is where Schelling’s early work,

from between 1797 and 1801, has an important role to play. In these
writings, Schelling encourages us to think about the “human” in terms
of the lever, much as Schlegel and Novalis do. In order to understand
the lever of Schelling’s philosophy, however, we first need to approach
it via the concept of equilibrium.
In the introduction to his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for
a Philosophy of Nature) from 1797, Schelling writes that philosophy is an
act whereby we free ourselves from the “bonds of nature.”52 To do so,
we must put ourselves into a state of contradiction with the external
world.53 Initially, we exist in a state of “absolute equilibrium” of forces
and consciousness. This state of equilibrium can, through an exercise of
intellectual freedom, be removed—and freely reinstated. This freedom
is the freedom to speculate, and for Schelling, that means to differentiate
between intuition (Anschauung) and its object (Gegenstand), between
concept (Begriff) and the image (Bild) one has of it:
He who first attended to the fact that he could distinguish himself

from external things, and therewith his ideas from the objects, and
conversely, the latter from the former, was the first philosopher.
He first interrupted the mechanics of his thinking [and] upset
the equilibrium of consciousness, in which subject and object are
most intimately united.54
Schelling constructs this concise narrative to relate how we, as

thinkers, become conscious of ourselves and of the world by learning
to distinguish ideas from objects. He describes this process in terms
of the replacement of “absolute equilibrium” with a series of relative
equilibrium states. According to this logic, once the first distinction
between object and representation has been made—once their
original identity has been replaced by a relationship of equivalence—
equilibrium as metaphor is in play. With this idea, Schelling links the
concept of equilibrium inextricably to the physical or material origin
of abstract thought. In anticipation of Nietzsche, he also reminds us
of the metaphorical structure of language itself. Equilibrium therefore
52 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, ed.
Manfred Durner and Walter Schieche (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-
holzboog, 2001), 70.
53 “Sobald der Mensch sich selbst mit der äußern Welt in Widerspruch setzt . . . ist
der erste Schritt zur Philosophie geschehen” (Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie
der Natur, 71).
54 Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and
Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Reprint 1995), 12.
hinges upon the ability to negotiate even the most radical differences
of the material and the nonmaterial. The ease with which equilibrium
can construct relationships between disparate things is worthy of more
attention in the context of Schelling’s nature philosophy, where ideas
from the natural sciences are reworked in innovative ways. In these
writings, he is attuned to the problem of equilibrium in the context of
a wide range of phenomena related to physiology, electricity, and heat,
and here too, we can observe a clear affinity to the conceptual “work”
accomplished by the lever of Romanticism. The chapter on Kant showed
how the beginning of the “Negative Magnitudes” essay set the stage for
the arrival of the lever: long before it actually appeared on the scene,
its conceptual apparatus was already in place. A similar argument can
be made with regard to Schelling. Once he frames a relationship of two
dissimilar things—objects and ideas—in terms of equilibrium, we are
only one step away from the work of the lever itself, which has proven
time and again to be the instrument that brings disparate objects into an
unexpected rapport.
The first overt connection between the lever and the ego in Schelling’s
philosophy appears three years after the publication of the Ideas, in his
System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism).55
This treatise describes the emergence of the ego’s self-awareness, and
one of the questions Schelling poses to himself is how the ego comes to
perceive of itself as limited or determined. His preliminary answer is
that “inasmuch as the opposing activities of self-consciousness merge in
a third, there arises a common product of them both.”56 As he elaborates
this idea, he takes advantage of the logic of the lever.
Schelling’s reasoning will be easier to follow if we keep in mind that,
for him, the ego exists in a state of “rest” and (relative) “equilibrium to
which the two [opposing infinite activities, J.H.] reduce one another,
and whose continuance is conditioned by the persistent rivalry between
55 Originally published as Friedrich Schelling, System des transcendentalen

Idealismus (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1800). German quotes refer to the System des
transscendentalen Idealismus in the Historische-kritische Ausgabe, Werke 9.1, ed.
Harald Korten and Paul Ziche (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog,
2005).
56 Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 51. “Indem die
entgegengesetzten Thätigkeiten des Selbstbewusstseyns sich in einer dritten
durchdringen, entsteht ein Gemeinschaftliches aus beyden” (Schelling, System
des transcendentalen Idealismus, 92). I include the German translation, because
of the importance of this quote: it lays the groundwork for the following
comparison with the mechanical lever.
the two.”57 Everything that we think of as sheer matter is, according to

Schelling, merely “the expression of an equilibrium between opposing
activities that mutually reduce themselves to a mere substrate of
activity.”58 This is the dynamic view of nature, one which takes as its
point of departure an understanding of matter as existing through the
interplay of the two opposed forces of attraction and repulsion. Schelling
chooses to linger a bit longer, however, on the notion of a “substrate”:
(Compare the lever, for example; the two weights merely act
upon the fulcrum, which is thus the common substrate of their
activity.)—This substrate, moreover, does not arise voluntarily,
as it were, through free production but completely involuntarily,
by means of a third activity, which is no less necessary than the
identity of self-consciousness.59
To understand what is so peculiar about Schelling’s use of the term

“substrate” with regard to the lever in this context requires a bit of
digging into its eighteenth-century background. The first reference point
is the closest to home: Substrat is an important term in Eschenmayer’s
Propositions. When he posits that AB = M, he emphasizes that this
formula does not represent a degree, but rather emphasizes the unity
of a substrate that is “capable of gradation.”60 Around 1800, we also
57 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. Schelling writes that the situation
of the ego can be described as “ein Gleichgewicht, auf das sie sich wechselseitig
reduciren, und dessen Fortdauer durch die fortdaurende Concurrenz beyder
Thätigkeiten bedingt ist” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 92).
58 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. “Aller Stoff ist blosser Ausdruck
eines Gleichgewichts entgegengetzter Thätigkeiten, die sich wechselseitig
auf ein blosses Substrat von Thätigkeit reduciren” (Schelling, System des
transcendentalen Idealismus, 93).
59 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. “(Man denke sich den Hebel,
beyde Gewichte wirken nur auf das Hypomochlion, welches also das
gemeinschaftliche Substrat ihrer Thätigkeit ist). Jenes Substrat entsteht überdies
nicht etwa willkührlich durch freye Production, sondern völlig unwillkührlich,
mittelst einer dritten Thätigkeit, die so nothwendig ist, als die Identität des
Selbstbewußtseyns” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 93).
60 Eschenmayer, Säze, 11. Here, too, Jantzen’s essay on “Eschenmayer and
Schelling” is of great help. Jantzen describes how, when Eschenmayer adopts
Kant’s understanding of matter as the product of attractive and repulsive
forces and formulates the notion of a mathematical series, the middle point—or
“M” to the zero power—is the perfect “indifference” of both forces (Jantzen,
“Eschenmayer and Schelling,” 75). In this case, matter is “substrate, for while
the forces are equaled out and in fact do not yet stand in relation to one another,
matter is external to all intuition, or as the case may be, not yet specific, not yet
qualitative” (i.i.o.) (Jantzen, “Eschenmayer and Schelling”).
have two other sources likely of interest to Schelling. One is the

Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where Kant refers to the “schema” of the
substance as the “persistence of the real in time, i.e., the representation
of the real as a substratum of empirical time-determination in general,
which therefore endures as everything else changes.”61 The other is the
Handbuch der gesammten Chemie (Hand Book of the Entire Chemistry) by
Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren (1794), which proves that the notion of
“substrate” was firmly established in chemistry, where it appears as
the bearer of acidic and alkaline “principles.”62 Zedler’s Lexicon also
emphasizes that, in the eighteenth century, the substratum could be
used synonymously with the term “subject.”63
Why should it matter to us what notion of “substrate” Schelling has
in mind in what seems to be little more than a parenthetical remark?
From the point of view of the lever—and its potential connection with
the ego—it matters quite a bit, because it raises the question of whether
the “substrate” exists prior to everything that happens to it or whether
it itself is the product of some activity. What is so peculiar in the
passage from Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism quoted above
is that, when Schelling identifies the hypomochlion or fulcrum point
as the “substrate” of the activity of the two weights which act upon
it, he appears to invert the usual definition such that the “substrate”
is the product of two activities, as opposed to something upon which
they exert themselves. Its status is fundamentally ambiguous. From a
physical or material point of view, the locus of the substrate—the point
61 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 275. This is not to say that the association of
substance with the term substratum originates with Kant. One finds the same
idea in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and elsewhere in the
history of philosophy. In this case, Kant serves as a more contemporary reference
point for Schelling.
62 Winterl’s System der dualistischen Chemie (1807) also refers to “substrates” which
are capable of combining with “base principles” or “acid principles” such that
the resulting product possesses a particular chemical affinity and is then able
to combine with other substances. Winterl describes how “acid principles” and
“base principles” are joined by a “band” to a “substrate.” The weaker the band,
the stronger the acid or base, because it is more “free” to react. See System der
dualistischen Chemie des Prof. Jakob Joseph Winterl dargestellt von Johann Schuster
M.D., vol. 1 (Berlin: Frölich, 1807), 278 and passim.
63 Zedler, s.v. “Substratum.” Zedler, Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste,
vol. 40 (Leipzig and Halle: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1744), col. 1597. Immanuel
Robinson Howard’s entry on “Substance” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
offers a thorough overview of various historical criteria that were attached to the
concept of the substrate in the eighteenth century, including ontological basicness,
durability, and the ability to bear predicates and be a “subject of change.” Robinson,
Howard, “Substance,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/subs
tance/, accessed September 22, 2016, at 1:08 p.m.
which the substrate will become—is, of course, already there. The

status of the fulcrum point is more of a challenge to define. On the one
hand, its existence depends upon the weights: the application of the
weights makes the concept of the fulcrum relevant. On the other hand,
we cannot equate the hypomochlion with the weights themselves in a
straightforward way, given that it is also the locus of their cancellation.
The substrate, then, is an elusive concept in this example—it both
appears and disappears at the same time. As he makes his analogy,
Schelling emphasizes that the substrate only appears indirectly, that
is, not through a deliberate choice, but rather involuntarily, through a
“third activity” that is “no less necessary than the identity of the self-
consciousness” (i.e., an identity which encompasses the productive
cancellation of opposing tendencies, or forces).64
Even beyond the complex mechanics of the ego’s self-awareness,
further light is shed on the possible connection between the lever and
the ego when Schelling returns to the comparison in the deduction of
productive intuition (Anschauung). Here, he devotes his attention to
describing the two activities that comprise the production of an intellectual
intuition: one is “ideal,” the “negative” striving of the Ding an sich (thing
in itself) projected back into the ego. The other is “real,” the “positive”
striving of the ego to expand itself infinitely.65 The “product” (i.e., the
intuition) results from these reciprocating activities and is equivalent to
their equilibrium state. Schelling then calls upon the lever to make an
important distinction that, in the state of equilibrium, these two opposed
activities do not cease, but they also no longer appear as activities:
To the extent that they preserve a balance between them, the two
will not cease, indeed, to be activities, but they will not appear as
such.—Let us recall once more the example of the lever. In order
for it to remain in balance, equal weights must bear upon it at both
ends, at equal distances from the fulcrum. Each individual weight
acts, but cannot achieve its effect (it does not appear as active);
both are confined to the common effect. So too in intuition. The
two activities that preserve equilibrium do not thereby cease to
be activities, for the equilibrium only exists insofar as both are
actively opposed to one another, only the product is static.66
64 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 51. Jenes Substrat entsteht überdies

nicht etwa willkührlich durch freye Production, sondern völlig unwillkührlich,
mittelst einer dritten Thätigkeit, die so nothwendig ist, als die Identität des
Selbstbewüsstseyns” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 93).
65 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 77.
66 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 81–82. “Insofern sich beyde unter
einander das Gleichgewicht halten, werden beyde zwar nicht aufhören,
Thätigkeiten zu seyn, aber sie werden nicht als Thätigkeiten erscheinen.—
Once again, Schelling has summoned the lever in the service of

explaining a fundamental activity of the ego: the production of an
intuition. The first example we considered invoked the cancellation
of opposing forces in the hypomochlion and introduced the notion of
a substrate. Here, the emphasis is on maintaining equilibrium, which
Schelling phrases in aesthetic terms of sense perception. The idea is
comparable to what Eschenmayer describes in his Propositions: that
forces in equilibrium are, for all intents and purposes, “invisible,”
because through their mutual cancellation they have ceased to become
an object of analysis. Equilibrium is a constant activity that appears
inactive, just as the stability of an intuition in our mind’s eye gives no
overt clues as to the interplay of those forces that produce it in the first
place. Schelling’s use of the lever is also remarkable when one considers
how the simplest of objects serves as a model for the most abstract of
intellectual processes.
Just one more example, taken from the Fernere Darstellungen aus
dem System der Philosophie (Further Representations from the System of
Philosophy) (1802),67 will help to illustrate the virtuosity with which
Schelling manipulates philosophical levers to his advantage. In a section
that compares Fichte’s philosophical system to his own notion of an
“absolute way of knowing,”68 Schelling elaborates on the proposition
Man erinnere sich wiederum des Beyspiels vom Hebel. Damit der Hebel im
Gleichgewicht bleibe, müssen in gleichen Entfernungen vom Ruhepunct an
beyden Enden gleiche Gewichte niederziehen. Jedes einzelne Gewicht zieht,
aber es kann nicht zum Effect kommen (es erscheint nicht als thätig), beyde
schränken sich ein auf den gemeinschaftlichen Effect. So in der Anschauung.
Die beyden sich das Gleichgewicht haltenden Thätigkeiten hören dadurch nicht
auf, Thätigkeiten zu seyn, denn das Gleichgewicht existirt nur, insofern beyde
Thätigkeiten als Thätigkeiten einander entgegengesetzt sind, nur das Product
ist ein ruhendes” (Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 135).
67 Originally published in the Journal für spekulative Philosophie (1802). The Schelling
critical edition has not yet printed the volume with this work. The following
quotes are from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke 1800–
1802, part 1, vol. 4 (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1859). Excerpts are available in
English translation by Michael G. Vater, “F. W. J. Schelling: Further Presentations
from the System of Philosophy (1802)” in The Philosophical Forum 32.4 (Winter
2001): 373–97. If no reference is given, the translation is my own.
68 Elsewhere, in a defense of Naturphilosophie, Schelling captures the “monadic”
quality of Naturphilosophie—understood here emphatically as his version of
Naturphilosophie—when he refers to it as a not just another rung on the ladder of
philosophical history but rather something qualitatively different, an “entirely
different mode of knowing [Erkenntnißart], an entirely new world . . . into
which, from the world where contemporary physics exists, there is no possible
passage, [a world which] exists entirely for itself, which is enclosed in itself,
and has no external relations.” See “Benehmen des Obskurantismus gegen die
Naturphilosophie” in Sämmtliche Werke 1.4, 548.
that the egoity (Ichheit) is the “form . . . in which the absolute composes
itself for the immediate consciousness.69 In an intuition, he writes,
the empirical ego finds itself in connection with the pure ego (or
pure consciousness), without one being collapsed into the other. The
empirical ego is “necessarily and unavoidably burdened with the object
and”—for that reason—“occupied with an external influence.”70 To
illustrate this point, Schelling turns once again to a mechanical example,
but this time he uses a different kind of lever altogether.71
The construction, however, completely resembles that of a one-

armed lever; the empirical ego is, through the connection with the
pure consciousness, supported on one side and joined with it, on
the other [side] however hangs the weight of the object, which is
nothing other than a moving, an opposed force.72
A diagram—not included in Schelling’s original text—will make this

construction easier to visualize:
Empirical
Ego
object
Pure
consciousness
Figure 3.4 Illustration of the “empirical ego” in terms of a one-armed

lever.
69 “die Form sey, in welche das Absolute sich für das unmittelbare Bewußtseyn
faßt” (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen,” 355).
70 Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen.”
71 In mechanics, levers are usually divided into three “classes,” based on where
the fulcrum point is in relation to the counterbalanced weights. In the first class,
the fulcrum is positioned in the middle between the burden or load (Last) and
the force applied to displace it. In the second class, the fulcrum is at one end, the
burden is in the middle, and the displacing force is applied to the other end (as
in a wheelbarrow). In the third class, the fulcrum is at one end, above the lever
(a “hyper-” as opposed to “hypomochlion”), the load is at the other end, and the
displacing force is applied to the middle. The human mandible functions this
way.
72 Die Construktion aber gleicht vollkommen der eines einarmigen Hebels; das
empirische Ich ist durch die Verbindung mit dem reinen Bewußtseyn auf
der einen Seite unterstützt und mit ihm eins, an der anderen aber hängt das
Gewicht des Objekts, welches nichts als ein Bewegendes, eine entgegengesetzte
Kraft ist (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen,” 355).
Based on this diagram, the empirical ego and pure consciousness

are aligned at the fulcrum point or hypomochlion. The “influence” of
the object is that of a motive force that needs to be offset by the joint
activity of ego and consciousness. Schelling adds, “To come to a true
unity, however, which would engulf the empirical ego and its weight,
together with the pure consciousness, within an absolute point of
indifference, is already made impossible by the first limitation.”73
Paul Ziche’s Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der
Philosophie Schellings und Hegels (Mathematical and Natural-Scientific
Models in Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy) is of great help when it
comes to interpreting Schelling’s references to the lever and other
mechanical and mathematical concepts. Ziche observes that, through
the comparison with the one-armed lever, Schelling wants to show
how two activities working in opposite directions can be united in a
single point: “Each of the two forces [i.e., the empirical ego and the
object, J.H.], makes contact in a point that is removed from this third
point; the forces therefore lie externally to the pure ego.”74 He also
notes an important distinction between the lever and the dynamic
construction of matter from opposing forces, where the “center of
force was clearly the target and point of departure for the forces.”75
What the diagram therefore shows is “how the true unity of the
empirical ego, the object and the pure self-consciousness would be
to intuit: as an “engulfing” of these three positions in an absolute
point of indifference. This understanding of unity corresponds
terminologically and in its own right to Eschenmayer’s concept of
absolute equilibrium.”76
To put things in perspective with the levers from the System of
Transcendental Idealism, it is noteworthy that Schelling’s “two-armed”
levers are much more defined by a sense of interiority: they represent
the emergence of self-awareness in the ego, or the process of intuition
whereby the Ding an sich and the ego negotiate their equilibrium.
73 “zu einer wahren Einheit aber zu kommen, welche das empirische Ich und sein
Gewicht zusammt dem reinen Bewußtseyn in einem absoluten Indifferenzpunkt
versenkte, ist schon durch die erste Beschränkung schlechthin unmöglich
gemacht” (Schelling, “Fernere Darstellungen”).
74 “Jede der beiden Kräfte greift in einem Punkt an, der von diesem dritten Punkt
entfernt ist; die Kräfte liegen also außerhalb des reinen Ichs” (Ziche, Modelle,
216).
75 “dort war das Kraftzentrum eindeutig Ziel bzw. Ausgangspunkt der Kräfte”
(Ziche, Modelle, 216).
76 Ziche, Modelle. Ziche also emphasizes Schelling’s point that there are no
divisions (Unterscheidungen) in the absolute, and as a result, nothing can be
sensed (Ziche, Modelle, 216).
When the fulcrum point is in the middle, as in these two cases, it is

also symbolically “contained” by lever’s weight and counterweight.
Schelling therefore appropriates this lever as a model for his ego-
concept because of its compatibility with a contained unit (or unity)
of balanced attractive and repulsive forces. In the case of the “one-
armed” lever, however, we can see a shift to collapse the “interiority”
of the lever by joining the position of the empirical ego and the
“pure consciousness” such that the object symbolically hung from
the end of the lever arm is both visually and theoretically “exterior”
to them. Even without diagrams, Schelling’s levers would seem
to fulfill the Eschenmayer’s “demand for visualization” based on
description alone.
By now it is clear that Schelling embraces the conceptual apparatus
of the lever in the service of clarifying a philosophical idea on several
occasions, so that once again, we are able to admire the lever’s versatility.
For all that it is such a simple object, it possesses various features upon
which one can focus attention: the position of weights, the fulcrum point,
its symmetry,77 or even the traces of the lever’s materiality as physical
object. Up until this point, however, there is been no indication that
Schelling voices any concern about the limit of what the lever can do as
we witnessed in Eschenmayer’s Laws, where the usefulness of the lever
eventually ran its course. The situation changes with the publication of
the Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie (Aphorisms for the
introduction to nature philosophy) in 1806.78 In the same year, Schelling
communicates his doubts about nature philosophy in correspondence
with Alexander von Humboldt:
In Germany, one has taken up against this matter [nature

philosophy, J.H.], as one always does against everything new.
One has misunderstood it and twisted it and disseminated
the coarsest judgments against it. One has insisted that nature
philosophy scorns experience and limits its progress, and this at
the same time as individual researchers of nature took the most
advantage of its ideas for their experiments, and guided them
according to nature philosophy. Until now, there has been lacking
in Germany, from the side of the empirical researchers, even a
77 Ziche has noticed more generally that Schelling prefers in his examples to
describe scenarios where the weights of the lever are equal and equidistant
from the fulcrum point and does not conjure the “law” of the lever which relies
on an inverse ratio of weight and distance from the fulcrum.
78 “Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie,” in Jahrbücher der Medicin
als Wissenschaft, ed. A. F. Marcus and F. W. J. Schelling, vol. 1.1 (Tübingen: Cotta,
1806), 3–11.
single man, who could comprehend the perspective as a whole

and who would be able to judge it accordingly.79
By this point in his career, Schelling is no longer writing or revising

systems of nature philosophy, but he has also not yet decamped from
the field, however great his frustrations with its reception may be. In
the aphorisms, one can see a serious attempt—published in Schelling’s
own journal, in collaboration with his friend Marcus—to explain once
again the rudiments of his thinking.
When Schelling discusses “the absolute identity of the subjective and
the objective,” one of the foundational ideas of his system, he is careful
to distinguish this state from “mere equilibrium.”80 Unlike equilibrium
states, which always involve a relation between at least two discrete
things, the state of identity has a “one-ness” that is quite different. “The
fulcrum point of a lever,” Schelling writes, “illustrates the equilibrium
of two opposed forces; it is that which unifies both, but it is by no means
their absolute identity.”81 It is a “point of rest” but only relative to those
two opposed forces, not in itself: “These forces reduce themselves
reciprocally to nothing in it [i.e., in the fulcrum, J.H.], but it does not,
as itself, it is the positive nothing of both.”82 Schelling distances himself
from Eschenmayer in this passage. The unity (or “one-ness”) of identity,
as Schelling puts it, would appear to be compatible with Eschenmayer’s
“absolute equilibrium,” but Schelling prefers to remove the concept
of equilibrium from that description altogether. In the subsequent
79 Man hat sich in Deutschland gegen diese Sache [i.e., Naturphilosophie, J.H.], wie
noch immer gegen alles Neue, benommen. Man hat sie erst misverstanden und
verdreht und die gröbsten Vorurtheile dagegen verbreitet. Man hat vorgegeben,
die Naturphilosophie verschmähe die Erfahrung und hemme ihre Fortschritte,
und dies zu gleicher Zeit, als einzlene Naturforscher von den Ideen derselben
den besten Gebrauch zu ihren Experimenten machten und diese darnach
regulirten. Es hat bis jetzt in Deutschland von Seiten der empirschen Forscher
an dem Mann gefehlt, der die Ansicht im Ganzen und Großen aufgefaßt und
darnach beurtheilt hätte” (Aus Schellings Leben, 47).
80 In Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft, ed. A. F. Marcus and F. W. J. Schelling,
vol. 2.1 (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1806) 23. The aphorisms in this volume are
found on pages 3–36. Note that they are continued in Jahrbücher der Medicin als
Wissenschaft, vol. 2.2 (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1806), 121–58.
81 Der Ruhepunkt eines Hebels stellt das Gleichgewicht zweyer entgegengesetzter
Kräfte dar; er ist das Vereinigende beyder, aber er ist keineswegs ihre absolute
Identität” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,” vol. 2.1, 23).
82 “diese [= Kräfte, J.H.] reduciren sich wechselseitig in ihm zur Null, nicht aber
er selbst, als er selbst, ist die positive Null beyder” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,”
23–24).
discussion of opposing forces in matter, he takes the additional step of

distancing himself from the lever as well:
All of nature, by necessity, offers examples of the absolute

one-being [Eins-seyns] of oppositions, as do all the sciences.
Whoever attempted to understand matter in the simplest sense
of contraction and expansion would never arrive at real matter,
as long as he assumed both of those forces to be opposed like the
forces of a lever, if he did not think of matter as expansive and
attractive completely and indivisibly in every point.83
It is the nature of aphorisms to be laconic and to gesture at more than is

put into words. This aphorism points toward an ambivalence regarding
Schelling’s own use of the lever. At first glance, it appears to describe
a case of the lever’s misuse: where an image of two opposed forces
operating at different points on the lever is applied—incorrectly—to
our understanding of the forces of attraction and repulsion in matter.
Instead, Schelling suggests that we should think of the opposed forces
operating in each and every point. As far as a scientific description of
the lever is concerned, this is always already the case: a weight may
be attached to the lever at a particular distance from its fulcrum, and
a counterweight might be attached on the other side, but as far as a
calculation of torque is concerned, it can be measured for every point
on the bar of the lever, when the force of the fulcrum is also taken into
account. And it is also useful to recall that the German Romantics
entertained the notion of a lever understood simply in terms of a
hypomochlion. If we extend this concept in the other direction, that is,
as an expansion of cases rather than as the reduction to a single one,
we can see that the conclusion of this idea is that everything—every
point—is a lever in miniature. Is this an enormous triumph for the lever
of nature philosophy, or does it risk losing its usefulness altogether? A
debate that erupts between Schelling and Eschenmayer will put this
very question to the test.
83 “Beyspiele des absoluten Eins-seyns Entgegengesetzter bietet, nothwendiger

Weise, die ganze Natur, bieten alle Wissenschaften in Menge dar. Wer die
Materie auch nur auf die einfachste Art aus Contraction und Expansion zu
begreifen versuchte, würde nie zu einer realen Materie gelangen, so lange er
jene beyden wie die Kräfte eines Hebels entgegengesetzt annähme, wenn er die
Materie nicht durchaus und in jedem Punkt als expansiv und als attractiv dächte
auf untheilbare Weise” (Schelling, “Aphorismen,” 24).
The Lever as God of Naturphilosophie

Given the degree to which Eschenmayer and Schelling incorporate
the lever into their early nature-philosophical thinking, one would
assume that its legacy was secure. A dispute that emerges in their
correspondence, however, has serious repercussions for lever’s status
as well as, more generally, the degree to which analogies drawn from
mechanics and mathematics are considered at all useful for nature
philosophy. For the lever, in any event, the stakes could not be higher.
In Schelling’s and Eschenmayer’s own words, the result of the debate
will be either its death or its apotheosis.
In order to understand the source of the controversy and the
terms with which the debate was waged, we need to turn first to the
text that was central to the dispute, Schelling’s controversial essay,
“Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen
Freiheit” (Philosophical Investigations on the Nature of Human
Freedom) from 1809.84 This essay has been understood in various
ways: as a meditation on freedom in the age of philosophical systems,
as a contribution to the debate on theodicy, and as an attempt to
reconcile physics and moral philosophy, to name just three strands of
interpretation. Heidegger’s reception of Schelling and Žižek’s reception
of Schelling and Heidegger have also guaranteed that the Philosophical
Investigations possess a kind of status in contemporary philosophical
thinking that sets it apart from Schelling’s nature-philosophical
writings. Those familiar with Schelling’s essay might already be
wondering what its relevance to the conceptual history of the lever
could possibly be. After all, it makes no mention of the lever, much less
the concept of mechanics. The term “equilibrium” does have a role to
play in terms of the balance of forces of the intellect, although readers
of the English edition should be aware that the translator renders not
only Gleichgewicht but also Gleichgültigkeit as equilibrium whereby the
latter is often closer to the English notion of “indifference.” Schelling
does use scientific terminology for the purpose of making analogies,
but these references are largely drawn from the fields of optics and
gravitational theory.
The lever, as it is used with reference to the Philosophical Investigations
is, in fact, not Schelling’s creation at all. It is entirely the product of
84 One finds testimony to the resonance of Schelling’s thought in Martin Heidegger,

Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1985); Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des
deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975);
Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
1992); Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related
Maters (London: Verso, 1996).
Eschenmayer’s interpretation and owes its existence to his attempt to

grapple with two of the most challenging concepts in Schelling’s essay,
Grund and Ungrund. Of the two, Ungrund—usually translated as “non-
ground”—is a semantic oddity, a concept that seems perpetually at risk
of undermining itself through its simultaneous positing (of a “ground”
or Grund) and self-negation. Schelling first uses it in the Philosophical
Investigations in the middle of a discussion about the possibility of a
distinction between being (Wesen) and its relationship to ground:
For a long time already we have heard the question: What end
should this primary distinction of being serve, in so far as it is
ground and in so far as it exists? For there is either no common
point of contact for both, in which case we must declare ourselves
in favor of absolute dualism, or there is such a point; thus, both
coincide once again in the final analysis. We have, then, one being
[Ein Wesen] for all oppositions, an absolute identity of light and
darkness, good and evil, and for all the inconsistent results to
which any rational system falls prey and which have long been
manifest in this system too.85
Schelling touches here upon a question that has led to numerous

dissenting opinions among his interpreters: whether or not the original
being that encompasses and exists a priori to all oppositions also
coincides with and includes the concept of “ground,” or whether they
need to be thought of as distinct from one another.
He pushes forward with the claim that there must be something that
exists prior to “ground”:
We have already explained what we assume in the first respect:

there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists,
thus generally before any duality—how can we call it anything
other than the original ground [Urgrund] or the non-ground
85 “Schon lange hörten wir die Frage: wozu soll doch jene erste Unterscheidung
dienen, zwischen dem Wesen, sofern es Grund ist und in wie fern es existirt?
denn entweder giebt es für die beyden keinen gemeinsamen Mittelpunkt:
dann müssen wir uns für den absoluten Dualismus erklären. Oder es giebt
einen solchen: so fallen beyde in der letzten Betrachtung wieder zusammen.
Wir haben dann ein Wesen für alle Gegensätze, eine absolute Identität von
Licht und Finsterniß, Gut und Bös und alle die ungereimten Folgen, auf die
jedes Vernunftsystem gerathen muß, und die auch diesem System vorlängst
nachgewiesen sind” in Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das
Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände
(Reutlingen: J. N. Enslinsch Buchhandlung, 1834), 113–14.
[Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be

distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore,
it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be
described as the absolute indifference of both.86
At the risk of paring down the subtleties of Schelling’s argument

to an overly reductive structural question, I would like to put the
philosophical (as well as theological) problems attached to the notion
of an Ungrund aside for the moment and consider the basic distinction
Schelling emphasizes between thinking of it in terms of “indifference”
as opposed to “identity.” According to Schelling’s account, indifference
must by definition precede identity. Whereas an “identity” of opposites
presupposes that those opposites already exist and are in a relation to
each other, “indifference” is essentially a state of “pre-difference” prior
to all oppositions within which these oppositions are not “present in
any way.” There are, by now, any number of questions clamoring for
attention. Chief among them is how do we account for the origin of
good, evil, or a divine being if they are not present in the initial “non-
ground”? Does not this “non-ground” itself act as a kind of grounding
concept? Or is this just a case of philosophical sophistry? Out of all
the responses to Schelling’s essay that arise, however, as posed by
the numerous readers who have struggled to come to terms with the
elusive non-ground, I am interested in just one: Eschenmayer’s.
At his home in Kirchheim on October 18, 1810, Eschenmayer sat
down to write a letter to Schelling. The subject was Eschenmayer’s
thoughts about the Philosophical Investigations, which he had just
finished reading. Eschenmayer frames his letter with his customary
humility. He writes that, like Schelling, he has already pursued a
similar line of philosophical inquiry and has attempted, without
success, to reconcile the spheres of nature and human history. What
follows, however, is an increasingly pointed critique of Schelling’s
concept of the Ungrund. The most striking aspect of Eschenmayer’s
lengthy letter is his repeated use of analogies to compare Schelling’s
philosophical ideas to physical phenomena. This strategy also catches
Schelling’s attention and, as we eventually see in the written response,
becomes a source of profound irritation. Why is that the case? On the
86 “Was wir in der ersten Beziehung annehmen, haben wir bereits erklärt: es muß
vor allem Grund und vor allem Existirenden, also überhaupt vor aller Dualität,
ein Wesen seyn; wie können wir es anders nennen, als den Urgrund oder
vielmehr Ungrund? Da es vor allen Gegensätzen vorhergeht, so können diese
in ihm nicht unterscheidbar, noch auf irgend eine Weise vorhanden seyn. Es
kann daher nicht als die Identität; es kann nur als die absolute Indifferenz beyder
bezeichnet werden” (Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 114).
one hand, it is a well-known fact that the use of optical, magnetic

and other kinds of physical phenomena to serve as metaphors or to
model philosophical ideas is quite common in Schelling’s writings.
On the other hand, it is also true that, in the case of Eschenmayer’s
letter, mechanical references appear with disproportionate frequency
when compared to the language of the Philosophical Investigations.
For example, when Eschenmayer refers to “three systems” of the
ego in Schelling’s essay: reason (the “universal organ” associated
with the All, or Allheit), understanding (the “particular organ”
associated with the One, or Einheit), and sense (the “singular organ”
associated with the Many, or Vielheit), he connects them to scientific
and mathematical concepts in various ways.87 First, he refers to what
by his own admission is a “weak analogy,” whereby reason is light,
understanding is the prism, and the senses are the colors of refracted
light.88 He also uses mathematical language, where understanding is a
mirror and the ego is the midpoint of a hyperbola with two abscissae
of space and time rising on either side.
These examples, which relate to corresponding metaphors in
Schelling’s essay, set the stage for the appearance of the lever. In
order to understand why Eschenmayer summons this particular
mechanical figure among all others, however, we need to take a closer
look at the substance of his argument. Eschenmayer is troubled by the
thought that Schelling’s claims about human freedom amount to “a
complete transformation of ethics into physics.”89 For Eschenmayer,
this transformation would lead to a collapse of the “higher order of
things” (such as freedom and morality) into necessity and natural
processes in general. He writes that we cannot arrange concepts such
as duty, right (Recht), conscientious behavior (Gewissen), and virtue
(Tugend) on a scale just as we would the varying degrees of sickness
and health, darkness and light. Instead, human history needs to
be thought of as a figure of a “transcendental line” where for every x
there was an innumerable quantity of y values: as a cycloid rather
than a circle.
In Eschenmayer’s letter, we also witness the difficulty he has coming
to terms with the concept of “ground,” as Schelling understands it.
In response to Schelling description of God’s “indifference,” and the
claim that we should conceive of God as having a “ground” from which
87 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 40–42. Schelling’s reply to Eschenmayer, “Antwort

auf das voranstehende Schreiben von Schelling” is published in the same
volume, 79–99.
88 “Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 42.
89 “eine völlige Umwandlung der Ethik in Physik” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 50).
(separately, not as oppositions) the principles of good and evil emerge,

Eschenmayer has the following to say:
God has no nature, God has no ground in himself, the in-self

and beyond-self have no meaning for God, there is no operative
ground dependent upon God, which contains for you [Shelling]
the possibility of the principle of evil.90
According to Eschenmayer, we should not think of God as having any

predicates; this precludes his existence in space and time. One can well
imagine his frustration with Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations—not
only with the idea of God’s “ground,” but also with the idea that the
principle of evil is in some way connected to it:
According to your perspective, understanding emerges from that

which is without understanding, order from chaos, light from
the dark ground of gravity. Should something hinder us, to push
these oppositions even further in order to allow virtue to emerge
from vice, what is holy from sin, and God from the devil? For that,
which you call the dark ground of God’s existence, is certainly
something similar to the devil.91
Eschenmayer struggles to reconcile the notion of God’s eternity with

the notion of light emerging from darkness, order from chaos, etc.92
His irritation only increases when confronted with the notion of the
Ungrund, which he understands as the “essence of the ground [Wesen
des Ungrunds].”93 If the Ungrund is supposed to cover precisely the
conceptual terrain of the non-predicated, then where was one to find the
“principle of separation” (Prinzip des Theilens) that exists to differentiate
it further into concepts of good, evil, and all the rest? Schelling’s
claim is that what we usually think of as oppositions (good and evil,
90 “Gott hat keine Natur, Gott hat keinen Grund in sich, das in Sich und außer Sich
hat keine Bedeutung für Gott, es gibt keinen von Gott abhängig fortwirkenden
Grund, was Ihnen die Möglichkeit des bösen Princips enthält” (“Eschenmayer
an Schelling,” 51).
91 “Nach Ihrer Ansicht geht der Verstand aus dem Verstandlosen, die Ordnung
aus dem Chaos, das Licht aus dem finstern Grunde der Schwere hervor. Sollte
uns etwas hindern, diese Gegensäze noch weiter fortzusezen, und die Tugend
aus dem Laster, das Heilige aus der Sünde, den Himmel aus der Hölle und Gott
aus dem Teufel hervorgehen zu lassen? Denn das, was sie [sic] den dunkeln
Grund der Existenz Gottes nennen, ist doch so etwas Aehnliches von Teufel”
(“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 57).
etc.) emerge as “non-oppositions” from the non-ground. Or, put in

somewhat different terms: Schelling does not allow for the possibility
of oppositions to be acknowledged in the zero moment, only in all
subsequent ones (in succession). From the point of view of a physical
analogy, this does not seem unreasonable. Perhaps it already gestures
toward the problem of applying (even if implicitly) a physical logic to
metaphysical ideas.
In order to impose his own kind of order on what he perceives to
be the conceptual chaos of the Philosophical Investigations, Eschenmayer
turns to the lever. The degree to which he pursues this analogy is
unprecedented in nature philosophy, and such a milestone in the
history of the lever justifies it being quoted at length:
What is won by negating opposition in co-existence and then

affirming it again in succession, so that light and darkness,
goodness and evil do not proceed at once but rather one after the
other from the non-ground? This non-ground divides itself, so
that love and life may be, and so that the divided may become
one again.94
Eschenmayer begins with a statement that puts him in direct conflict

with Schelling’s model. According to Eschenmayer, there is no possible
motivation for making a distinction between that which a priori falls
“within” purview of the non-ground and that which can be shown to
emerge from it. Nor does Eschenmayer accept the notion that concepts
joined within opposing pairs can somehow move independently of
each other. To demonstrate his point of view, he writes,
I will show this to you conclusively using the mechanics of the

lever. Time and space are the non-ground for the lever, the ground
is its absolute center of gravity [Schwerpunkt95], the indifference
of all relative equilibria that occur in it; the separation into two
equally eternal beginnings are the two arms of the lever, the
one as force, principle of light or goodness, the other as burden
94 “Was ist gewonnen, wenn der Gegensaz in der Coexistenz negirt, dafür aber
in der Succession wieder affirmirt ist, so daß Licht und Finsterniß, Gutes und
Böses zwar nicht zugleich aber nacheinander aus dem Ungrund hervorgehen.
Dieser Ungrund theilt sich, damit Liebe und Leben sey, und das Getheilte
wieder Eins werde” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61).
95 Schwerpunkt can refer to the center of mass or gravity as well as, more generally
to a point of emphasis in an argument.
[Last96], principle of darkness or evil, its existence or life consists

in move and counter-move or generally in relative equilibrium,
but even this relative equilibrium is always striving to return to
the absolute again, and seeks to be one again, and this is love.97
As we read through Eschenmayer’s prolonged comparison between

the relation of Ungrund and ego to the lever, it becomes clear that
certain aspects are easier to visualize than others—there is an intimate
connection between the “visibility” of the model and the notion of
what is and is not directly anschaulich. In other words, that aspect of
the lever which is visible to us correlates to the emergence of conscious
life. For the purposes of this comparison, the categories of time and
space that comprise the non-ground cannot be visually located on
the lever, as is the case with other concepts that make up its center
of gravity and its arms. Perhaps the most powerful idea captured by
Eschenmayer’s use of the lever is the perfect rapport of stasis and
emergence: the “two equally eternal beginnings of the arms” (one
good, the other evil) find their perfect balance at the center of gravity,
but are exemplary of innumerable other conceptual pairs, given that
this center is the “indifference of all relative equilibria.”98 This perfect
rapport, also described as an eternal departure and striving toward
return is, according to Eschenmayer, nothing less than love. He does
not stop here, however:
The only difference is that the principle of evil and the principle
of good, burden and force on the lever, can only be made visible
[anschaulich] in co-existence, but in fact nothing at all hinders us
sometimes to think of the lever entirely as burden and other times
entirely as force. Now, replace the lever with the ego, then your
96 The Last, the weight applied to the lever, is also semantically related to Laster,
or “vice,” which suggests an additional degree of compatibility between
the mechanics of the lever (with the opposition of Kraft and Last) and how
Eschenmayer uses the lever to model the origin of good and evil.
97 “Ich zeige Ihnen diese Schlußweise in der Mechanik am Hebel auf. Zeit und
Raum ist der Ungrund für den Hebel, der Grund ist sein absoluter Schwerpunkt
oder die Indifferenz aller relative Gleichgewichte, die an ihm statt finden, das
Auseinandergehen in zwei gleich ewige Anfänge sind die beyde Arme des
Hebels, der eine als Kraft, Lichtprinzip oder das Gute, der andere als Last,
finsteres Prinzip oder das Böse, seine Existenz oder Leben besteht in Zug und
Gegenzug oder überhaupt im relative Gleichgewicht, aber eben diß relative
Gleichgewicht strebt immer wieder auf das Absolute zurük, und sucht wieder
Eins zu warden, und diß ist die Liebe” (“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61).
entire construction lies within. And so is it too, this lever is the

god of nature philosophy, and it cannot aspire to another one.99
One has to ask whether or not this vision of the lever effectively falls
within a blind spot for Eschenmayer. Did he not, at the beginning of
his response to Schelling, complain about Schelling’s conflation of
physics with ethics? A lever subsumed entirely by good, evil, or some
balance of the two and, what is more, which makes claims to being the
“god of nature-philosophy,” would seem quite susceptible to this very
criticism. At the same time, I do not want to divert too much attention
from the truly stunning punchline of Eschenmayer’s comparison:
that what he has been building up to all along is a description of the
ego itself.
The previous chapter, which addressed the role of the lever in
German Romantic thinking, showed how Friedrich Schlegel and
Novalis took the fulcrum point or hypomochlion of the lever as a
metaphor for the ego. They also used the mechanical theory of the
lever to support the comparison and allowed the arms of their levers
to conjoin pairs of concepts drawn from different branches of human
thought. Eschenmayer’s description encompasses the Romantic idea
of man as a “self-tool” (Selbstwerkzeug) where agency and medium are
collapsed. At the same time, there are critical differences between the
levers of German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. Eschenmayer’s
lever is morally engaged in a way that Schlegel’s and Novalis’s is
not: whereas their levers embody the dynamic balancing of various
concepts, Eschenmayer’s lever is an agent of good—and evil—that
emerges in the immediate context of an essay on the possibilities of
human freedom. When one considers the mechanics and morality of
the lever with this emphasis, then Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical
lever appears to be in some ways closer to how Kant describes processes
of moral equilibrium in the human mind in his negative magnitudes
essay—with some caveats. The lever Eschenmayer designates the “god
of nature philosophy” is not quite embedded in the human in the same
way Kant’s was, however. Also, Eschenmayer does not refer to levers in
general but rather a particular one: the lever which he summons from
Schelling’s essay. As the “god of nature-philosophy,” it is singular, yet
99 “Die einzige Differenz ist, daß das böse und gute Princip, Last und Kraft am
Hebel nur in der Coexistenz anschaulich gemacht werden können, es hindert
Uns aber in der That nichts, den Hebel das einemal ganz als Last, das anderemal
ganz als Kraft zu denken. Sezen Sie nun an die Stelle des Hebels das Ich, so
ist Ihre ganze Konstruction darinn. Und so ist es auch, dieser Hebel ist der
Gott der Naturphilosophie, und keinen [sic] andern kann sie nicht erringen”
(“Eschenmayer an Schelling,” 61–62).
connected to the mechanical principle applicable to all (moral and non-

moral) levers.
Unfortunately for Eschenmayer, his attempt to resolve an
apparent contradiction of ground and non-ground is met with a
scathing rebuttal. According to Schelling, Eschenmayer has gotten
it all wrong: the concept of the non-ground, its relationship to good
and evil, and all the rest. In part, Schelling is irritated at what he
perceives of as Eschenmayer’s total lack of understanding, although
one could make the argument here that Eschenmayer understands
Schelling better than Schelling does himself. Schelling does not just
react against Eschenmayer’s philosophical positions, however. He is
as much if not more irritated with the way Eschenmayer goes about
making his case. After railing against Eschenmayer for summoning
circles, cycloids, lines, and hyperbolas as “analogies for the moral
world,” he writes, “Above all I want to note my wonderment at how
you still rely on mathematical comparisons which could perhaps
accord some advantages to subordinate things and how you cannot
overcome the inclination to bring everything back to these dead
formulas.”100 If that were not enough, Schelling moves on to include
Eschenmayer’s (mis)use of the lever among his fondness for “dead
formulas”: “You want nevertheless to use the latter to interpret my
dialectical theory of the first origin of duality, as in for instance
magnetic phenomena.”101
Even if we keep in mind Schelling’s early skepticism with regard to
mathematical representations, it is nonetheless a surprising statement
from a philosopher who, since 1797, has used the lever’s mechanical
advantage for philosophical gain in writings on natural philosophy,
moral philosophy, and ethics. It is therefore worth taking a closer
look at Schelling’s further complaints as he contemplates how best to
enlighten Eschenmayer:
100 Christopher Lauer and Jason Worth have translated Schelling’s response to
Eschenmayer and published it as an appendix to Jason Worth, Schelling’s Practice
of the Wild. Time, Art, Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 173–96, here 185.“
Ueberhaupt will ich bemerken, daß ich verwundert bin, wie Sie noch immer an
mathematischen Gleichnissen hangen, die Ihnen vielleicht für untergeordnete
Dinge einige Vortheile gewähren konnten, und die Neigung nicht überwinden
können, sich alles auf diese todten Formeln zurückzubringen” (Schelling,
“Antwort auf das voranstehende Schreiben,” 106).
101 Lauer and Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 185. “Sie wollen sogar . . .
meine dialektische Theorie vom ersten Ursprung der Zweyheit, wie einst die
magnetischen Erscheinungen, am Hebel deutlich machen” (Schelling, “Antwort
auf das voranstehende Schreiben,” 106).
I found in that entire exposition a confusion of my concepts, so

that I did not know where to begin. I needed either to set the
entire matter right and deduce it from the beginning—who knows
whether with any more success, given the silence with which you
can look down on all philosophical systems with a mocking and
self-deprecatory glance, which would have made the deduction
difficult for you to follow. Or I needed to emulate that place in
your letter where you, in order to pronounce yourself fully, speak
in loud negations.102
One will notice here that Schelling is arguing entirely in hypotheticals,

in terms of what he “would” have to do. As a consequence, the
pejorative tone notwithstanding, his actual position is not entirely clear.
He continues in the same vein, going so far as to quote his hypothetical
self, even as he moves toward the crux of his argument:
I would have to say, “A living process, like that of the first origin
of duality, does not allow itself to be represented on the lever.
What I call the ground cannot be compared with the center of
mass [Schwerpunkt]; were such a mechanizing to take place here,
then it [er] would have to be compared with the one weight of the
lever. One does not need a particularly differentiating principle
in the One, in order to explain the origin of duality. I have never
claimed that evil and good—simultaneously or sequentially—
emerge from the non-ground etc.” What, however, would all of
these denials have served?103
We seem to have reached an impasse, in more than one sense. It is

an argumentative impasse because Schelling has reached the point—
whatever the rhetorical motivation may be—where his argument only
exists in the hypothetical. It is also a conceptual impasse because for
Eschenmayer, unlike for Schelling, the concept of Grund is associated
with the absolute center of mass, the indifference of all relative equilibria
102 Lauer and Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 185–86.

103 “ich mußte sagen: ‘Ein lebendiger Proceß, wie jener des ersten Ursprungs der
Zweyheit, läßt sich nicht am Hebel darstellen. Was ich den Grund nenne, läßt
sich nicht mit dem Schwerpunkt vergleichen; sollte je ein solches Mechanisiren
hier statt finden, so müßte er mit dem einen Gewicht des Hebels verglichen
werden. Es braucht kein besondres differenziirendes Prinzip in dem Einen, um
den Ursprung der Zweyheit zu erklären. Ich habe niemals behauptet, daß Böses
und Gutes—zugleich oder nacheinander—aus dem Ungrund hervorgehen
u.s.w.’ Wozu würden aber alle diese Verneinungen gedient haben?” (Lauer and
Worth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 107).
(the state of absolute equilibrium Eschenmayer describes in the

Propositions and Laws).
The existence of the lever lies not, however, in an idealized punctual
stasis, but rather in the act of balancing itself. Relative equilibrium is
always to be understood as a process, a constant state of tension between
two opposed forces. Eschenmayer has encoded the opposed forces
with moral values. In the spirit of Prudentius, he envisions a scenario
tantamount to a mechanical psychomachia. If Schelling refuses to play
the role of the approving audience, however, then Eschenmayer’s
somewhat “poetic” interpretation of Schelling, however accurate it
may be, remains as invalidated as an “I-would-have-to” argument that
never materializes. We are left, then, with a cliffhanger, and it will take
the arrival of Johann Herbart onto the scene to determine precisely how
the lever, no matter how disputed its apotheosis in nature philosophy,
lives on to serve the human in the realm of psychology.
Four From Naturphilosophie to a
Mechanically Minded Psychology
“After more precise reflection on the lever some things have come to
mind, which will be presented here; without concern, that it might seem
too foreign.”1
Johann Herbart
Introduction
The following pages will bring Carl Eschenmayer, whose fleeting
appearances in the chapter on Romanticism were followed by a starring
role in the context of nature philosophy, into a dialogue with Johann
Herbart, a philosopher equally known for his writings on psychology
and pedagogy.2 This combination would have likely seemed strange
to their contemporaries, just as it may to readers today. In one of the
few pairings one can find of Eschenmayer’s and Herbart’s names in
recent years, Matthew Bell refers to them as “the two best-known
products of Idealism” only to distinguish them for coming to “two
different conclusions from Kant’s philosophy,” both “against Kant’s
intentions.”3 There will be opportunities to add more nuance to
this statement, but Bell’s description of their essentially different
orientations holds true. Whereas Eschenmayer, like Schelling, posits a
“psychology of the absolute” that describes innate connections between
empirical phenomena and structures of the mind, Herbart insists that
1 Herbart, “Ueber Analogien in Bezug auf das Fundament der Psychologie” in

Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke, vol. 11, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto
Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and Sons, 1906), 185–202, 187.
2 I am very grateful to Carolina Malagon for insightful and critical feedback on an
early draft of this chapter.
3 Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology, 164.
his psychology be grounded in mathematics.4 If this goal could be

achieved, then, Herbart thought, psychology could achieve the status
of a science—at least, by the standard Kant set in the Metaphysische
Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science) of 1786.5 In the preface to that text, Kant states quite clearly that
“the empirical doctrine of the soul”—that is, empirical psychology—“
can never become anything more than a historical doctrine of nature . . .
that is, a natural description of the soul, but never a science of the soul.”6
As we will see, Herbart thought that empirical psychology lent itself
quite well to quantitative techniques. In his (somewhat polemically
titled) Psychologie als Wissenschaft (Psychology as Science) (1824), he
states that that mental processes, such as the awareness and repression
of thoughts, could be analyzed by what he refers to as a “statics and
mechanics of the mind.”7
I will show that there is an additional reason to couple Eschenmayer’s
and Herbart’s names. The motivation in this particular case has more
to do with a surprising affinity that exists between the two. For both
Eschenmayer and Herbart, the lever and its conceptual apparatus are
important—and even essential—to their thinking about psychology. We
find references to the lever, to equilibrium, and to mechanical laws in
each section of Eschenmayer’s Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische,
reine, und angewandte (Psychology in Three Parts as Empirical, Pure, and
Applied) (1817),8 just as we do in significant works on psychology
throughout Herbart’s career. In Herbart’s case, these include the
essay “Über die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit, Mathematik auf
Psychologie anzuwenden” (On the Possibility and Necessity of
Applying Mathematics to Psychology) (1822), his major treatises,
Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824) and the Allgemeine Metaphysik (General
Metaphysics) (1829), and above all, the later essay “Über Analogien in
Bezug auf das Fundament zur Psychologie” (On Analogies in Relation
to the Foundation of Psychology) (1840). In the essay on analogies,
Herbart devotes himself to a lengthy reflection as to what makes the

5 In the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, Kant claims “that in any
special doctrine of nature, there can be only as much proper science as there
is mathematics therein.” See Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, trans. Michael
Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6.
7 Herbart refers many times to a “statics and mechanics of the mind” in his
Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 2, 36 and passim.
8 C. A. Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische, reine und angewandte.
Zum Gebrauch seiner Zuhörer (Stuttgart und Tübingen: Johann Georg Cotta,
1817).
From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology 153
lever and its conceptual apparatus particularly well suited to describe

and model the processes and phenomena of the mind.
In order to understand the contributions of Eschenmayer and
Herbart in terms of the field of psychology in general, and our thinking
about levers in particular, their work needs to be contextualized
against the backdrop of German psychology as well as the particular
history of the lever that is the focus of this study. After an introduction
that briefly summarizes a few of the challenges and key events that
informed the study of the mind in the years before and after 1800, my
argument will pick up where the chapter on nature philosophy left off,
with the question of the life or death of the lever. It begins by exploring
the surprising prevalence of mechanical thinking in Eschenmayer’s
Psychology in Three Parts (1817). On the basis of this treatise alone, it
is clear that the lever is more than a “dead formula,” as Schelling had
claimed. In its resurrection, we can observe that the lever, which was
for Eschenmayer the “god of nature philosophy” (see Chapter Three),
is also indispensable to his writing on psychology. The next section
then focuses on Herbart’s work as a mathematically and mechanically
minded psychologist. His use of the lever extends well beyond a general
notion of static equilibrium in the mind as it becomes an instrument
of reason in its own right. In Herbart’s reflections on the lever, we
will also see surprising affinities to the levers of nature philosophy
and Romanticism.
Eighteenth-Century Psychology: An Overview

One need not be a specialist in eighteenth-century philosophy to follow
the developments in the emerging field of psychology and the debates
about the criteria required to secure its status as an independent
discipline and science. Many readers will already be familiar with the
distinction between “rational” and “empirical” psychology, each of
which has its own trajectory.9 The history of rational psychology is often
linked with the names of Descartes and Leibniz, and in the eighteenth
century with Christian Wolff. Broadly speaking, rational psychology
attempts to formulate truths without reliance on the senses. Empirical
psychology, associated with Francis Bacon’s critique of Scholasticism,10
distinguishes itself through an emphasis on mental “facts” as a basis for
the discovery of fundamental truths.
Christian Wolff’s contributions to the history of psychology cannot
be overstated. He was responsible for the placement of psychology
9 Bell, German Tradition of Psychology, 19.

10 Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1995), 150.
within a system of knowledge in the early eighteenth century and, in

addition to relegating psychology to special metaphysics, he provided a
theoretical justification for dividing it into the subdisciplines of empirical
psychology (which he understood to be “about the soul in general, what
we namely perceive of it”) and rational psychology (“about the essence
of the soul and of the spirit in general”).11 Wolff remained a reference
point for most of the eighteenth century, both in Germany and beyond
its borders,12 even as the status of psychology shifted such that it was
no longer primarily understood as a subdiscipline of metaphysics.13
It is important to keep in mind, however, that when speaking about
psychology’s relation to metaphysics and its status as “science,” one
needs to pay close attention to how these terms are defined and which
philosophers they are associated with. With regard to the question of
metaphysics, Eschenmayer and Herbart each negotiated an individual
relationship with Kant, as the following sections of this chapter will
make clear. With regard to the question of psychology as “science,”
even though Herbart’s insistence on a mathematically informed
psychology responds to criteria defined by Kant, one should recall
that older definitions in circulation still have a role to play. Wolff,
for example does not define a “science” in terms of mathematical
principles. He believed that psychology was already a “science,” if by
science one means “the capacity to demonstrate,” as he writes in the
German Metaphysics.14 Matt Hettche describes how, for Wolff, “science is
a disposition or ability of the human mind to conceive the facts of reality
in an ordered and structured way” and that “individual sciences” like
psychology “are simply the various sets, or subsets of demonstrable
facts.”15 With a similar emphasis, Klaus Sachs-Hombach has argued that
the growth in popularity of empirical psychology during the eighteenth
century was spurred by a growing skepticism toward “non-fact-based
11 See “von der Seele überhaupt, was wir nehmlich von ihr wahrnehmen” (106)
and “von dem Wesen der Seele und eines Geistes überhaupt” (453) in Wolff,
Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott.
12 The authors of the French Encyclopèdie, which could be considered paradigmatic
for the context in mid-eighteenth-century France, refer to Christian Wolff in the
entry on “Psychologie.”
13 See E. Scheerer’s entry on “Psychologie” in Historisches Wörterbuch der
Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 7 (Basel: Schwabe &
Co, 1989), col. 1601–02.
14 This reference to paragraph 383 of the Deutsche Metaphysik is quoted in the entry
for “Christian Wolff” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Matt Hettche,
“Christian Wolff,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/
wolff-christian/, accessed May 30, 2017, 12:28 p.m.
15 Hettche, “Christian Wolff.”
research,”16 although the question of what constitutes a “fact” in this

context is by no means a simple one.17 We could take, as an example
of the polemical position in favor of “fact-based” empirical research
of the mind, Karl Philip Moritz’ journal, Gnothi seauton oder Magazin
zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Know Thyself or the Magazine of Empirical
Psychology), founded in 1783. This journal was supposed to contain
only “true facts,”18 and it featured contributions by nonspecialists about
“childhood memories, dream reports, reflections on language, stories of
misfits, and accounts of various tics and quirky behaviors.”19
Eschenmayer and Herbart are also interested in psychological
“facts,” although not necessarily in the sense that Moritz has in mind.
For Eschenmayer, the self-consciousness is itself the most certain,
indisputable and fertile Factum.20 So too is man. Empirical psychology,
he writes,
can allow the human to emerge before its eyes as fact and
accompany him step by step from the elementary relations up
through the maximum of his development.21
Herbart’s approach—and terminology—is somewhat different: whereas

Eschenmayer takes as his point of departure the sheer “fact” of
consciousness, Herbart prioritizes the “facts” of consciousness.22 His
Psychology as Science, though reliant on the awareness of one’s own
mental states, refers to “facts” with considerably less frequency than
Eschenmayer, perhaps due to a greater focus on active mental processes.
For Herbart, the activity of the mind is of much greater interest than
mental “content.”
Both Eschenmayer and Herbart could be considered sympathetic
to the position described by Daniel Robinson in An Intellectual History
of Psychology as a “point of agreement between rationalists and
16 Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 31.

17 See Michael House’s description of this problem in his essay, “Fictional
Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the Magazine for Empirical
Psychology and Beyond,” in Fact and Fiction. Literary and Scientific Cultures in
Germany and Britain, ed. Christine Lehleiter (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2016), 175–98.
18 Quoted in Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Philosophische Psychologie, 34.
19 Andreas Gailus, “A Case of Individuality: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Magazine
for Empirical Psychology,” New German Critique 70 (Winter 2000): 67–105, 71.
20 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 257.
empiricists” that survives through the behavioral psychology of the

twentieth century:23
This common feature may best be labeled “mentalism.” The

leading architects of empiricism all based their epistemologies
upon what seemed to them to be the fixed dispositions of the
mind. … Their philosophies were explicitly designed to account
for the facts of mental life. Although all agreed that the mind is
furnished by the senses, they agreed as well that philosophy’s
task was to determine how this occurred and what it implied.
The empirical tradition, therefore, is in no sense anti-mental,
notwithstanding its emphasis on perception.24
Robinson’s assessment points, albeit indirectly, to a key concern of

this chapter, one closely linked to the use of the lever: the question of
quantification. To his description of philosophy’s “task” to determine
the “how” and the “what,” we could add two questions that defined
Herbart’s study of mental phenomena: their quantity and duration.
These concerns place Herbart squarely within the tradition of
psychometrics and also offer a useful point of contact with Eschenmayer,
even if the latter’s “quantitative” thinking has more to do with the lever
as an instrument of ratio and proportion.
Psychometrics is also one of the most interesting and influential
concepts of eighteenth-century psychology, one with significant
consequences for the history of the lever in nineteenth-century
psychology. It is associated with the idea that some aspects of
the mind, such as thoughts and feelings, could be quantitatively
modeled, and by the end of the eighteenth century, it was central to a
discussion of whether or not psychology could achieve the status of an
independent science. In an essay on the historical basis for Herbart’s
use of mathematics in psychology, David E. Leary reminds us that Kant
“denied the possibility of measurement in psychology because, as he
maintained in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, psychological
phenomena have only the one dimension of time.”25 As we will see in
the following discussion, there are other quantifiable (if not always
measureable) “dimensions” of interest to Herbart apart from a temporal
one, such as the number of thoughts one could be aware of at a given
23 Robinson, Intellectual History, 150.

24 Robinson, Intellectual History, 150.
25 Leary, David E. “The Historical Foundation of Herbart’s Mathematization
of Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 150–63,
153.
time, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the rapidity with
which individual thoughts crossed above or were repressed below the
“threshold of consciousness.”26
It should be clear by now that by 1800, the state of psychology as
a field could no longer be categorized simply in terms of empiricism
and rationalism. Sachs-Hombach identifies three theoretical opponents
to Herbart’s psychology and begins his list with faculty psychology
(Vermögenspsychologie), whereby the mind is understood as a collection
of separate functions. As Wolman describes in the Historical Roots of
Contemporary Psychology, around 1800,
The soul was believed to be immortal, the body perishable.

Psychology was the study of the soul. The soul was divided into
distinct parts that performed distinct functions. Hence the theory
of mental faculties, such as thought, sensation, and conation, with
conation being divided into desire, feeling, and will.27
Scheerer has noted that the idea of psychological faculties did not come
without a recognition of various difficulties attached to it. These include
the problem of how to understand the materiality or immateriality of
“soul” or “mind,” as well as the relationship of “faculty” and “force”
(Kraft). The latter also concerns itself with the question of whether
various mental activities could be reduced to a single “force,”28 a key
term for Herbart’s psychology.
The second of the opponents Sachs-Hombach lists is the “idealism
of freedom” supported by Kant and Fichte. For Herbart, he says, they
stand in the way of a scientific psychology because they “either remove
or discard a large portion of psychological facts of universal legality
through the dogma of the so-called transcendental freedom of will or
they declare this legality as a mere illusion.”29 This characterization
is certainly true, as one can read in the Psychology as Science (see
paragraph 84, for example), but when one turns to the broader question
of Herbart’s relationship to Kant, the answer becomes much more
complicated. Here, the best reference is Frederick Beiser’s study of
Neo-Kantianism, which devotes an entire chapter to “Johann Friedrich
Herbart, Neo-Kantian Metaphysician.” Beiser describes how even
though Herbart rejected central Kantian themes, including that space
26 This is a frequently recurring figure in Herbart’s psychology. See, for example,

Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 292 and passim.
27 B. B. Wolman, “The Historical Role of Johann Friedrich Herbart” in Historical
Roots of Contemporary Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 29–46, 29.
28 Scheerer, “Psychologie,” col. 1603.
and time are a priori intuitions, that acts of synthesis are the origin of the
unity of the manifold, that the mind is divisible into cognition, desire
and taste, that there are mental faculties, that there are a priori concepts
and intuitions, and that reason is the source of moral obligation, he still
describes himself as a “Kantian.”30
That leaves, according to Sachs-Hombach, just one more opponent:
the nature philosophy of Schelling and Eschenmayer. He describes
how Herbart critiques the scientific method of nature philosophy
because of its reliance on the concept of an intellectual intuition.31
Here, too, the devil is in the details. Herbart’s critique of intellectual
intuition in Psychology as Science does not allow us to ignore the fact
that, as the chapter on nature philosophy has shown, Schelling’s and
Eschenmayer’s nature-philosophical positions are far from identical.
As we will see below, Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts relies
upon a “threefold structure of mind developed by Tetens and Kant,”32
a structure that Schelling also incorporates in his notion of the “three
powers” (Potenzen) of the finite, infinite, and eternal. In contradistinction
to both Schelling’s “powers” and Herbart’s “forces,” however,
Eschenmayer prefers to think in terms of patterns and structures, that
is, an “architectonics of the mind.”33 Those familiar with the landscape
of German Romanticism might argue that Eschenmayer’s willingness
throughout his career to let clairvoyance, animal magnetism, and dream
play a role in his thinking makes him more suitable for a dialogue with
thinkers such as Carl Gustav Carus, Lorenz Oken, and Gotthilf Heinrich
von Schubert, rather than with Herbart. Those other contributors to
Romantic psychology do not, however, share Eschenmayer’s affinity
for mechanical figures. I would also like to underscore the fact that my
approach to Eschenmayer—as in the readings of German Romantic
thinkers Schlegel and Novalis from the previous chapter—will have
little to do with the Romantic tropes of dream and animal magnetism
mentioned above. Instead, what this chapter pursues is a new reading
of Eschenmayer that, as was the case with Schlegel and Novalis,
uncovers a trajectory to his thinking that has, up until now, received
little attention. It is precisely this new discovery–that the “Romantic
psychologist” is, in his way, just as “mechanically minded” as Johann
Herbart–that motivates the readings of this chapter.
The acceptance of “force” as a valid term for the description of mental
processes is another point of connection and distinction between Herbart
30 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 90.

and Eschenmayer. Both refer frequently to force, but for Herbart a mental
Vorstellung34 will act like a force, whereas for Eschenmayer force is the
objective corollary to subjective processes: “The opposition between
knowing and being is expressed objectively (im Objectiven) between
force and burden.”35 For Herbart, who understands the mind in terms
of an interplay of forces, it makes no sense to subdivide it artificially
into the activities of “representing, desiring, [and] feeling” because “it
tears apart the indivisible unity of the mind,”36 an idea he shared with
German Romantic writers Novalis and Schlegel. As Herbart attempts to
balance metaphysics with empiricism, he is careful to divest his notion
of soul of anything resembling substance: it has “no where, no time”
and is “not known.”37 For all of their apparent differences, however,
Herbart and Eschenmayer are joined in one important regard: that the
phenomena and activities of the soul are to be understood as unified.38
34 Boudewijnse, Murray, and Bandomir note that Vorstellung is alternately

translated as idea, concept, and presentation and describe it as “the basic
unit of mental life . . . thereby more comparable to a mental ‘atom’ than to a
mental body”; the “continuous process of builing up, breaking down, and
again building up” of Vorstellung explains “the everchanging flux of conscious
experiences.” See Geeart-Jan Boudewijnse, David J. Murray, Christina A.
Bandomir, “Herbart’s Mathematical Psychology,” History of Psychology 2.3
(1999): 163–93, 164.
35 “Das Gegensetzen zwischen Wissen und Seyn ist ausgedrückt im objectiven
zwischen Kraft und Last” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448).
36 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 137.
37 Beiser, Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 137. Huemer and Landerer provide this
additional perspective: “Although arguing from a metaphysical point of view,
Herbart comes very close to the empiricist conception of the human mind as a
tabula rasa. Neither an implicit cognitive architecture, nor structures of any sort,
is or are initially present in the mind. Everything that unfolds, unfolds by means
of presentations and their combination.” See W. Huemer and C. Landerer,
“Mathematics, experience, and laboratories: Herbart’s and Brentano’s role in
the rise of scientific psychology,” History of the Human Sciences 23.3 (2010): 72–94,
75. Günter Gödde states that “in express opposition to idealist philosophy and
psychology, Herbart pursued the project of grounding a psychology on ‘realist
metaphysics’” and that “although he remained beholden to metaphysics,
he founded an ‘explanatory psychology’ which tried to comprehend the
regularities of mental life with the methods of natural science.” See Gödde, The
Unconscious in German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Ciaran Cronin, in Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed.
Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 205–06.
38 Herbart’s Lehrbuch zur Psychologie is useful for understanding his terminological
distinctions. There one can read that the soul (Seele) “is called spirit (Geist), in as
far as it represents (vorstellt), and mind (Gemüth) in as far as it feels and desires.”
See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämtliche Werke,
vol. 4, ed. Karl Kehrbach (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne, 1891), 118.
Part One: Eschenmayer’s Psychological Lever

Eschenmayer’s intellectual contributions are often neglected in histories
of philosophy and psychology alike. In the Edinburgh Critical History
of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, he is barely accorded a bibliographic
reference, and there is no mention made of him in B. H. Hergenhahn’s
otherwise thorough Introduction to the History of Psychology. Matthew
Bell, in his book on German psychology in the long eighteenth century,
dismisses Eschenmayer’s psychology when he writes that it is as
“entirely hypothetical as Herbart’s psychometrics.”39 Bell does give
a brief outline of the tripartite structure of Eschenmayer’s treatise
on psychology, only to reduce each part to the work of some prior
philosopher: the empirical section is derivative to Schelling’s System,
the section on “pure psychology” is “effectively a digest of Kant’s
three critiques,” and the “final and most bizarre” section, on “applied
psychology,” is “neither psychological nor applied.”40
It is possible that the peculiar amalgam of mechanical theory and
speculative thinking has long been overlooked in Eschenmayer’s work
because it made him difficult to categorize within traditional histories,
whether of Romanticism, philosophy, or psychology. When we consider
the fact that the influence of mechanics in Eschenmayer’s thinking has
already proven valuable to the prior chapters on Romanticism and
nature philosophy, it is no exaggeration to say that the present study
celebrates him as one of the unsung heroes in the history of the lever.
We can also acknowledge Eschenmayer’s efforts to award psychology
pride of place in the disciplinary hierarchy of the early nineteenth
century, as a glimpse into the preface and introduction to the Psychology
in Three Parts will show. There, he writes that he wants to give the
historically undervalued study of psychology the acknowledgment it
deserves after it has been “slumbering in the shadow of philosophy.”41
With reference to the empirical science of chemistry and Stahl’s
terminology,42 Eschenmayer argues that psychology needs to be
removed from the “aggregate state” of empirical knowledge and
granted a more prominent theoretical status.43 Eschenmayer also makes
the analogy between geometry’s significance for the entire field of
analysis and psychology’s for philosophy: “It leads us into the nature

41 Eschenmayer, Psychology in drei Theilen, iii.
42 Eschenmayer does mention Stahl’s name on several occasions in the Psychologie,
but only with reference to their shared opinion that the soul “builds” the body,
an idea Eschenmayer considers in the context of organic theories of procreation.
43 Eschenmayer, Psychology in drei Theilen, iii.
of the elements.”44 The language he uses about the status of psychology

becomes even more polemical when he calls it “the elementary science
or the root of all philosophy.”45 These fundamental claims bear
repeating, because they relate directly to the lever: if psychology is to
surpass philosophy in importance, and if, as I argue, the lever is to be
recognized as the structuring principle of Eschenmayer’s philosophy,
then the Psychology asks to be read as a manifesto proclaiming the
lever’s apotheosis predicted in correspondence with Schelling.
Let us first consider Eschenmayer’s particular view of the distinctions
between empirical, pure, and applied psychology as described in the
preface and introduction to the Psychology in Three Parts. The lever only
makes a brief appearance in the introductory description of empirical
psychology, but will have an increasingly important role to play with
regard to the other two branches. The section of the introduction devoted
to empirical psychology nonetheless invokes the conceptual apparatus
associated with the lever when it proposes an understanding of the
mind and mental processes in terms of equilibrium. Eschenmayer’s
definition of empirical psychology in the introduction will sound
familiar to most readers, even as his metaphorical language anticipates
the importance of mechanical theory for his thinking:
If we observe the expressions and appearances of the soul as

objects of inner experience and observation, as they flow from the
soul, join one another, gain and lose in intensity and extensity,
and as they present themselves in various preponderances
[Uebergewichte] or equilibrium, without inquiring into the nature
of the ground from which they flow, without, in a word, returning
to the source of all mental phenomena, and if we investigate
the living spiritual dynamic in its general laws, then we have
empirical psychology.46
44 “Sie führt uns in die Natur der Elemente ein” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei
Theilen, iii). Eschenmayer does not specify what, exactly, these elements are
comprised of.
46 “Betrachten wir Aeusserungen und Erscheinungen der Seele als Gegenstände
innerer Erfahrung und Beobachtung, wie sie aus der Seele fliessen, sich
verbinden, an Intensität und Extensität ab- und zunehmen, in verschiedenem
Uebergewichte oder Gleichgewicht sich darstellen, ohne nach der Natur des
Grundes zu fragen, aus dem sie fliessen, ohne, mit einem Wort, an die Urquelle
aller geistigen Phänomene zurückzugehen und die lebendige geistige Dynamik
in ihren allgemeinen Gesezen daselbst zu erforschen, so erhalten wir die
empirische Psychologie” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 3). Leary
reminds us that it was Leibniz who “introduced the concept of intensity into
As Eschenmayer understands it, empirical psychology focuses on

the status of mental phenomena as given data. Within this branch of
psychology, he discourages us from undertaking any kind of genetic
approach that would cause us to investigate the origin of the spectacle
that takes place before the eyes of the mind. At the same time, the
objects of experience and observation can be said to move in and out
of equilibrium, as physical bodies do. In the references to equilibrium
and the notion of phenomena that gain in intensity and extensity, we
can also see the basic elements necessary for a psychometrics, which
will form a surprising point of connection to Herbart’s statics and
mechanics of the mind.
The second part of Eschenmayer’s system, “pure” or “rational”
psychology,” takes as its point of departure the many phenomena
described by empirical psychology and investigates their laws and
principles. The focus of pure psychology is, accordingly, to “seek out the
main traits of the three basic functions thinking, feeling, and willing and
make them the object of a higher reflection.”47 Even if Bell has pointed
out that the constellation of concepts in this section is Kantian in flavor
(and here we see that Eschenmayer is more accepting of psychological
“faculties” than Herbart), there is much to Eschenmayer’s thinking
about pure psychology that has little to do with Kant at all, as will
become evident when he connects those same basic concepts to an even
more foundational concept whose components are knowledge, self,
and being.
In the third and final section on “applied psychology”—the one Bell
finds decidedly “bizarre”—we see the degree to which Eschenmayer’s
thinking still owes a debt to Schelling’s nature philosophy. He bases this
section on the supposition that “all objectivity” is merely “a reflection
of subjectivity” and that the “subjective forms and proportions we
behold are at the basis of all phenomena of the universe.”48 In his Ideas,
Schelling had argued for a basic compatibility between the structures
of the mind and those found in nature. Eschenmayer’s description of
applied psychology in the introduction continues in much the same
vein when he insists that “objectivity, with its real formulae, gradually
transforms into subjectivity, with its ideal formulae.”49 Yet we can
the German intellectual tradition through his discussions of the concept of force
and the concept of the clarity of ideas” (Leary, “Historical Foundation,” 154).
47 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 8–9.
49 Eschenmayer refers to the assumption that objectivity is only a “reflection”
(Widerschein) of subjectivity and that the basis of phenomena of the universe is
comprised of “subjective forms and proportions” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in
drei Theilen, 10).
also see Eschenmayer’s willingness to defy Schelling when he takes

advantage of a mathematical example quite familiar to us by now:
The law of the lever, that burden [Last] and force [Kraft] are
inversely related, like their distance from the hypomochlion, is
without a doubt an objective law of nature, given in intuition, and
still remains objective in its reduction to the law of proportionality
of mass and speed, which we understand to be the basic law
of mechanics.50
It speaks to the prominence of the lever in Eschenmayer’s thinking

that it already appears in the introduction to Psychology in Three Parts.
After the passage cited above, he begins step by step to deconstruct
and defamiliarize the lever when referring to applied psychology,
transforming the lever into an instrument of reason by bringing its
component parts into the realm of the subject. For instance, Eschenmayer
requests that we contemplate the proportional velocity of the two lever
arms. He reminds his readers that velocity is nothing other than “space
divided by time” but continues by stating that “already here the law
begins to become subjective, in that space and time are merely forms of
intuition.”51 Where the law of the lever “really” becomes subjective, he
continues, is when we reduce this ratio into its smallest components.
What if one were to reduce the length such that 1/∞: 1 = 1: ∞? His
answer: “This proportion is entirely subjective; for the infinite is no
object of experience.”52
Eschenmayer then sums up his argument:
If the at first entirely objective law of nature is finally returned to

the purely subjective proportion, then I am also entitled to say that
the law of the lever is basically only the objective impression of
50 “Das Gesez [sic] des Hebels, daß Last und Kraft sich verkehrt verhalten, wie
ihre Entfernung vom Hypomochlion, ist ohne Zweifel ein in der Anschauung
gegebenes objectives Gesez in der Natur und bleibt auch noch objectiv in seiner
Reduction auf das Gesez der Proportionalität der Masse mit der Geschwindigkeit,
was wir als Grundgesez der Mechanik kennen” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in
drei Theilen, 11).
51 “Hiebei fängt das Gesez schon an subjectiv zu werden, indem Raum und
Zeit blose [sic] Anschauungsformen sind” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei
Theilen, 11).
52 “aber es wird ganz subjectiv in der Reduction auf die in uns liegende
allgemeinste Proportion, daß das Product des unendlich kleinen in das
unendlich große gleich dem Endlichen seye, oder: 1/[∞]: 1 = 1: [∞]. Diese
Proportion ist ganz subjectiv; denn das Unendliche ist kein Gegenstand der
Erfahrung” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11).
a proportion that lies within ourselves. And thus nature appears as

the impression [Abbild] of an original image [Urbild] lying within us.53
If pure psychology investigates the laws governing the empirical

phenomena of the soul, according to Eschenmayer, then applied
psychology reveals a deeper affinity between objective laws of nature
and subjective phenomena that is one of the guiding principles of
Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy.
The cases cited above also testify to the fact that the status of the
lever is already put into question in the introduction to Eschenmayer’s
Psychology. On the basis of these initial passages, it could be argued
that it is merely one example, chosen as if by chance of the many
correlations between the structures of the ego and the objects of the
world—between objective laws and subjective proportions. As the
following pages will argue, however, the lever is not simply “an”
example for Eschenmayer. It is the example: part of a conceptual
apparatus of utmost significance for the structure and content of his
argument and, as we will see, for how his argument is given historical
justification. Now that we have a sense of the big picture—that the
lever and its conceptual apparatus have a role to play in each of the
three parts of Eschenmayer’s psychology—let us take a closer look at
what, precisely, the lever is doing in each.
The Lever in Empirical and Pure Psychology

Even though Eschenmayer’s thinking about equilibrium is most
innovative in the section on applied psychology, we need to understand
in greater depth the role it plays in the first two sections of his treatise,
because the function of equilibrium in the final section is a synthesis
of what comes before. Of the various faculties treated in the section
on empirical psychology, the faculty of feeling is the one worthiest
of attention according to Eschenmayer. In this case, we can see that
what Herbart considers a vice—an arbitrary rendering of the “soul”
in spatial terms—is used to philosophical advantage by Eschenmayer
when he situates the faculty of feeling both “in the middle row
of the faculties” and “in the middle point of the entire human,” a
position that raises the possibility of an analogous relationship to
the fulcrum.54 With direct reference to Kant, he identifies this faculty
53 “Lässt sich nun das anfänglich ganz objective Gesez der Natur zuletzt auf die
rein subjective Proportion zurückführen, so bin ich auch berechtigt, zu sagen,
daß das Gesez des Hebels im Grunde nur der objective Abdruck einer in uns
selbst liegenden Proportion seye. Und somit erscheint die Natur als Abbild eines in
uns liegenden Urbildes” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 11–12).
with the concepts of “pleasure and displeasure” (Lust und Unlust)

we have already had occasion to consider in the context of the essay
on negative magnitudes. The centrality of this faculty operates for
Eschenmayer within a model of equilibrium because it is here that
one finds “the absolute unity or the absolute equilibrium of the entire
mental [geistigen] organism in man.”55 Absolute equilibrium should
not be understood here as “original” as in the models of Fichte and
Schelling, in the sense of a primary, undifferentiated state. Instead, we
can conceive of it in the sense of an absolute mechanical equilibrium
articulated in Eschenmayer’s earlier texts as a state when “two forces
are completely cancelled, so that they no longer remain an object for
mathematical construction or for analysis,” or as a constant point of
departure and return among a stream of disruptions.56 In this context,
Eschenmayer also uses a metaphor with aesthetic and mechanical
overtones: the plucking of a string: “Thus what enters into the faculty of
feeling plucks as it were all of man’s strings at once, and its harmonious
or disharmonious tone, that is, pleasure or displeasure, is felt in the
entire human.”57 Eschenmayer mobilizes his description of the faculty
of feeling as a point of departure for a series of ever farther-reaching
comparisons, whereby man is always in the middle point, between
traditional dichotomies such as spirit and nature, mind and body. To
be sure, models that advocate the centrality of the human in the grand
scheme of things are common in the history of ideas and not necessarily
mechanical in nature. When the subsequent steps of Eschenmayer’s
argument are taken into consideration, however, one can argue that the
mechanical model of equilibrium is prefigured here. Though it does
not yet receive the full exposition, it will—in the section on applied
psychology, the illustration Eschenmayer gives of the lever as figure
of navigation between the material and the immaterial fits well with
the dichotomies listed above and also recalls, albeit indirectly, Hegel’s
definition of sublation: “All mental oppositions in man are mediated
through the ego . . . thus in mechanics, for example, the hypomochlion on

57 “Was daher ins Gefühlvermögen eingeht, das zieht gleichsam alle Saiten des
Menschen auf einmal an, und ihr harmonischer oder disharmonischer Klang,
d. h. Lust oder Unlust wird im ganzen Menschen empfunden” (Eschenmayer,
Psychologie in drei Theilen, 86). Caroline Welsh has also shown in her book
Hirnhöhlenpoetiken (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003) how around 1800 acoustical
phenomena were used by Herder, Sömmering, Ritter, Kant, Blumenbach and
numerous others (she does not mention Eschenmayer) to model the soul in
various ways and that the figure of a vibrating string had an important role to
play.
the lever is that which mediates between force and weight.”58 If, then, it
is one of the defining characteristics of man that he is “everywhere . . .
positioned between oppositions,” whether they be in the objective world
(outside of us), in the organism (with us), or in subjectivity (in us), then
the lever is the symbol of that mediating position.59 Indeed, as we have
seen in prior chapters, the lever is a symbol for mediating processes
in general, a way of reflecting on the structure of language itself. Such
patterns of opposition exist between different realms, such as spirit
and nature, the soul and the body. They can also exist within a single
realm, where Eschenmayer classifies them as general, particular, and
individual. He writes that when one understands nature as a physical
world order, then the highest, most general, opposition is between light
and gravity; or, that a particular opposition in nature is that of acid and
base and we find individual oppositions between positive and negative
electricity, magnetism, etc.60 We can also see in these cases the degree
to which Eschenmayer is able to marshal concepts beyond the realm of
mechanics to strengthen his argument. For Eschenmayer, the practical
value of these oppositions lies in their “construction,” the product of
which includes not just the opposing pair itself but also “a third” whose
job it is to mediate back and forth. For instance, the power of zero
mediates between the positive and negative exponents and correlates
to the concept of the finite between the infinitely small and large, “Thus
in the mechanism,” Eschenmayer adds, “the hypomochlion is the
mediating element on the lever between force and burden.”61
Eschenmayer’s thoughts on empirical psychology might leave one
with the impression that the lever is merely an arbitrary comparison
chosen to illustrate for a basic structure that informs both the subjective
and the objective, but this is far from the case. A closer look at the
section on pure psychology is required to see that the lever does not
merely have the status of an analogy, but rather the concretization of
a central structuring principle. In other words, the lever is not simply
exemplary for Eschenmayer, it is paradigmatic in the sense of being a
governing idea, much as we saw in those passages from introduction to
this volume where the lever was thought to provide a unifying principle
useful for understanding the operations of the other simple machines.
Pure psychology, as Eschenmayer informs us, is responsible for
identifying and describing the laws of the mind, based on the “natural
58 “Alle geistige Gegensätze im Menschen sind durch die Ichheit vermittelt . . . .

So ist im Mechanismus z. B. am Hebel das Hypomochlion das Vermittelnde
zwischen Kraft und Last” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 188).
59 Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 186–87.
history of man” which was the “occupation” of empirical psychology.62

We could take, as an example, one of the most fundamental “objects”
of study that the mind has to offer: the self-consciousness (das
Selbstbewußtseyn). Eschenmayer’s definition of self-consciousness as
“a knowledge of the self about being” (ein Wissen des selbst um das Seyn)
might not seem particularly revolutionary from a psychological point
of view.63 The novelty lies in what Eschenmayer does with each of the
three elements of knowledge, self, and being. Of these three, the self,
or ego, is the “copula” and “middle term” that balances the opposing
concepts of knowledge and being. Eschenmayer emphasizes that what
he is positing here is a relationship of equivalence, not identity (i.e., not
like Fichte, he writes, for whom being and knowledge are identical).
In Eschenmayer’s discussion of pure psychology, we learn the
degree to which he is willing to pursue his comparison between
equilibrium among the components of his model of the self and the
law of equilibrium as it applies to the mechanical balance or lever.
Though being and knowing have a relation to each other through their
mutual relation to the self, Eschenmayer is careful to point out that
this common relation still allows for the preservation of differences:
“What matters here is that we do not confuse a relational equivalence
with a complete identity” (Psychologie in drei Theilen).64 In other words,
we are dealing with a model of relative equilibrium, and to illustrate it,
Eschenmayer constructs a diagram that symbolizes the act of balancing
between something material (a weight) and something abstract (force):
Figure 4.1 Eschenmayer, Psychology in Three Parts, 288.
Force (Kraft) and weight (Last) are in this diagram. The fact that
they balance each other out relatively in the hypomochlion without
becoming identical to each other illustrates the basic idea of the lever
as a figure of mediation and equivalence. It is important in this context
to keep in mind that philosophy distinguishes between a relative as
opposed to an absolute equilibrium. Relative is the equilibrium on the

64 This is with reference to Fichte: “Es kommt hier darauf an, daß wir ein
beziehungsweises Gleichsezen nicht mit einer vollkommenen Identität
verwechseln, was mehrere Philosophen gethan haben, wie z. B. Fichte, welcher
Seyn und Wissen identisch setzt” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 287).
lever, when weight and force lie beyond the hypomochlion, and for that
reason are also object of intuition and calculation. If one brings weight
and force closer and closer together, and finally so close as to collapse
with the hypomochlion, then equilibrium becomes absolute and thus
has nothing more to offer the intuition.
Eschenmayer then writes,
In a similar relation, the three factors that lie in the proposition

[Satz] of the self-consciousness can be portrayed:
Knowledge. Self. Being.65
These two passages also herald the use of diagrams for the first time
in Eschenmayer’s Psychology. The first diagram visualizes the model
of the mechanical lever, and it is presumably in relative equilibrium
because “force” and “weight” have not collapsed in the hypomochlion.
This diagram resembles a physical lever and functions accordingly,
and it also instates its own artificiality as diagram and visualizes the
theoretical construct that the physical lever embodies. It projects the
“object of intuition” in print.
The second diagram—Knowledge. Self. Being.—only deserves the
designation because of the italics and white space that set it off from
the main text, and because it is meant to recall the first diagram in its
linear arrangement of three terms, whereby the outside two compete
in their relations with the central term. The diagrams each function
doubly: first, they show how the apparatus of the lever has the ability to
make connections between abstract terms and things that are material
or accessible to the senses. They also show, through the repetition of
the second diagram, that equilibrium itself can serve as a hermeneutic
tool, and that it is possible to make comparisons between equilibrium
states to advance our understanding of how the mind works through
a relationship of equivalence between the immateriality of knowledge
and the materiality of being.
Eschenmayer instrumentalizes his own diagram when he responds
to a question he asks of himself “where the enlivening [belebende] central
point of the entire system or the egoity [Ichheit] of the general consciousness”
should be located.66 He continues by thinking through this problem
65 “In einem ähnlichen Verhältniß lassen sich die drey Factoren, die in dem Satz
des Selbstbewußtseyns liegen, darstellen” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei
Theilen, 288). Eschnemayer then typesets the triad of knowledge, being, and self
so that they are graphically distinct from the rest of the page.
66 “Wohin fällt der belebende Centralpunct des ganzen Systems oder die Ichheit des
gemeinen Bewußtseyns?” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 404).
in various ways: where the ego is on a scale between the positive and
the negative, or between the “higher” and the “lower,” or between
experience and ideas.67 Central to this entire organization is the faculty
of feeling, and in particular: “self-feeling” (Selbstgefühl):
This self-feeling is the general hypomochlion, to which knowledge

and being, like force and burden, are related. Within it rests the
absolute equilibrium of the entire system and all relative equilibria
of the entire intellectual sphere strive to return to it. From this
point, all philosophy can orient itself, both for the external and
for the internal world.68
Within this passage one can find encapsulated everything of importance

for the history of the lever—and also for the Archimedean point. We
look toward the lever and its conceptual apparatus to help explain
how things work. We look away from the lever—and implicitly take its
fulcrum point to be our Archimedean point: the firm point from which
we orient ourselves—in our pursuit of further knowledge.
The Lever of Applied Psychology

In his section on applied or “practical” psychology, which he heralds
as a “new experiment” in thinking, Eschenmayer returns to the model
of the self as lever (where the “self” is the hypomochlion between the
two arms of “knowing” and “being”).69 Although the phrase “applied
psychology” appears as early as the 1790s in Karl Philipp Moritz’s
Magazine for Empirical Psychology, Eschenmayer’s treatise represents
one of the first attempts to think systematically about it in depth.70 As he
states in the introductory paragraph, the word “applied” is used here
in the same sense as a mathematician—or indeed, any theorist—would
take theoretical propositions and apply them to cases drawn from
experience. For our purposes, it is remarkable to see to what extent that

68 “Dieses Selbstgefühl ist das allgemeine Hypomochlion, zu welchem Wissen und Seyn,
wie Kraft und Last sich verhält. In ihm ruht das absolute Gleichgewicht des ganzen
Systems, und alle relative Gleichgewichte der ganzen geistigen Sphäre streben auf
dasselbe zurück. Von diesem Punct aus kann sich die ganze Philosophie orientiren,
und diß sowohl für eine Aussen- als Innenwelt” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei
Theilen, 405).
70 The only person who seems to have thought systematically about an applied
psychology before Eschenmayer is Johann Karl Wezel, in his Grundriß eines
eigentlichen Systems der anthropologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: in der Dykschen
Buchhandlung, 1805). In Wezel’s text, however, there is no clear distinction
made between the terms “empirical” and “applied” psychology.
which is “applied” in this section of Eschenmayer’s psychology has to

do with the conceptual apparatus of the lever, with a special emphasis
on the concept of equilibrium:
The general formulae and equations of mathematics, for example

the theorem of equilibrium in terms of the product of mass and
speed, find their application in mechanics, statics, and astronomy.
Entirely in this sense I place a pure and applied psychology in
opposition to each other.71
Equilibrium, a concept deployed in mechanics, statics, and astronomy,

has come in Eschenmayer’s Psychology to embody the figure of
application itself, an idea that also played a role in the chapter on
the lever in Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes. It thereby becomes
an illustration for how quantitative models can be seen to influence
methodological approaches: metaphors of equilibrium have become
metaphors of method.
The purpose of an applied psychology is much more than a
unidirectional application of theory to experience. According to
Eschenmayer, it takes as its premise that “laws of thought” (Geseze [sic]
des Denkens) become objective in “physical nature” and that there is
complete congruence between the intellectual “realm of freedom” and
the physical “realm of necessity.”72 The discovery of this congruence
may well begin with experience. The counterpart to Schelling’s “first
philosopher” who learned how to distinguish ideas from objects, the
immaterial and the material,73 is Eschenmayer’s investigator of nature
(Naturforscher) who gathers elements of experience and observations of
the world, orders them, and tries to find the laws governing them even
as, unbeknownst to him, he is being led by the general law that exists
within himself. Once again, the special case that illustrates this general
point is the lever:
The physicist believes, for example, that he invented the law of

the lever. The psychologist, however, shows him the prototype of
it already in the law of self-consciousness and can demonstrate
71 “So finden die allgemeine Formeln und Gleichungen der Mathematik, z.B. der
Satz des Gleichgewichts der Masse mit der Geschwindigkeit in der Mechanik,
Statik, Astronomie ihre Anwendung. Ganz in diesem Sinne stelle ich eine reine
und angewandte Psychologie einander gegenüber” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in
drei Theilen, 423).
73 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 12.
to the physicist that such an expression of equilibrium in nature

must necessarily take place.74
We have here a very clear statement about the primacy of psychology

over physics and philosophy, but there remains the potential for
confusion. If, according to Eschenmayer, the structures of the mind are
supposed to exist prior to all else, then even if we find them reproduced
with pleasing regularity in nature, it remains unclear what status
should we accord the mechanical language and logic that informs his
thinking. There is, after all, a long tradition, reaching back to pseudo-
Aristotle, that conceives of mechanical tools as somehow “contrary
to nature” (when nature is understood in the most general sense of
everything living) because they augment human agency to beyond its
natural (unenhanced) limits. In Eschenmayer, the very object that is
“against nature” is repositioned such that the relationship of opposition
no longer holds. Just as we saw in Romanticism, Eschenmayer imagines
a collapse between human and tool.
Such reflections are far from Eschenmayer’s own stated concerns;
however, he insists upon a fundamental symmetry between the mind
and the material world and reminds us that already “the deduction
of logic showed that the law of the self-consciousness in its subjective
form expresses precisely what the law of the lever does in its objective
form.”75 Eschenmayer’s analogical thinking provokes some interesting
speculations: for example, that “all laws of thinking are reflected in
the laws of motion.”76 This is an overlooked point of affinity between
Eschenmayer and Herbart, and an idea that the latter will work out
in much greater mathematical detail. Eschenmayer also muses that
the opposition of force and weight mirrors that of knowledge and
being, that the mediating function of being is expressed in the lever’s
hypomochlion, and that “the equation of knowledge and being is
expressed through the relative equilibrium of weight and force.”77
Eschenmayer does not appear inclined to use the lever to generate
74 “Der Physiker glaubt etwa, er hätte das Gesez des Hebels erfunden.
Der Psycholog aber zeigt ihm den Prototyp davon schon im Gesez des
Selbstbewußtseyns auf, und vermag dem Physiker zu demonstriren, daß ein
solcher Ausdruck des Gleichgewichts in der Natur nothwendig statt finden
müsse” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 435–36).
75 “Die Deduction der Logik erwies, daß das Gesetz des Selbstbewußtseyns in
seiner subjectiven Form eben das ausdrücke, was das Gesez des Hebels in
seiner objectiven Form” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448).
76 “alle Geseze des Denkens in den Gesezen der Bewegung sich reflectiren”
(Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 425).
knowledge directly, however, at least not in the sense of using it to

uncover new relationships as the German Romantics do. Instead, for
Eschenmayer, the lever as instrument of reason seems designed to
maximize the “force” of those relationships already in place, and in that
regard it tends to point back toward itself, to hold itself as exemplary.
An illustration of such mechanical advantage occurs in another
passage that refers to the law of the lever (i.e., the law that states that
the lever or balance is in equilibrium when the ratio of weight and force
is the inverse of their distance from the hypomochlion). According to
Eschenmayer, this is also applicable to the self-consciousness:
Knowledge namely becomes an even greater force, and stands in

equilibrium with an even greater weight, the more it is removed
from the standpoint of the self, and thereby approaches the
standpoint of ideas. Thus the law of self-consciousness expresses
in its objective form precisely that which the law of mechanics does
in its objective form, and this correspondence is not a contingent,
but rather a necessary one. Nature cannot appear to us otherwise
than in such forms that are innate [eingebildet] to our mind.78
According to this passage, applied psychology can augment the force

of knowledge by revealing that self-knowledge leads to an ability to
remove oneself from the standpoint of self. This passage also reveals
that at the heart of Eschenmayer’s “applied psychology” one finds an
“applied equilibrium.” After its appropriation from the physical world
in the service of philosophical theory, it might at one time have been
sufficient to say that equilibrium’s instrumental value simply lies in the
connection of material and nonmaterial concepts, but Eschenmayer’s
psychology proves that this is no longer the case. Equilibrium has been
promoted to a more prominent position in the conceptual apparatus of
the lever: it has been allowed to become an instrument of reasoning in
its own right. As the above examples have shown, however, this does
not mean that the mechanical balances and levers have been left behind.
Rather, they have remained, as diagrams and figures of thought, and as
a reminder that the concept of equilibrium itself has become necessary
78 “Das Wissen nemlich wird auch eine um so grössere Kraft, und steht mit einer
um so grössern Last im Gleichgewicht, je mehr es sich vom Standpunkt des
Selbsts entfernt, und eben dadurch sich dem Standpunkt der Ideen nähert.
So drückt das Gesez des Selbstbewußtseyns in seiner objectiven Form gerade
das aus, was das Gesez der Mechanik in seiner objectiven Form, und diß
Zusammentreffen ist kein zufälliges, sondern nothwendiges. Die Natur kann
und gar nicht anders erscheinen, als in solchen Formen, die unserm Geiste
eingebildet sind” (Eschenmayer, Psychologie in drei Theilen, 448).
for continued negotiations between the physical world on the one hand
and the world of abstract forces, knowledge, and consciousness on
the other.
Excursus: A Surprising Application

Readers such as Matthew Bell, and others who find the thoughts
contained in Eschenmayer’s “applied” psychology too ridiculous
to be of any pragmatic use, might be surprised to learn that the
nineteenth century witnessed several serious efforts in that regard.
Walter Wuttke, who has compiled one of the most detailed accounts of
Eschenmayer’s intellectual contributions to date,79 has identified three
different contexts in which Eschenmayer’s psychological theories were
applied to political situations. The first regards the new constitution for
Wurtemberg, which was drafted as it transitioned from a principality to
a kingdom in 1805. Wuttke reports how Karl August von Wangenheim,
the trustee (Kurator) of the Tübingen University, wished to transform
the unified estates of the country (Landstände) into two chambers, a
decision influenced by Eschenmayer’s tripartite psychology.80 Wuttke
writes that Karl August
overtakes as well the structure of [Eschenmayer’s] system, that

means, the polar dichotomy and the dynamic mediation of the
faculties and their potencies in an area of indifference . . . the
Democratic and the autocratic moment oppose each other in the
thusly partitioned state organism as polar forces and compel
through this polarity a mediating force, which is law in the area
of the physical, the organic, and the spiritual world orders. In the
force field of the state, whose poles form on the negative side the
subjects and on the positive side the regent, this task of mediation
falls to the aristocratic moment, which to a certain degree is
conceived of as a liberal and thereby a fulcrum point of a lever, one
which constantly guarantees equilibrium, upon which the people
grasp as dragging burden and the regent as pressuring force.81
79 See Wuttke, “Materialien,” 255–96.

80 Wuttke argues that even though the discussions took place in 1815, and
Eschenmayer’s Psychology in Three Parts was first published in 1817, the ideas
were already in circulation based on Eschenmayer’s university lectures.
81 “[E]r übernimmt . . . auch die Struktur seines Systems, d.h. die polare
Gegensätzlichkeit und die dynamische Vermittlung der Vermögen und ihrer
Potenzen in einem Indifferenzbereich . . . Demokratisches und autokratisches
Moment stehen sich in dem so gegliederten Staatsorganismus als polare
Kräfte gegenüber und erzwingen durch diese Polarität eine vermittelnde
Kraft, wie das im Bereich der physischen, der organischen und der geistigen
Wangenheim even extended his particular vision of the lever of power to

include Germany as a whole, which would establish “the independent
middle states” as a fulcrum point “between the two great powers
of Prussia and Austria.”82 Wuttke shows how Eschenmayer offers
himself as mediator (Vermittler) in these debates, thereby realizing the
connection of the human to the fulcrum point, as well as the individual
and the social, in ways that even German Romanticism might not
have anticipated.83
In short, we have seen that Eschenmayer’s 1817 treatise, Psychology
in Three Parts as Empirical, Pure, and Applied, takes up several of the
narrative threads in the discussion on equilibrium and develops them.
This treatise exhibits some of the most advanced theoretical thinking
we have witnessed thus far about equilibrium’s function to connect
the material and nonmaterial, and as a concept that becomes an object
of visualization in its own right. The psychologist is the persona who
embodies the central arguments Eschenmayer develops. Even if a
nature philosopher shares the perspective that all laws of nature are
corollaries of subjective intuitions, it is the psychologist who takes the
extra step of showing that this structure is replicated in psychological
theories on the structure of the brain itself.
There is also, in Eschenmayer’s thinking, a clear relation of reciprocity
between lever and agent. The lever is a useful tool as well as a model
that advances the construction of knowledge, but it also imprints
itself upon the human, which recalls Leroi-Gourhan’s argument that
it is the tool which informs and “invents” the human, rather than the
human being the one who creates the “technical.”84 So deeply is the
lever embedded in Eschenmayer’s thinking, that we are entitled to ask
whether it is more the case that the lever is a natural fit in a discursive
environment whose conceptual framework is structured in terms
Weltordnungen Gesetz ist. Im staatlichen Kraftfeld, deren Pole auf der negativen
Seite die Untertanen, auf der positiven Seite der Regent bildet, fällt diese
Vermittlungsaufgabe dem aristokratischen Moment zu, das gewissermaßen
als ein liberaler und damit ein ständiges Gleichgewicht garantierender
Drehpunkt eines Kräftehebels gedacht wird, an dem das Volk als zerrende Last
und der Regent als drückende Kraft angreifen” (Wuttke, “Leben und Werk
Eschenmayers,” 273–74).
82 Wuttke, “Leben und Werk Eschenmayers,” 274.
83 Wuttke, “Leben und Werk Eschenmayers,” 274.
84 See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, for a summary
of Leroi-Gourhan’s argument as well as the succinct comment, “the technical
inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive
as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics,
from Plato to Heidegger and beyond.” Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus,
trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137.
of equilibrium and disequilibrium, or whether it is Eschenmayer’s

continued reflection on the lever itself, as instrument of reason, that
motivates the entire project. The next section will offer an intriguing
counterexample to Eschenmayer’s psychological lever by focusing
on Johann Herbart’s equally idiosyncratic use of it. Herbart shares
Eschenmayer’s belief in a unified vision of the mental phenomena
and activities, but his philosophical background, methods, and use
of analogical thinking will offer new perspectives in the history of the
lever and its conceptual apparatus.
Part Two: Johann Herbart’s Statics

and Mechanics of the Mind
There is good reason to recall Fichte’s assertion about the impossibility
of defining an external theoretical perspective while one is rooted “in
the world” when we observe the difficulties Herbart faced with his
critique of faculty psychology. “Instead of engaging with the further
dismembering of the faculties of the soul,” he writes, “let us linger for
a while in the middle of them, in order to look for a standpoint from
where the whole can be viewed to some degree as whole.”85 Such a
drive for synthesis and a perspective of the whole also manifests itself
in other ways, such as when Herbart calls for more collaboration among
the disciplines: “At the present time, the mathematicians are here and
the philosophers are there—as if one could be an authentic investigator
of the truth without being both at once.”86 Herbart’s desire for synthesis
informs his work on psychology, which, as was mentioned at the
beginning of the chapter, extends from the Textbook on Psychology of 1816
to the Psychological Investigations of 1839 and 1840. Whereas the early
writings lay the groundwork by providing a theoretical foundation for
the concepts of force, statics, and mechanics, it is in the later writings
that we find prolonged reflections on the lever that seek to justify
theoretically why it is well suited for the tasks Herbart envisions for
it. With regard to the lever in Herbart’s oeuvre, there are two questions
85 “Anstatt uns schon jetzt auf die weitere Zerstückelung der Seelenvermögen
einzulassen, verweilen wir noch eine Zeitlang in der Mitte zwischen ihnen, um
einen Standpunkt zu suchen, von wo aus sich das Ganze einigermaassen als
ein Ganzes überschauen lasse” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 17). Jonathan
Crary also notes that Herbart’s psychology is one of his earliest attempts to
“demonstrate and preserve Kant’s notion of the unity of mind.” See Crary,
Techniques of the Observer (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 100.
86 “Jetzt sind hier Mathematiker, und dort sind Philosophen;—als ob man, ohne
beydes zugleich zu seyn, ein ächter Wahrheitsforscher seyn könnte” (Herbart,
“On the Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics to Psychology,”
xiii).
to be answered: the first concerns the role the lever plays in Herbart’s
quest for a unified perspective of psychological phenomena, while
the second addresses the specific contribution Herbart makes to the
conceptual history of the lever that has informed each chapter of this
study. In order to comprehend Herbart’s special role in the history of
the lever and related narratives (such as the history of psychometrics
and the pervasive interest in quantifying mental phenomena), we as
readers are also required, to the extent that we are able, to achieve the
elusive view of “the whole” in Herbart’s thinking.
In Herbart’s Textbook of Psychology, which was substantially revised
between its first publication in 1816 and the year 1834, when it achieved
its final form, we can see inscribed the musings of a thinker who
struggles to come to terms with his relationship to Kant. On the one
hand, there is plenty of evidence testifying to the fact that Herbart is still
deeply embedded in the terminology of Kantian faculty psychology:
the first paragraph of the first edition focuses entirely on faculties of
imagining, feeling, and willing. In the second section, however, which is
devoted to an “explanation of psychological phenomena, derived from
the hypothesis of Vorstellungen87 as forces,” Herbart’s thinking goes in
a much different direction. This second section was, in the 1834 edition
(and perhaps as a sign of Herbart’s growing intellectual independence),
moved to the beginning of the manuscript. In it, Herbart does not
disavow the existence of a soul, but he clearly distances himself from a
spatial concept of it. “The soul is not somewhere,” he writes, even if it is
our convention to speak of it in a place and time; nonetheless, one must
think of it as somehow locatable and Herbart solves this conundrum
a compromise that seeks to balance both requirements: “This place is
the simplex in space, or the nothing in space, a mathematical point.”88
It is here that Herbart first takes advantage of a mechanical model.
Within the “simplex” of the soul there are “simple” though “dissimilar”
beings existing in a relation to each other “that one can characterize
with help of a comparison from the corporeal world as pressure
87 Herbart’s concept of the Vorstellung, which will be explained in greater detail in

the following pages, has been translated as idea and representation, neither of
which is satisfactory. I prefer to keep the custom of those writers who retain the
German word Vorstellung.
88 “Dennoch muss sie in dem Denken, worin sie mit andern Wesen
zusammengefasst wird, in den Raum, und zwar für jeden Zeitpunct an einen
bestimmten Ort gesetzt werden. Dieser Ort ist das Einfache im Raume, oder das
Nichts im Raume, ein mathematischer Punct” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie,
363).
and counter-pressure.”89 What are these “beings” (Wesen), exactly?

These are the Vorstellungen, which Herbart also describes as the “the
self-preservations of the soul.”90 Just as in material nature there is an
opposition of attractive and repulsive forces, so too do the Vorstellungen
interact with each other as forces: “Vorstellungen become forces,”
Herbart writes, “in that they resist each other” when they come into
conflict; each resistance is an “expression of force.”91 According to this
model, it stands to reason that some are stronger than others. When
one force yields to another, it is transformed from an active Vorstellung
into the mere striving to become one. Some readers might recall the
imagery of Gottfried Leibniz when Herbart refers to the process of one
force yielding to another in terms of a “darkening,” since Leibniz also
used “brightness” and “darkness” to describe ideas as they emerge and
disappear from our consciousness.92 The quantification of a Vorstellung,
according to the logic of this metaphor, is connected to the “degree of the
darkening of the entire Vorstellung.”93 For Herbart, then, the “statics and
mechanics of the mind” is a field of inquiry that concerns itself “with the
calculation of equilibrium and of the movement of the Vorstellungen,”94
where “movement” is the physical metaphor that correlates to the
darkening or lightening of our minds.95
89 “Zwischen mehrern, unter sich ungleichartigen einfachen Wesen giebt es ein

Verhältniss, das man mit Hülfe eines Gleichnisses aus der Körperwelt als Druck
und Gegendruck bezeichnen kann” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 364).
90 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 364.
91 “Vorstellungen werden Kräfte, indem sie einander widerstehen. Dieses
geschieht, wenn ihrer mehrere entgegengesetzte zusammentreffen” (Herbart,
Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 369).
92 Leibniz is another reference point for understanding Herbart’s psychology.
From Leibniz, Herbart also borrows the concept of apperception, the conviction
that there is a unity of mind, the notion that mind can be reduced to power and
force. See Leary’s discussion in “Historical Foundation.”
93 The picture is a bit more complicated. If a Vorstellung is partially repressed,
so that some amount of it is turned into pure striving, then, as Herbart warns
us, we should not think of this part as somehow “broken off” from the entire
Vorstellung. Rather, it has a particular size, which describes a degree of the
darkening of the entire Vorstellung (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 370).
94 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 370.
95 For an overview of Herbart’s intellectual predecessors Leibniz, Wolff, Maupertuis,
and Kant, see David E. Leary’s article, “The Historical Foundation of Herbart’s
Mathematization of Psychology” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
16.2 (April 1980): 150–63. See also Erik C. Banks, “Extension and Measurement:
A Constructivist Program from Leibniz to Grassman” in Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 44 (2013): 20–31. Banks shows how Herbart’s theory can
be seen as an attempt to seek “an explicit construction of extension from the
unextended points and forces in a physical monadology” (20).
Once the assumption has been made that Vorstellungen behave

like forces when they interact with each other, it becomes desirable
to develop laws of equilibrium to describe their behavior. Given that
Herbart conceptualizes the mutually limiting behavior of forces in
terms of a kind of restraint or inhibition (Hemmung), his statics of the
mind is primarily concerned with two issues: the sum of inhibition
and the ratio of inhibition among various Vorstellungen. The former is
“the burden to be distributed, which arises from the opposition of the
Vorstellungen.”96 If one knows this quantity, writes Herbart, as well as
the relation “in which the various Vorstellungen give way to it,” then
one can, “through an easy calculation of ratio, determine the static
point of every Vorstellung, and that means the degree of its darkening
in equilibrium.”97 With this description of the mechanical behavior of
Vorstellungen, we find ourselves in a very similar environment to the
beginning of Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes, when the discursive
conditions were primed for the lever to make its appearance. In Kant’s
essay, the topic under discussion was “real opposition,” which he
illustrated through a series of mechanical examples. The analogy
between Kant’s essay on negative magnitudes and Herbart’s Textbook on
Psychology holds because each is concerned with a balance of “forces” in
opposition to one another.
Two related concepts, equally essential to Herbart’s conceptual
apparatus, are the “static” and “mechanical” thresholds. The “static
threshold,” which Herbart often refers to as the “threshold of
consciousness,” simply indicates which mental content we are aware of
(= above the threshold) or are not aware of (= below the threshold) in
our conscious minds. Unlike many of his predecessors, however, it was
Herbart’s firm belief that there are mental operations that take place
without our being aware of them. As Lowry phrases it, “[Herbart’s]
notion here was that, even though a mental content might be held in
equilibrium outside of consciousness, it could still exert effects upon
consciousness.”98 This conviction compelled Herbart to develop the
concept of a “mechanical threshold”: “So long as a suppressed mental
content remains above the mechanical threshold, it will contribute to
96 “Jene ist gleichsam die zu vertheilende Last, welche aus den Gegensätzen der
Vorstellungen entspringt” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 371).
97 “Weiss man sie anzugeben und kennt man das Verhältniß, in welchem die
verschiedenen Vorstellungen ihr nachgeben, so findet man durch eine leichte
Proportions-Rechnung den statischen Punct einer jeden Vorstellung, d h.
den Grad ihrer Verdunkelung im Gleichgewichte” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur
Psychologie, 371).
98 Richard Lowry, The Evolution of Psychological Theory: A Critical History of Concepts
and Presuppositions, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1971), 68.
what goes on inside consciousness, even though it is itself unconscious.99

In this context, Herbart also summons the concept of “latency” to
refer to those Vorstellungen which, though still active, exist below the
threshold of consciousness.100
It is also in the Textbook of Psychology that Herbart introduces the
first of many equations designed to model the activity of the mind. The
equation and a sample graph are represented below:101
1.0
0.8
0.6
s = S(1 – et)
S
s
0.4
0.2
1 2 3 4 5
t
Figure 4.2 Graph that models the relation of the “sum of inhibition”
relative to time. Self-produced using Mathematica.
In this equation, “S” equals a quantity Herbart refers to as the Summe

der Hemmung or “sum of inhibition,” which he defines in Psychology
as Science as “the quantum of representing which, taking together
those representations working in contrast, must be inhibited.”102 The
“t” stands for time and the “e” is the mathematical constant that is the
base of the natural logarithm. The lowercase sigma on the left refers
to “that which has been inhibited from the collected Vorstellungen in
99 Lowry, The Evolution of Psychological Theory, 68.

100 Günter Gödde helps clarify the distinction between the static and mechanical
thresholds for Herbart when he writes that the threshold is not just a
spatial metaphor but also “a mathematically measurable factor within
his realistic psychology”; for Gödde, the static threshold is that point “in
which a representation, even though it is no longer in consciousness, can
nevertheless re-enter consciousness without encountering major resistance”
and a “mechanical threshold” as that “in which a representation is completely
suppressed from consciousness for a certain time.” See Gödde, The Unconscious
in German Philosophy and Psychology, 205.
101 See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 1st ed., 106.
102 “Die Summe der Hemmung ist das Quantum des Vorstellens, welches von
den einander entgegenwirkenden Vorstellungen zusammengenommen, muss
gehemmt werden” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 282).
this time.”103 In Herbart’s words: “When the sum of inhibition lowers,

the as of yet uninhibited quantum of the same is in every moment
proportional to that which is sinking.”104
This equation condenses several of Herbart’s basic ideas. First
and foremost, it attests to his belief in the unity of psychological
phenomena. It symbolizes the fact that “the easily comprehended
metaphysical reason, why opposed Vorstellungen resist each other,
is the unity of the soul, whose self-preservations they are.”105 It also
allows for the mechanical lever to appear, by way of a comparison. The
above formula, which contains the “seed” of important psychological
investigations for Herbart, is a simplification of the sort which could
never be found “in reality” within the human mind. But it is precisely
this genre of simplification that aligns it, Herbart adds, with the
mathematical lever,106 a construction of pure relation, devoid of all
material constraints. This connection, though incidental to the work of
the Textbook on Psychology as a whole, is itself a seed that will grow and
germinate throughout Herbart’s career.
In Herbart’s case, the lever only begins its conceptual work once
the “apparatus” (a word he himself uses) is firmly in place. In the
1822 essay “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit, Mathematik
auf Psychologie anzuwenden” (On the Possibility and Necessity of
Applying Mathematics to Psychology), whose programmatic title
echoes Kant’s 1763 “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative
Magnitudes to Philosophy,” Herbart emphasizes that it is possible to
take advantage of mathematics in psychological investigations, even
when a direct numerical measurement is not possible.107 He even goes
a step further to argue that the “tool” of mathematics has always been
quite flexible and has never shied away from inventing useful fictions,108
103 “das in dieser Zeit von sämmtlichen Vorstellungen gehemmte” (Lehrbuch zur
Psychologie (1816), 106).
104 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816), 131.
105 “Der sehr leicht begreifliche metaphysische Grund, weswegen entgegengesetzte
Vorstellungen einander widerstehen, ist die Einheit der Seele, deren
Selbsterhaltungen sie sind” (Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816): 136).
106 See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816): 112.
107 Boudewijnse, Murray, and Bandomir remind us that mathematics had already
made an appearance in Herbart’s work in the 1811 essay, “Psychological remarks
on the theory of tones” and that “for Herbart . . . psychology was intimately
bound in with the science of mental acoustics” (Boudewijnse, Murray, and
Bandomir, “Herbart’s Mathematical Psychology,” 170). This suggests an
interesting connection between Herbart and those Romantic-era psychological
models discussed by Caroline Welsh in Hirnhöhlenpoetiken.
108 Johann Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit, Mathematik
auf Psychologie anzuwenden,” in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke,
and he offers the center of gravity (Schwerpunkt) and the mathematical

lever as examples. At the same time, he claims that these fictions are
“real aids”109 to our understanding.
The previous chapter described how Schelling’s philosophy links
the concept of equilibrium to the physical or material origin of abstract
thought by inscribing it in a narrative that allows it to negotiate between
the material and the nonmaterial. Herbart’s essay on the application of
mathematics to psychology addresses a similar problem, but comes up
with an altogether different response. For Herbart, what is at stake is
the viability of a large-scale model—the entire notion of a “statics and
mechanics of the mind.” He needs to justify his decision to conceive of
mental processes in terms of the interaction of forces. In this situation,
he wants a model flexible enough not to be bogged down with a literal
interpretation: its strength lies in its metaphorical value. “With the
word equilibrium [Gleichgewicht],” he writes, “no one thinks about
weights [Gewichte]; the forces and their directions can be whatever
they [i.e., the forces and directions, J.H.] want.”110 Herbart’s distinction
between material and immaterial concepts of equilibrium reminds us
of the definitions of “mathematical” as opposed to “physical” levers
discussed in the introduction, and it also recalls the conceptual levers
of German Romanticism. What matters, he insists, is “whether their
effectiveness cancels [aufhebt] reciprocally in such a way, that the entire
state has to remain as it is.”111 Herbart is even willing to go quite a bit
further: just as equilibrium does not require us to think of weights per
se in order to be a useful concept, the same holds true for mechanics
in general: “There is just as little necessity, with the words statics and
mechanics, to think of the corporeal world” because these sciences
“find a place everywhere, where there is a system of forces, which
oppose one another, so that they do or do not cancel each other.”112 By
vol. 5, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and
Sons, 1890), 91–122, 101.
109 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit.”
110 “Bei dem Worte Gleichgewicht denkt Niemand an Gewichte; die Kräfte
und deren Richtungen mögen sein, welche sie wollen” (Herbart, “Ueber die
Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 110).
111 “es kommt nur darauf an, ob ihre Wirksamkeit sich dergestalt gegenseitig
aufhebt, das kein weiterer Erfolg daraus entstehen kann, und dass der ganze
Zustand so bleiben muss, wie er ist” (Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und
Nothwendigkeit”).
112 “Eben so wenig ist es nöthig, bey den Worten Statik und Mechanik an die
Körperwelt zu denken . . . diese beyde Wissenschaften finden überall Platz,
wo es ein System von Kräften giebt, die einander entgegenwirken, so dass sie
einander entweder aufheben oder nicht” (Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und
Nothwendigkeit”).
deliberately distancing himself from material concepts of equilibrium

and with an expansive notion of what a statics and mechanics of
the mind might encompass, Herbart constructs an “apparatus”113 by
gathering a cluster of concepts broad enough to embrace an entire field
of psychological phenomena and their theoretical descriptions.
As was the case with the other authors discussed in this study,
Herbart’s apparatus lends itself to thinking in terms of an absolute
metaphor, given that his psychological levers operate as guiding
models—in this case, within the broader concerns of a statics and
mechanics of the mind—and materialize as a certain kind of “approach”
to thinking about psychology. Herbart also shares an additional affinity
to Eschenmayer, whose willingness to test the limits of the lever led
to some productive conclusions. Herbart thought that we learn from
those moments in which we become aware of the lever’s limits (as
well as one’s own limits). He admits, for example, that he is concerned
about a potential misunderstanding and provides us with the following
illustration: suppose, in conversation with a mathematician, we describe
a situation where two equally strong opposed forces “reduce each other
to null.”114 If we apply this same situation to the Vorstellungen of the
mind, Herbart explains, it would be tempting to come to the “false”
conclusion that two equal and opposed thoughts are the “negative” of
each other and “annihilate” each other completely. This is clearly not the
case, he concludes, because no Vorstellung is the “negative” of another;
“each taken for itself is purely positive.”115 In other words, in such a
situation as Herbart describes, both Vorstellungen would be present
in equal measure. It would seem, though, as if Herbart confuses the
description of a physical environment with its net effect. Once again,
Kant’s essay can be of service. After all, when two equal and opposite
winds keep a ship from moving—the example Kant provided us with—
the “effect” is one of standstill even if both winds are still physically
present. The same holds true for forces in a physical environment.
Herbart’s claim that no single Vorstellung is the negative of the other
might seem strange to us since what he insists upon is already a given in
mechanical theory. To understand the emphasis of his argument, it helps
to interpret it within a broader “construction project”: that of the ego.
Two Vorstellungen in opposition already share something: a restraint,
or inhibition. Yet such an image already belongs in the category of
“fictions”—however useful—because the reality of the soul is much more
complex. Vorstellungen do not merely interact in simple pairings, but
113 Herbart, “Ueber die Möglichkeit und Nothwendigkeit,” 101.

also in clusters and long, complex rows, an image that Eschenmayer

also invokes. This implies that the model of two Vorstellungen who share
a “burden” (Last) and are joined both through the physical metaphor of
opposing forces and the mathematical metaphors of balance and ratio,
has a provisional status. The most intricate equations to emerge from
Herbart’s mathematical psychology will account for the “distribution”
of force along potentially infinite rows of Vorstellungen. The total
complex of these rows informs the collective activity of the ego.
Consider, for example, the following two passages from the first
volume of Herbart’s Psychology as Science (1824):
Depending on how the rows of Vorstellungen are composed, which

meet and intersect in the ego; and according to how they are
excited in every particular moment: according to this is oriented,
how the human sees himself in this moment.116
and
The most manifold Vorstellungen must cancel each other, for the
egoity to be possible.117
The “mechanics” of being human—what we feel, what we do, how

we perceive ourselves—depends upon the entirety of the complex
interaction of forces. To accept Herbart’s psychology is therefore to
embrace an all-pervasive mechanical model for the environment of the
mind: “The soul [Seele] is . . . not originally a representing [vorstellende]
force, but rather it becomes one depending on the circumstances. . . .
Just so the Vorstellungen, taken separately, are not forces at all, but
they become so by virtue of their opposition to one another.”118 It is
within this environment—where all phenomena, through metaphors
of movement and the tension of opposition, become mechanical and
thereby allow themselves to be described in terms of forces—that the
lever finally arrives for good: not simply as an offhand remark, but
a model that functions heuristically as an instrument of reason. The
116 “Je nachdem die Reihen von Vorstellungen beschaffen sind, welche im Ich
zusammentreffen und sich kreuzen; und je nachdem sie in jedem bestimmten
Augenblick aufgeregt sind: darnach richtet es sich, wie der Mensch sich in
diesem Augenblick sieht” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, vol. 1, 247).
117 “Es müssen also die mannigfaltigen Vorstellungen sich unter einander aufheben, wenn
die Ichheit möglich seyn soll” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 251).
118 “Die Seele ist demnach nicht ursprünglich eine vorstellende Kraft, sondern sie
wird es unter Umständen” (Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 253).
context is the second volume of Psychology as Science (1825), in a passage

where Herbart is discussing feelings and affects.
In Herbart’s view, feelings, like Vorstellungen, are located in
consciousness, and they can also be pushed above and below the
threshold of consciousness. The important point, he emphasizes, is to
consider the net effect of those forces working either together or against
one another:
Putting aside for the moment several closer determinations,

which cannot yet be considered here, the most essential one can be
expressed by the following example: let us think of a lever and the
conditions of its equilibrium. Let us suppose that this equilibrium
were to be disturbed: then [the lever] would incline toward one
side or the other; one could thereby compare the rising and
sinking of Vorstellungen, thus the objective determinations of the
consciousness, which are not called feelings. But that equilibrium
can occur, while very different forces, at very different distances
from the lever’s support, are applied to it. These do not turn the
lever; nonetheless it would feel them, if it had consciousness; and
feel ever differently, depending on which greater or lesser weights
are applied to it, so or so.119
It is a remarkable passage for a number of reasons. One can appreciate,

for example, the image of feelings that counterbalance one another,
some stronger, others less so. One can also admire the fact that the
lever, which has long been implicit in Herbart’s statics and mechanics
of the mind, with its emphasis on forces, static and mechanical
thresholds, and states of equilibrium, finally makes an appearance:
it rises above Herbart’s threshold of consciousness, as it were. The
true surprise, however, lies in the fact that this passage irrevocably
inscribes Herbart within the tradition that, up until now, has been most
119 Mit Beyseitsetzung mancher nähern Bestimmungen, die hier noch nicht
eingesehen werden können, lässt sich das Wesentlichste durch folgendes
Gleichniss erläutern: man denke sich einen Hebel, und die Bedingungen
seines Gleichgewichts. Gesetzt, dies Gleichgewicht wäre verletzt: so neigte
sich derselbe nach der einen oder andern Seite; damit vergleiche man das
Steigen und Sinken der Vorstellungen also die objectiven Bestimmungen / des
Bewusstseyns, welche nicht Gefühle genannt werden. Aber das Gleichgewicht
kann bestehn, während sehr verschiedene Gewichte, in sehr verschiedenen
Entfernungen von der Stütze des Hebels, an ihm angebracht werden. Diese
drehen den Hebel nicht; gleichwohl würde er sie fühlen, wenn er Bewusstseyn
hätte; und immer anders und anders fühlen, je nachdem grössere oder kleinere
Gewichte an ihm so oder anders angebracht wären (Herbart, Psychologie als
Wissenschaft, vol. 2, 76).
prominently represented by those writers such as Schlegel, Novalis,

and Eschenmayer, who identify the lever with the ego. For Schlegel
and Novalis, the general (encyclopedic) notion of conceptual levers
in the mind was complemented by the image of the individual as
hypomochlion or fulcrum point. Herbart asks us to envision a more
intricate scenario: a mise en abîme where a model of consciousness is
embedded within the conscious mind and where this part comes to
stand in for the whole. In some ways, it is the reverse of the Romantic
gesture: instead of designating the individual as fulcrum, we grant the
instrument its own agency—while containing it within the environment
of the human mind. This is a “fiction” to be sure, of the kind Herbart
has identified elsewhere as coming to aid of the illustration of an idea,
but a powerful one nonetheless.
Questioning Equilibrium
Up through this point, we have observed the increasing presence of
the lever in Herbart’s mechanical psychology. In order to understand
why the lever becomes such an integral part of Herbart’s thinking
about the psyche, however, we need to take a step back from the
psychological context and study the underpinnings of Herbart’s
theoretical perspective more closely. In the introduction, I argued that it
is the particular use of mechanical concepts and theory that makes the
cases from the cultural history of the lever in this study so interesting.
Herbart is no exception. In the second volume of his General Metaphysics
(1829), he specifically rejects one mechanical explanation of the lever
in favor of another. It is a decision with important ramifications for
his final synthesis of mechanics and psychology in the Psychological
Investigations of the 1830s.
Herbart’s General Metaphysics addresses many of the basic mechanical
concepts that have informed his psychology up through that point,
including attractive and repulsive forces. It also demonstrates a marked
interest in the material substrates of mechanical instruments. This
means that Herbart also feels compelled to account for the transmission
of forces, such as through the string of a pulley or the arms of a lever.
Herbart’s (qualified) “material turn,” which questions the degree to
which material concerns are integrated into the “fiction,” is remarkable
for someone who has, up through this point, championed mathematical
models for their ability to provide “helpful fictions.” This emphasis on
material constraints not only broadens Herbart’s understanding of
the lever, it can also be read as an attempt, in light of reactions against
German Naturphilosophie, to make his writing about the lever sound
like less of a “speculative physics.” A closer look at Herbart’s preferred
theory of the lever in the General Metaphysics will offer some insight as
to what motivates this development.
Suppose, Herbart says, we consider the most familiar way of looking

at the lever, where one imagines equal weights at equal distances from
the fulcrum. We infer that the lever is in equilibrium and can also
ascertain other equilibrium states by increasing the distance of the
weights from the fulcrum, and we can eventually postulate that an
inverse relation of weight and distance will also achieve an equilibrium
state. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it does not
account for the “why and how” behind the results “for the imagined
weights, successively applied and removed again are only present in
thoughts. The real lever is in equilibrium without these fictions.”120 Yet,
Herbart also rejects another explanation, offered by the mathematically
inclined nature philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries, as unsatisfactory. In a
section of his “mathematical nature philosophy” dedicated to the “pure
theory of motion,” Fries posits experience (Erfahrung) as the basis of
theory and refers to the laws of the lever. Fries admits that the proof of
the lever’s theory of equilibrium is difficult compared to the simplicity
of the intuition that accompanies the observation of the lever, and when
he defines the lever’s law he thinks in terms of the respective velocities
of each lever arm and their distance from the fulcrum point.121 Herbert
dismisses this case because, in his opinion, it has more to do with
illustrating the concept of the moment of inertia than a theory of static
equilibrium. Instead, he turns to a material explanation, the case of a
pulley’s rope, upon which each point resists tearing.
Just like this, the inflexible line on the lever has to transmit
the pressure of the weight from place to place. Without this
transmission and renewal of pressure, by virtue of which the
lever would have to break in every point if it was too weak, no
weight would act on the other and the cooperation of both, which
lies in their equilibrium, could not emerge. It is therefore precisely
the sum of the pressures, which stands in relation with the length
of the lever arm, and which needs to be compensated for through
the inverse relation of weights.122
120 “Der wirkliche Hebel ist im Gleichgewichte ohne diese Fictionen.” See Herbart,
Allgemeine Metaphysik, vol. 2, in Johann Friedrich Herbart’s sämmtliche Werke, ed.
Karl Kehlbach, vol. 8 (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer and Sons, 1893), 294.
121 Jakob Friedrich Fries, Die mathematische Naturphilosophie nach philosophischer
Methode bearbeitet (Heidelberg: Mohr and Winter, 1822), 406.
122 Gerade so wie jeder Punct des Fadens, sofern er durch seinen materialen
Zusammenhang im Stande ist ein Gewicht zu tragen, sich aus der Gefahr
des Zerreissens selbst die Kraft des Tragens erzeugt,—eben so muss auch
die unbiegsame Linie am Hebel von Ort zu Ort den Druck des Gewichts
fortpflanzen. Ohne diese Fortpflanzung und Erneuerung des Drucks, vermöge
Regardless of whether one is speaking of statics or dynamics, the passage

makes clear that equilibrium is something that “emerges” for Herbart. His
emphasis on the material constraints of the lever arms makes apparent a
dimension that has been absent so far in this chapter, but one which we
have already glimpsed in the discussion of Kant: that of time, because
the equilibrium of a system over time can also be understood more
precisely as a sequential process of moving from one state of equilibrium
to another. Having arrived, this concept will remain at the forefront of
Herbart’s final mediations on the lever in the Psychological Investigations.
Unavoidable Comparisons
In the two volumes of the Psychological Investigations, published in 1839
and 1840, we find programmatic statements on the state of the field of
mathematical psychology—which Herbart squarely situates between
metaphysics and empiricism—and on the lever itself, in an essay titled
“Ueber Analogien in Bezug auf das Fundament der Psychologie” (On
Analogies in Relation to the Foundation of Psychology). To be sure, he
writes, one has to be careful to avoid analogies that are far-fetched. At
the same time, “it is a different matter with such almost unavoidable
comparisons, which are already summoned with the expression
statics.”123 This includes comparisons with the lever: “For the lever is
certainly the first, simplest example that suggests itself, in the case of
equilibrium.”124 Unlike other instances in Herbart’s writing where the
lever was summoned to help think through a particular problem, in this
context Herbart focuses directly on the lever itself:
After more precise reflection on the lever some things have

come to mind, which will be presented here; without concern,
that it might seem too foreign. At the end of this essay it will
be shown that sufficient, and even double reason is available
to make a connection between the consideration of equilibrium
among Vorstellungen with [that consideration], which the
lever provokes.125
dessen der Hebel in jedem Puncte brechen müsste, wenn er zu schwach wäre,
würde kein Gewicht auf das andre wirken, und die Gemeinschaft beyder, welche
in ihrem Gleichgewichte liegt, könnte gar nicht entstehen. Es ist also geradezu die
Summe der Drückungen, welche mit der Länge der Hebelarme im Verhältniss
steht, und welche durch das umgekehrte Gewichte muss ausgeglichen werden
(Herbart, Allgemeine Metaphysik, vol. 2, 295).
123 Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 187.
125 “Bey genauerem Nachdenken über den Hebel hat sich nun Einiges dargeboten,
welches hier soll vorgelegt werden; ohne Besorgniss, als würde es gar zu
After summarizing various ways of looking at the lever, in language

taken almost verbatim from the General Metaphysics, Herbart returns to
the problem of the transmission of force. Whereas the General Metaphysics
spoke of a “propagation” (Fortpflanzung), however, in the essay on
analogies, the word of choice is more of a spreading or distribution
(Vertheilung). “Here already it is evident,” Herbart writes, “that the
analogy between the equilibrium on the lever and the equilibrium
among Vorstellungen acquires a somewhat more comfortable form, in
that here as there a distribution (Vertheilung) is present.”126 One should
not accept the analogy without reservation, he cautions. The question
still remains, where the equilibrium is to be found.
Herbart asks that we visualize a lever and provides us with the
following illustration:
Figure 4.3 “On Analogies,” 189.
We should imagine, that the lever is supported at point “C” and

that equal weights are hung at points “A,” “D,” “E,” and “B,” where
CA = CD and the distance CB is exactly 3CA. The “most essential” part
of this construction, for Herbart, is “that a pressure, which from one
point should act upon another remote point, must first traverse the
distance between these two points; otherwise no connection would be
present.”127 If one weight were hung from B and another, three times
greater, were hung from A, then if the lever arms were fairly short, the
lever would be almost instantly in a state of equilibrium. Now, suppose
the arms of the lever were extended in either direction indefinitely. Then,
Herbart surmises, we would have “no sudden equilibrium present all
fremdartig scheinen. Am Ende dieses Aufsatzes wird sich zeigen, dass

hinreichender, und selbst doppelter Grund vorhanden ist, die Betrachtung des
Gleichgewichts unter Vorstellungen mit derjenigen, wozu der Hebel Anlass
giebt, in Verbindung zu setzen” (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien”).
126 “Schon hier erhellt, dass die Analogie zwischen dem Gleichgewicht am Hebel
und dem Gleichgewicht unter Vorstellungen eine etwas bequemere Gestalt
gewinnt, indem hier wie dort eine Vertheilung vorliegt” (Herbart, “Ueber
Analogien,” 188).
127 “Das Wesentliche aber ist: dass ein Druck, der von einem Puncte auf einen andern
entfernten wirken soll, erst die Distanz dieser Puncte durchlaufen muss; sonst wäre
keine Verbindung vorhanden” (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 189).
at once.”128 It is a point Herbart returns to again and again: that in the

discussions of what constitutes an equilibrium state for a lever with
weights hanging on either side of a fulcrum point, scientists usually
do not stop to think about what happens when the different forces are
brought into relation on lever arms of various lengths. The category of
time is usually left out of the equation (where time refers to the relative
speed in which equilibrium could be established). The chapter on Kant
discussed the “emergence” of the zero of equilibrium in the process of
thinking and emphasized how Kant’s “mental mechanics” also allowed
for a time integral. In that case, we saw how Kant reconceptualized the
equilibrium point of static mechanics, the fulcrum point of the lever,
so that it was no longer mechanically instantaneous. This idea is an
important connection between the two thinkers, because in each case it
offers a glimpse of how the model drawn from statics might be adapted
into the lived experience of being human. In this regard, Herbart goes
even further than Kant. When he raises the idea of lever arms that are
of greatly varying lengths and emphasizes that he is interested in the
transfer of force, we see that he is thinking in more concrete terms about
how individual Vorstellungen have their own durations as they move in
and out of equilibrium.
Herbart has not yet extracted all he can from his lever analogy,
however. He returns to the comparison we are already familiar with
from the Textbook for Psychology between the movement of Vorstellungen
and their respective “lightening” and “darkening.” Now, with
reference to the description of the distribution of force along the lever
arm, he reminds us that Vorstellungen, for all that we think of them in
terms of forces entering and departing from states of equilibrium, are
not spatial entities. Their equivalent of movement—their brightening
and darkening—can, however, be quantified in terms of speed
(Geschwindigkeit), such that when a relative speed of two opposed
Vorstellungen is zero, then they are in equilibrium. Herbart then brings
the notion of speed back to the lever:
One should consider here the turning of the lever, which every
weight would effect, if the other one were weaker or closer to the
fulcrum point. One could move a weight and turning results; if one
should bring it again to the correct position, then the possibility
of turning disappears. Thus this position, which we called the
correct one, brings the possibility of movement to zero.129

129 Man denke hier an die Umdrehung des Hebels, welche jedes Gewicht bewirken
würde, wenn das andre schwächer oder dem Unterstützungspuncte näher wäre.
What distinguishes Herbart’s from all other contributions to the

history of the lever examined in this study is the flexibility with
which he moves between the mechanical object of the lever and his
psychological thinking. On the one hand, he is inspired to think of the
lever because, for him, equilibrium is a concept fundamental to the
operations of the human mind. On the other hand, certain aspects of
the lever’s mechanical theory—such as the distribution of force or the
relative speed of lever arms—become perceptible to him and relevant
to his writing because they are analogous to properties he observes in
the behavior of Vorstellungen. Throughout his writing on psychology,
Herbart concerns himself almost not at all with the actual content of
thought. What his psychology has to offer us, through the use of the
lever, is an abstraction of the lived experience of the human.
Man verrücke ein Gewicht, und die Umdrehung erfolgt; man bringe es wieder
an die rechte Stelle, und die Möglichkeit des Drehens verschwindet. Also diese
Stelle, die wir die rechte nannten, bringt die Möglichkeit der Bewegung auf
Null (Herbart, “Ueber Analogien,” 199).
Concluding Thoughts
This chapter does not conclude the history of the lever by any means,
but it does mark the final episode in the history I have chosen to
highlight, one which I hope will have changed how readers think
about the mechanical lever and concepts related to it. Just as the lever
informed the worldview of the Greek and Roman philosophers, so too
does this most simple of machines still have the ability to construct
relationships and make unexpected connections before our very eyes.
One of the most surprising realizations of this study is the fact that
the lever demonstrates such staying power at a time of increasing
technological sophistication around 1800, and that it has been mobilized
to perform in contexts that seem to have little to do with mechanics in
a traditional sense. As we have seen, the works discussed in each of the
four chapters of this study vary greatly in terms of disciplinary focus,
and I would like once again to underscore two different ways in which
the case studies speak to each other.
The common denominator of this study has been a shared interest
in connecting the activity of the lever to the human in a general sense.
A great deal of the philosophical “work” accomplished in each chapter
by the lever and its conceptual apparatus has something to do with
the phenomena of human existence. For Kant, the lever is implicated
in moral action as well as the basic production of mental images, the
dynamics of thought. For early German Romantics Schlegel and Novalis,
the lever came to stand in nuce for the essential tension of the human
as fulcrum point within the balancing act of the encyclopedia project.
In the context of German Naturphilosophie, we witnessed how Schelling
and Eschenmayer debated the limits of the lever’s applicability to life, a
debate with high stakes involving the potential death—or apotheosis—
of the lever. And finally, in the chapter on psychology, we have seen
how the lever is integral to two very different approaches defined by
the work of Eschenmayer and Herbart: whereas the former relies upon
the lever to illustrate the basic structures of human being and knowing,
the latter integrates the lever into a sophisticated and mathematically

informed model of thinking. As different as these various approaches
may be, it becomes clear that the activity of being human around 1800
is widely—if non-uniformly—equated with being a lever. What we
can conclude, then, is that in an era defined by the emergence of new
disciplines and the increasing specialization of knowledge, the lever
and related concepts such as “equilibrium” fulfill an unspoken need to
retain a central unifying principle.
The second connection between the chapters I would like to
emphasize has to do with the more ephemeral question of what the
lever “is” and “does” in the examples I have chosen to highlight in
this study. The chapter on Kant emphasized the lever as a principle of
connection and also set the stage for those contexts where a particular
set of concerns come together and concretize in the lever. A key term in
this context is that of “application.” Thinking about “application” helps
us bridge the material and immaterial regimes—the realms of physical
and mathematical levers, respectively—and also helps us understand
that the lever performs or embodies particular acts of “translation”
when its mechanical knowledge proves useful in extra-mechanical
contexts. When Kant integrates the lever into his examples of moral
action, we can see that the lever is already to some implicated within an
understanding of the human, whereby the body can be read as a kind
of “meter” for the moral mechanics of the mind.
As I argued in the introduction, the levers we observed in the Kant
chapter and the following ones are not primarily to be understood
as metaphorical in the usual rhetorical sense. Indeed, it may well be
that the tendency to categorize levers this way when they appear
outside the realm of classical mechanics has contributed to the other
roles the lever plays around 1800 being overlooked in the first place.
Yet we do the lever a disservice when we pare it down to a singular
metaphorical identification, such as the “lever of morality,” because
such a designation ignores the lever’s particular ability to transcend
and reflect on a given context, to act as an instrument of reason and
“applied” knowledge while reflecting on its own status as a figure of
application more generally that transcends any particular usage. There
is ample evidence for this in the context of the Romantic encyclopedia
project, where levers were constructed to create new conceptual
constellations, and we see a similar gesture of transcendence formulated
more radically by Eschenmayer in the context of nature philosophy.
Finally, in Herbart’s psychology, we find the admission that the lever is
somehow “unavoidable.” In that particular context, Herbart means that
in regimes where the concept of equilibrium figures so prominently in
simple scenarios with clear analogies to statics, it is logical to think
in terms of levers. At the same time, his statement can be taken as
Concluding Thoughts 193
programmatic for the examples that inform my study as a whole. The

lever, in the decades prior to and following 1800, is unavoidable. If
this fact has been slow to receive recognition, then we can assume it is
because of the presence of a blind spot, whether because of a bias against
mechanics in the midst of newer, more organically oriented sciences
and philosophies, or whether because the lever is so remarkably simple
that it has remained unremarkable all these years: a hidden instrument
of reason awaiting rediscovery.
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Index
advantage, mechanical knowledge-building 20–4,

Archimedean point 16–17, 101, 169
20, 92 lever 29
body’s 15 Archimedes
lever’s 5, 16, 33–5, 148, agency 95
172 call for a point 16, 19, 30, 102
as rhetorical device On the Equilibrium of Planes 7
41, 117 Grains of Sand 18
analogy law of the lever 2, 8, 27
fulcrum point and Renaissance reception 9
personality 81 Syracusia 17
geometry and psychology arithmetic 45, 49, 89–90, 95
160 Aufhebung 27, 55–8, 95
lever and human 93
lever and political balance (mechanical object)
ideologies 15 38 n.9, 41, 53, 61, 82,
lever and thought 167, 172
process 42, 56 Erwägen 41
lever and Vorstellungen German Romanticism 82
188–9 Guidobaldo dal Monte 9
linguistic units and relative history of economics 28
equilibrium 107 history of mechanics 10
in Naturphilosohpie 113, Kant 28
122, 124, 133, 143, 145, Mechanical Problems 6–7
166 In Naturphilosophie 167,
representation and relative 172
equilibrium 105 organizing principle 53
Archimedean point out of equilibrium 61
absence 23 Benvenuto, Edouardo
Descartes 68–9 9–12, 28
German Romanticism Blumenberg, Hans 1 n.2, 7,
97, 100–2 13, 15, 17, 22–4, 27, 29, 34,
history 16–19, 21, 67 62, 123
Index 205
chemistry 28, 64, 74, 117–18, lever 16, 34–5, 41, 53, 62, 79,
120–1, 132, 160 81, 86, 118
contradiction mediating principle 30–1
logical vs. real 29, 39, 43, moral judgments 26, 29, 42.
45, 83 54, 147
Naturphilosophie 84 Naturphilosophie 76, 84, 113,
principle of contradiction 40–3 120–2, 127–7, 129–31, 133–8,
140, 146, 150
Derrida, Jacques 14–16 psychology 152, 161–2,
Descartes, Réné 164–6, 167–75, 177–8, 181–2,
Cogito and Archimedean 184–90, 192
point 19–21, 68–9, 99 statics 6, 27, 37, 39, 43–4, 56,
German Romanticism’s 60, 71, 77, 153
appropriation of 70, Varignon 10–11
91, 103 Von Eschenmayer, Carl August
Law of the lever 10 German Romanticism 95
Lever and orbital motion 12 psychology 151–6, 158–75,
diagram 182–3, 185, 191–2
German Romanticism 80, 82 relation to Schelling 111–28,
mechanical texts 79 131, 134, 136–50
Naturphilosophie 30, 117, Säze [sic] aus der
119–20, 122–3, 126–7, 135–7, Natur-Metaphysik
167–8, 172 (propositions) 74–8, 80
Euclid 87, 89
ego
Eschenmayer’s nature Faculty (in psychology) 98, 115,
philosophy 164–5, 167–9 157, 164–5, 169, 175–6
Fichte’s philosophy 83, 104–5 Feuerhahn, Wolf 48–9
German Romanticism 14, 27, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
66, 99–100, 111 Archimedean point 175
Herbart’s psychology 182–3, German Romanticism 90–1,
185 101–5
pure ego 103 Leiden and Thätigkeit 82–3
res cogitans 69 mind and nature 113
Schelling’s philosophy of the
Naturphilosophie 113, 128, subject 43, 63
130–7, 143, 146–7 reception in
equilibrium Naturphilosophie 134,
Archimedes 7 165, 167
cognitive processes 40, 49–51, focus (optical) 97–9
57–9, 61 fulcrum
Fichte 82 Archimedean point 16, 18, 20
Galileo 9 body 15
German Romanticism 95–6, ego 14
100, 103–7 Gehler 36
206 Index
German Romanticism 26, 30, Conflict of the Faculties 15

54, 66–9, 71, 77–9, 81–6, 88, Critique of Judgement 27
92–5, 97, 99–103, 108 Critique of Pure Reason
Hegel 35 97–8
Herbart 185–6, 189, 191 German Romanticism 91,
Kant 43, 45, 47–8, 56 99, 107
Naturphilosophie 110, 122–3, lever 77, 82, 103–4, 111
128, 131–3, 135–9, 147, Naturphilosophie 111–13, 116,
164, 169 119, 125, 130–2, 147
political contexts 173–4 psychology 151–2, 154,
156, 157–60, 162, 164–5,
Galileo 9–10, 12–13, 28, 38, 73 170, 175–80, 182, 187,
Gehler, Johann Samuel 189, 191–2
Traugott 36, 42, 44, 71, 77, Kassung, Christian 24–5
79, 82, 97 Kepler, Johannes 12, 69, 79
geometry 51, 87, 89–90, 97, 160 Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich 105
Von Kleist, Heinrich 61
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 27, 34–5, 37, 55, Latour, Bruno 18
114, 116, 119, 136, 165 Leibniz 7–8, 12, 35, 38–9, 65, 82,
Herbart, Johann 1–2, 12, 28, 30–1, 103, 153, 161, 177
40, 42, 56, 107, 150–60, 162, Leupold, Jacob 13
164, 171, 175–92 Lucretius 3–4
hypomochlion Luhmann, Niklas 21–2, 95
lever 16
German Romanticism 67–8, machine (simple) 4–6, 9–10, 15,
77, 80, 82, 85, 87, 92–7, 17–18, 60, 67, 69, 80–1, 95,
99–102, 104–10, 185 166, 191
Naturphilosophie 121–2, Meli, Dominico 9–10, 12–13, 28,
124–7, 131–6, 139, 147, 163, 69, 79, 81
165–9, 171–2 moment (mechanical) 9, 16,
27, 34–5, 51, 77, 118,
Idealism (German) 21–2, 31, 64, 124, 173–4
112, 113–14, 128, 130–4, 136,
140, 151, 157 Naturphilosophie
indifference 49–50, 83–4, 92–4, dispute between Eschenmayer
128, 131, 136, 140, 142–3, and Schelling 140–50
145, 146, 149, 173 early history 112
intensity 50–1, 76, 78, 81, 161–2 Eschenmayer’s 115–28
German Romanticism 83–4
Kant, Immanuel Herbart 185
“Attempt to Introduce the life sciences 70
Concept of Negative reception 114–15
Magnitudes into Schelling’s 128–39
Philosophy” 33–62, 71 Neurath, Otto 23
Index 207
Novalis (Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich

von Hardenberg) Archimedean point 21
Archimedean point 21, 102 dispute with
encyclopedia project 66–7 Eschenmayer 140–50
equilibrium 103–5 ego 128–36
focus 98 equilibrium 106, 131
fulcrum 92–3, 95–7, 99–100 Eschenmayer’s interpretation
language 106–7 of 118–20, 162, 170
lever 72–85 German Romanticism 83–4
mathematical point 86–8, reception of his
108–9 Naturphilosophie 113–16
mechanics 63 speculative physics 113
Schiefsky, Mark 2–3, 5–6
psychology Schlegel, Friedrich
differences between Gespräch über die Poesie 109–10
Eschenmayer’s and hypomochlion 100–3
Herbart’s 155–9 language 106–7
eighteenth-century 153–5 lever 81–97
Eschenmayer’s 128, 152–3, Schlick, Moritz 22–3
160–74 Stevin, Simon 89–90
Herbart’s 175–90 sublation 27, 30, 34–5, 53, 95,
Kant 29, 51 165. See also Aufhebung
Wolff 48, 99 n.97 substrate 131–4, 185
rest (mechanical) technology 1, 3–4, 6, 17, 26, 66,

active 29 93, 100
German Romanticism 73, temperature 92–3, 121–3
86, 103–6 temporality 28, 56, 107
Kant 39, 43–4, 52, 54, 59–61 tool
Naturphilosophie 124, 126, 130, agency 29
138, 169 conceptual work 26, 30, 174
Renaissance 9 German Romanticism 67,
Romanticism (German) 71 n.20, 106, 147
Archimedean point 101–3 lever as simple tool 25
conceptual levers 130, Naturphilosophie 126, 168, 171
181 philosophical 92
equilibrium 103–6 torque 44, 47–8, 77, 139
Eschenmayer 158, 160, 171 translation (as relates to the
language 106–7 activity of the lever) 9, 27,
mathematical point 86–101 35, 37, 39, 42, 55, 60, 192
Novalis 72–81 Tresch, John 66, 70
reception of 63–6, 69–71
Schlegel (Friedrich) 81–5 Varignon, Pierre 10–12, 35
society 107–10 velocity 11, 43, 75–6, 80, 118, 121,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48 125–6, 163
208 Index
Vorstellung (in Herbart’s Zammito, John 41, 99

psychology) 176–80, zero
182–4, 187–90 German Romanticism 89–91,
vis viva 38–9, 114 93, 95, 100, 109
mechanical rest 44, 49, 52, 54,
Wolff, Christian 36, 38, 40, 46–50, 56, 61
99, 153–4, 177 moral action 53
work (in mechanical contexts) 4, Naturphilosophie 126–7, 131,
11, 28–9, 55, 77, 80, 122, 130, 145, 166, 189
136, 191
209
210

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New Directions in German Studies

Introduction. An Object and Its Positions: The Lever,

1 The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant 33

2 The Levers of German Romanticism 63

3 The Contested God of Naturphilosophie 111

4 From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically Minded Psychology 151

Concluding Thoughts 191

I can circumnavigate myself, but I cannot get beyond myself.

moral judgments (Kant), to the construction of concepts (Romanticism)

The Lever in Antiquity: Practical Use

3 Sylvia Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy

is easier to move a weight if it is placed closer to the fulcrum,” which

5 Schiefsky, “Theory and Practice.”

an analogy to a ship at sea, but the underlying idea is connected to the

The gentle breeze, so soft of substance, sets a great ship, great

This being premis’d, ‘tis easy to understand, why a Sail, swell’d

Creech’s commentary, in particular, stands out for the concern with

is moved—even adding the weight of the lever—easily.”13 In more

13 Anon., Mechanical Problems, 1. Readers should be aware that the English

to that of the balance than to the shape of the circle, because in

As much as it is possible to observe circular motion in each of the

16 A. G. Drachmann, The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity

Figure I.1 “Balanced scale of Justice” by Perhelion (2011) is licensed

Hans Blumenberg has traced the notion of a “coincidence of

[Archimedes] takes as given that a balance will remain at rest

19 Hans Blumenberg, “Neoplatonismen und Pseudoplatonismen in der Kosmologie

Aspects of the Lever in Renaissance Mechanics

22 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects. The Transformation of Mechanics

particular position of the field of statics as existing “between physical

27 Edouardo Benvenuto, An Introduction to the History of Structural Mechanics:

positively.”32 Varignon’s definition of virtual velocities is taken directly

Given several forces acting in various directions that hold in

32 Quoted in Benvenuto, History of Structural Mechanics, 89.

law of the lever is the degree to which it could be deployed across

What a Lever Can Be

36 Readers interested in this aspect of eighteenth-century mechanics can consult

language would be most appropriate for navigating between the lever

40 Meli, Thinking with Objects, 234.

in various contexts. In specialized levers, such as ones that were

44 Johann Georg Krünitz, Oekonomisch-technologische Encyclopädie, vol. 44 (Berlin:

law” based on the existing, “traditional law” that will “provide, on

We might say that the difficulty will consist, as always, in

In this passage, Derrida makes an analogy between the endpoints of

Derrida—and Kant—go beyond a simple alignment of man and simple

46 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Logomachia:

reflections on the lever seem to do as well. Derrida’s comments on the

Where to Put Your Lever: The Archimedean Point

the myth of Archimedes—foundational also in the literal sense that the

philosophical “contempt” of mechanics, Archimedes shows king Hiero that

from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century that challenged

52 Bruno Latour, “The Force and Reason of Experiment,” in Experimental Inquiries,

relates of the satirical poet “Euphormio” (i.e., Euphormionis, the pen

The Lever, the Archimedean Point, and the Construction

55 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae Mathematicae et Physicae, vol. 2, Deliciae

Philosophical skepticism with regard to the certain thing Descartes

The force of a man who presses on a body is estimated to be 100

Savérien neglects to explain how he comes up with the “weight” of the

60 Anonymous, “De la vie et des ouvrages d’Archimède,” in Le magasin pittoresque,