By the 1830s, Heinrich Heine, a Parisian historian, became an important critic of Goethe’s organicism and Ranke’s ideal of objective history by rejecting the application of eternal laws of organs and reason to history. Heine’s view on history is not a progressive evolution, such as the gradual development of reason, but a throughgoing kind of vital pantheism according to which God would be manifested to a different degree in all things had we no demand that spirit only be divine, not body. Although these two anthropological concepts, body (Fleisch) and spirit (Geist), are interdependent, Christian spiritualism said the enjoyment of the senses should be suppressed, so that it demands of their followers moral conduct by denouncing matter and insisting on pure spirit. Heine’s pantheistic sensualism made him skeptical of certain teleological views of history that were also essential to the Christian idea of providence and to the historical development of this idea. In Heine’s polemic against spiritualism, the rehabilitation of the body has Saint-Simonian evidence that there has been some sort of struggle for existence between each specific idea in history. As an advocate of a materialistic (sensualistic) view of the history, Heine’s philosophy of history was foremost an anthropological attempt to reinstate the vital rights of body and matter.

anthropology , Heinrich Heine , idea , materialism , philosophy of history , rehabilitation of matter , sensualism