Materialism and the Humanities in Zurich

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER we saw that the position of a historian at the Zurich Polytechnic was a liminal one. The human sciences were not a self-evident component of the mission of a technical university. The humanities could trade only to a limited degree on their prestige in such a setting, and they required advocates: professors able to articulate their value to nonspecialists. Indeed, their very value was nonspecialism. The pressure to legitimize was conducive to a mediating form of authorship, one that played to the strengths of the human sciences: their capacity to offer synthesis and style. But the pressure on the human sciences in general, and at the polytechnic in particular, increased with the growing prestige of the natural sciences and of scientific materialism.

At the banquet celebrating the first quarter century of the University of Zurich in April 1858, its rector, Hermann Köchly, awkwardly suggested that the university and the polytechnic stood not side by side but back to back, the university striving forward in the realm of the ideal, while the polytechnic was conquering the material sphere. Köchly's remark came at a time when the Winterthur Landbote editor Johannes Scherr was editorializing against excessively materialist tendencies in an increasingly affluent Swiss society, and there were signs that materialism was coming to dominate thinking at both university and polytechnic.

Three texts launched scientific materialism on a receptive German public in the 1850s: Jakob Moleschott's Der Kreislauf des Lebens (The Cycle of Life) was published in 1852; Ludwig Büchner's Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) and Carl Vogt's Köhlerglaube und Naturwissenschaft (Blind Faith and Natural Science) both appeared in 1855. The first of these authors took up the chair of physiology at the University of Zurich in 1856. Moleschott was a brilliant popularizer, just the kind of mediating author that Scherr was—or aspired to becoming—at the time. By the early 1870s the intellectual scene of Zurich was thoroughly engrossed with the scientific materialism of the day.