Lever as Instrument of Reason

Jocelyn Holland is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Professor of Comparative Literature at the California Institute of Technology, USA. She is the author of German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis and Ritter (2009) and Key Texts on the Science and Art of Nature by Johann Wilhelm Ritter (2010).

The Lever as Instrument of Reason is an inquiry into the theoretical use of the trope of the lever in major thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. It explores not what work a real lever can do but what epistemological work references to the lever can do in this crucial period of intellectual history. As she discusses the deployment of the figure of the lever, Holland takes us on a tour de force from Kant through Romanticism and Naturphilosophie to nineteenth-century psychology, providing along the way thoroughly original insights into shifting conceptions of the nature of knowledge and humanity. Holland’s is a mature book that prompts us to consider anew our understanding of critical junctures of 18th- and 19th-century German and European intellectual history.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction. An Object and Its Positions: The Lever, the Fulcrum, and the Archimedean Point1. The Balance of Life / Quantifying Kant2. The Levers of German Romanticism3. The Contested God of Naturphilosophie4. From Naturphilosophie to a Mechanically-Minded PsychologyConcluding ThoughtsBibliographyIndex