A Brill Calendar: December 27

"Holland's Plato"

Few stages in the history of the Low Countries met with more disdain from posterity than the 18th century.

Dethroned as the world’s dominant sea-power, the Republic is seen then as an irresponsible spender of a rich inheritance, honestly earned by the vigour of the “Gouden Eeuw”, the ‘Golden Century’; lasting sadly enough just some fifty years. In such a reading of a presumed past the national character – ailing during boring decades preceding the French Revolution and finally ground underfoot by Napoleon – only rises, Phoenix-like from its ashes, upon the advent of a new European State; the constitutional, House of Orange-ruled Kingdom of The Netherlands.

To some extent all of the above has some truth in it, but it is seldom – even in the 21st century – that the 18th is not seen as a decline, but as a transition; in scholarly, intellectual and political terms. In the romantic high-spirited construction of a prim National Pantheon for The Netherlands during most of the 19th century – providing historically widely dissimilar Provinces with a nation-wide alibi and roots – there was preciously little room & space for assessing a man like Frans Hemsterhuis (Franeker, Friesland, December 27, 1721 – The Hague, Holland, July 7, 1790).

After having pursued studies in the High School of his home-town and later in Leyden University – when he had already turned 28 - Hemsterhuis became Secretary to the Estates-General of the Republic in 1755. He may have been the first Dutch philosopher to come in contact with a foreign rising star, the much younger, not yet world-famous Goethe (1749 – 1832): via Frans’ ‘soul-mate’, the German Princess Gallitzin. Hemsterhuis embodied the 17th century pantheism and aesthetics of Spinoza’s universe, interlaced with awakening romanticism.

Nicknamed ‘Holland’s Plato’ and writing almost exclusively in French, his was an enlightened ‘mind-scape’ too transient and fragile for popular acclaim two centuries later.