The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public 9780231539333

Citation preview

The P R AC T I C ES

of the EN LI G H T EN M EN T

X

CO LU M B I A T H EM ES in P H I L O S O P H Y, S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M , and the A RT S

CO LU M B I A T H EM ES in P H I L O S O P H Y, S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M , and the A RT S

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, editors

Advisory Board Carolyn Abbate

J. M. Bernstein

Eve Blau

T. J. Clark

Arthur C. Danto

John Hyman

Michael Kelly

Paul Kottman

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself, where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged, and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. For a list of books, see page 293

D or o t h e a E . von M ü c k e

The P R AC T I C ES

of the EN LI G H T EN M EN T

f Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mücke, Dorothea E. von. The practices of the Enlightenment : aesthetics, authorship, and the public / Dorothea E. von Mücke. pages cm — (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17246-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53933-3 (e-book) 1. Enlightenment. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Authorship. I. Title. B802.M79 2015 190.9'033—dc23 2014035520

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover image Attributed to Erwin von Steinbach. Sketch “B” of the Strasbourg Cathedral. Reprinted from Marcel Aubert, The Art of the High Gothic Era, 1965. Cover and book design Lisa Hamm References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Philippe and Miriam

4

CO N T EN T S

Acknowledgments XI Introduction XIII

Part I THE BIRTH OF AESTHETICS, THE ENDS OF TELEOLOGY, AND THE RISE OF GENIUS 1

THE SURPRISING ORIGINS OF

ENLIGHTENMENT AESTHETICS 2

5

DISINTERESTED INTEREST: THE HUMAN ANIMAL’S LACK OF INSTINCT 3

4

1

27

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

39

ENLIGHTENMENT DISCOURSES ON ORIGINAL GENIUS 5

“ WHERE NATURE GIVES THE RULE TO ART ” 6

THE STRASBOURG CATHEDRAL:

EDIFICATION AND THEOPHANY CONCLUSION

73

63

53

51

( VIII)

CONTENTS

Part II CONFESSIONAL DISCOURSE, AU TOBIOGRAPHY, AND AU THORSHIP 7

PIETISM

77

85

The Valorization of Individual Experience 85 The Autobiography of Johanna Eleonora Petersen 93 8

ROUSSEAU

109

Confession/Profession 109 The Author and His Audiences in Rousseau’s Confessions 126 9

GOETHE: FROM THE “CONFESSIONS OF

A BEAU TIF UL SOUL” TO POETRY AND TRUTH

141

The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul 142 Revealed Religion and the Function of the Bible 149 Experience, the Production of Presence, and the Function of Art 158 Beyond the Prophets: deus sive natura 165 Conclusion 17 7

Part III IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND THE MOBILIZ ATION OF A CRITICAL PUBLIC 181 10

PATRIOTIC INVOCATIONS OF THE PUBLIC

The Context of the Seven Years’ War 187 The Perspective of a Legally Trained High-Level Administrator 190 The Perspective of the Ambitious Young Scholar and Publicist 196

187

CONTENTS

11

(IX)

REAL AND VIRTUAL AUDIENCES IN HERDER’S CONCEP T OF THE MODERN PUBLIC

205

The Role of Language and Religion in Shaping the Public 208 Live and Virtual Publics of Art: The Function of Music and Imaginative Literature 212 12

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

219

“Was ist Aufklärung?” 222 Gelehrte Streitigkeiten/Learned Battles 229 In the Beginning Was the Word 235 Conclusion 243

Notes 247 Index 281

AC K N OW LED G M EN T S

I

t was first in classroom, conference, and lecture settings that I started to explore some of the observations and ideas that ended up in this book. I am grateful to my students at Columbia University who took my classes “Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History,” “Enlightenment and Religion,” and “Rousseau and Goethe” for their lively and engaged participation. I thank Jörn Steigerwald and Rudolf Behrens for their hospitality in Bochum and Halle, Helmut Schneider and Eva Geulen for inviting me to Bonn, Christoph Holzhey for hosting me for an entire semester at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and Heidi Reiss Wellbery for offering me a home in Berlin. Luciana Villas Bôas was a most wonderful hostess, allowing me to present and discuss various aspects of this book in Rio de Janeiro. Jonathan Sheehan, Niklas Largier, Reinhold Martin, Joanna Stalnaker, and Irina Paperno provided me with felicitous feedback at the right time. Earlier versions of some chapters of this book have appeared in article form. I thank the editors of New Literary History, Grey Room, Representations, and the Romanic Review for permission to use these materials. For the past ten years Stefan Andriopoulos, Kelly Barry, and Caroline Bynum have been the most reliable and supportive friends and interlocutors. They have read many versions of many parts of this book and provided me with thorough and constructive criticism and insightful advice. I am deeply grateful to them. Without Bill Dellinger’s wit, patience, and superb administrative expertise, and without Peggy Quisenberry’s kindness, I would not have been able to progress with my research while

(XII)

AC KN OW LED G M EN T S

serving as chair of my department. I am very thankful to Brook Henkel and Sophie Alexander Salvo, who have given me much more than reliable research assistance. They shared their thoughts and they cared about the actual form of the book with great attention to detail. I thank Lydia Goehr for graciously including my book in her series. It has been a pleasure to work with Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Susan Pensak from Columbia University Press. I am thankful to the two anonymous readers who have carefully read and commented on the manuscript for the press, as I am also deeply grateful to David Bates, Paul Fleming, and Chris Cullens, who have taken the trouble to read the entire manuscript, to provide insightful comments, and to help me gain more distance and perspective toward it. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Horst and Veronica von Mücke, my husband, Philippe Similon, and my daughter, Miriam von Mücke Similon, for their steady and loving support. Ten years ago, when I started this book, Miriam was a lively, bright child. Now she is no less spirited but in the meantime she has also become a serious intellectual and an astute critic. It is to Miriam and Philippe that I dedicate this book.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

A

esthetics, authorship and the public, the three foci of this book, were sites of serious concern and change during the Enlightenment: taste, rather than an acquired ability and a marker of social distinction, became a universal faculty evincing a distinctly human mode of experiencing pleasure. A rule-oriented poetics gave way to an emphasis on unprecedented innovation and creativity, and art became the exclusive domain of original genius. As the print market, especially of literature written in the vernacular, exponentially increased during the second half of the eighteenth century, not only the economic and legal situation of writers but also the relationship between writer and biographical persona underwent great transformations and showed a heightened awareness of a publication’s appeal to different kinds of audiences. Together with the birth of the celebrity author such as Rousseau or Goethe, the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of the concept of an active, critical public. The guiding thread of this study lies in the claim that the Enlightenment— if understood not just as a historical period but as a distinct ethos—was deeply committed to specific practices, such as those called for by the following maxims: Think for yourself ! Put yourself in the position of everybody else! Think consistently! Whereas the call to emancipate oneself from the ingrained habit of relying on prejudice and authority from Immanuel Kant’s prize-winning essay is quite well known, it might seem surprising to find that Kant articulates these maxims in the context of discussing how we come to attribute universal validity to aesthetic

(XIV )

INTRODUCTION

judgments, which are, after all, based on a subjective feeling. Indeed, it is probably less commonly known how the claim of the universal validity of aesthetic judgments—an utterly novel, radical departure from traditional discourses on art and aesthetics—is related to the opposition to prejudice and authority and a trust in the human capacity for radical innovation and originality. This study will attempt to unfold those connections. I hope to show how a new concept of aesthetic experience and creativity crucially shapes concepts of authorship and I shall examine new ways of constructing audiences and publics. The practices of the Enlightenment are actualized by the way in which people receive and produce texts and artifacts, how they communicate and reflect on themselves as individuals as well as communities. Wondering about where such practices are articulated, maintained, and promoted, one might think of a whole spectrum of cultural domains, ranging from pedagogy and didactics to the realm of wisdom literature, including religious liturgy and spiritual exercises. All of these could be seen as domains that consider it their mission to pass on habits of thought, attitudes, and specific behaviors. Certainly the eighteenth century was the century of pedagogy and didactics, a century marked by a tremendous increase in literacy, increasingly compulsory school attendance, a century that paid much attention to the importance of childhood and the practices of parenting. And yet, for this study, the fields of pedagogy and didactics are not of major relevance. Instead I shall be turning to religious practices, on the one hand, and the study of nature, on the other hand, as the domains that provide both a background and a foil for those new habits of independent thought that are at the core of this book. For I hope to show that, in spite of the radical novelty of the conceptual implications of these Enlightenment practices, they have their formative predecessors in these rather unexpected and, until now, less examined discursive sites. My study is divided into three subsequent parts focusing on the crucial transformations in eighteenth-century aesthetics, models of authorship, and audiences or publics. In part 1, “The Birth of Aesthetics, the Ends of Teleology, and the Rise of the Genius,” I isolate three important aspects of eighteenth-century aesthetics, each of which ushered in a major change: first, there is the new kind of contemplative, absorbed subjectivity with universal claims that eventually replaces the traditional model of an appreciative audience of connoisseurs; second, there is an increasingly critical awareness of models of purposiveness and final ends; and third,

INTRODUCTION

(XV )

there is the radical reconceptualization of artistic production in analogy to the creative forces of nature itself. The goal of this part of my study is to bring together several disparate and until now often overlooked cultural domains, practices, and approaches to the study of nature that created the conditions enabling the emergence of the new aesthetic subjectivity as well as a new model of original creativity. I analyze Pietist meditational practices, the concept of instinct and the absence of instinct across various discourses, and the concept of original genius as it reorganizes the relationship between art and nature. In part 2, “Confessional Discourse, Autobiography, and Authorship,” I investigate the popularization of confessional discourse in the seventeenth century and the resurgence of autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century. I trace how Pietism gave important impulses to the Enlightenment critique of religion by cultivating and sanctioning subjective experience. I show how Rousseau’s “Professions of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” transforms the religious genre of the credo into an altogether different and secular speech situation: the exchange of intimate confidences between two friends. Similarly, in the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” Goethe cites the spiritual autobiography in order to analyze its pathological potential. Both authors use the respective literary setting to depragmatize a nonliterary religious genre. Finally, I analyze how Rousseau’s and Goethe’s understanding of religion informs their respective approaches to the autobiographical genre and their understanding of authorship in their autobiographies. Neither Rousseau’s Confessions nor Goethe’s Poetry and Truth attempts to model exemplary spiritual lives; instead, they are biographies of a unique individual and his creative achievement as an author and discourse innovator. Part 3, “Public Spheres: Imagined Communities and Live Audiences,” focuses on how eighteenth-century writers and philosophers discussed the nature and role of audiences and a general public. Although a good amount of attention has been given to the transformation of the republic of letters, and especially the gradual introduction of the vernacular and its consequences for the Enlightenment concept of the public sphere, the role religion played in the same context has gone largely unnoticed. Throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, censorship and regulations suppressing public gatherings were motivated by the fear of sectarian violence; the public posed a threat not to the state, but to the kind of religious coexistence that was ordained by the Westphalian

(XVI)

INTRODUCTION

Peace Treaties at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. It was within this climate that Pietist circles pioneered the Bible study group as a forum for debate that was open to all. I trace how, in the eighteenth century, dissension over religious issues fueled the imagination of a critical public audience, showing how to activate wider and more lively public involvement. By mid-century, in the context of the Seven Years’ War, there is an added dimension to this debate regarding the imagined community of patriots willing to die for their fatherland. In discourses on the nature and structure of a public sphere, references to religious communities may mark an ideal of universal, egalitarian involvement but also reassert authoritarian orthodoxy; in most instances, however, they call up the model of an audience that extends beyond the isolated, quiet reader of printed matter to a live audience and active community. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, whether it is in Herder’s notion of the “Public of Literature” or Kant’s interpretation of the sensus communis, the unifying ideal of one distinct imagined community is either left deliberately open and vague or is given up altogether in view of a set of imagined universal practices. A universalist approach to aesthetics, radical creativity, and an active, critical public: all these Enlightenment concepts with their adjoining practices have found ample scholarly attention, especially by historians of book culture, media, and literacy but also by scholars of eighteenthcentury literature and society, differing according to geographical focus and disciplinary specialization.1 Martha Woodmansee has studied the social, historical and primarily economic contexts for the emergence of such new concepts as the original genius as the prototype of the poet and artist and disinterested interest as the key marker of aesthetic experience. She has argued that the concept of original genius must be understood in direct correlation to efforts to secure copyright for authors. Along similar lines, she has made the case that the claim that aesthetic experience is based on a radically different kind of pleasure, not the interested pleasure of the agreeable but the disinterested interest derived from the free play of the human faculties, that this ultimately humanist claim must be understood as the reaction of writers and artists who envied the populist writers of entertainment fiction for their success with large audiences of readers.2 Although my study also pays particular attention to the concepts of “disinterested interest” and “original genius,” I am not interested in reducing them to mere symptoms of the politics and economics of the publishing market. Rather, I want to consider them crucial components of

INTRODUCTION

(XVII)

Enlightenment philosophy. Granted, this is an aspect of Enlightenment philosophy that remains invisible as long as the Enlightenment is defined primarily in view of the militantly empiricist and materialist Enlightenment of the philosophes. However, as I hope to show with this book, this aspect of the Enlightenment, which is based on positing a fundamental difference between animals and the human being, can be found in writers ranging from Shaftesbury and Rousseau to Herder, Lessing, Goethe, and Kant. It amounts to a philosophical anthropology, which defines the human being in contrast to animals as lacking in instinct, a deficiency that provides the condition of the possibility of human freedom, rationality, error, sexuality, history, language and creativity. This neo-humanist assumption puts the speaking biped into a curious position vis-à-vis the order of nature, on the one hand, and the order of creation, on the other hand, which, of course, has profound implications for the role of religion. And it is primarily in the domain of aesthetics that these writers negotiate this polyvalent aspect of human freedom. All of the aforementioned writers, namely Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Lessing, Herder, Kant and Goethe, have taken a more or less conscious distance from orthodoxy and doctrinal rigor, though none of them would fit into the mold of the militant anticlericalism à la Voltaire. Moreover, they are all aware of the extent to which their philosophical anthropology goes against the grain of Christian beliefs, especially the doctrine of original sin but also the belief that the order of nature as a meaningful whole with all its elements is the product of divine creation, stable and not capable of producing change on its own. And yet, these very same writers did not at all assume the Enlightenment should or would be able to abolish religion per se. Quite to the contrary, they were all, though in different ways, engaged with sustained, ongoing reflections about the nature and role of religion in human society. Indeed, the reflection on the role of religion plays a crucial role both in Rousseau’s Émile and in the Confessions (in its take on Augustine’s autobiography) and in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) where religion is transformed into a cultural resource for the creative writer and cultural innovator, providing him with models and norms that stand above current fashions and trends. Lessing not only wrote one of the most enduring plays about the conflict between religions, advocating religious tolerance, but he also used his position as head librarian of the Duke of Saxony to be exempted from the restrictions of censorship in order to publish widely on theological

(XVIII)

INTRODUCTION

controversies, showing that what might be considered today’s Christian orthodoxy might very well have been yesterday’s heresy, and inciting one of the most famous public debates with his publication of the “Fragments of an Unknown Author,” a tract that claims that the gospels need to be read as documents produced by “merely” human historians. Even in the reflection on the nature of the public and how to encourage open, free exchange and debate both religion and the church are important institutions and points of reference. Kant in his “What Is Enlightenment?” insists that even church institutions must be committed to open debate that would produce reform, though they might restrict what their ministers can say while they are speaking from the pulpit. And there is Herder’s invocation of the “public of literature” as an “invisible church,” which is to be preferred in its critical potential over a live public. For the latter only too easily falls prey to the seductions of demagoguery. Ultimately, it is the focus on various aspects of religion as they are involved in the articulation of what is important for Enlightenment aesthetics, the concept of authorship, especially in the realm of autobiography, i.e., in relationship to the genre of the confession, and in the articulation and mise-en-scène of critical debate by an enlightened public, that unites the three parts of this book. Whereas the majority of studies of the Enlightenment published in North America favor the French philosophes, empiricism, and antireligious sentiment, the choice of writers and individual texts analyzed and discussed in this study is meant to highlight a different aspect of the Enlightenment. It is my goal to show that neither a radical empiricism nor a radical antireligious position can account for all the important elements of the Enlightenment. Instead, I want to call attention to a certain “neo-humanist strand,” which was to have a crucial impact in the realm of aesthetics and philosophical anthropology as well as the emergence of a philosophy of history. Apart from contributing to the scholarship of individual writers such as Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Goethe, my study aims to contribute to the broader intellectual history of the eighteenth century as well as to the ongoing discussion about religion and secularization. Though most of the writers included in this study are well known and some of their texts belong to a well-established canon of the eighteenth century, I also include analyses of lesser known texts and very little known writers. In that sense, my contribution to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century consists in offering new readings

INTRODUCTION

(XIX)

of some canonical texts and suggesting new contexts and debates within which to read those, as well as by making an argument for until now undiscovered texts that should be read carefully in light of some of the questions that move the student of the eighteenth century. Of course, my attempt to intervene in the primarily French-focused approach to the Enlightenment is based on the work of other scholars. With regard to the study of nature in the eighteenth century there has been important work in the history of science and knowledge production that has paid much attention to the heterogeneity among the practitioners of eighteenth-century natural science, the fact that there was not just one institutionalized, professionalized practice but many diverse communities, composed of more or less academically trained philosophers or naturalists including laypeople and amateurs, respecting different protocols in the observation and interpretation of nature, within diverse paradigms and considering themselves part of different subdisciplines ranging from anatomy, zoology, and botany to physiology and natural history or history of nature.3 Traditionally the eighteenth-century study of nature has been considered primarily a classificatory enterprise, which eventually was to be replaced by the emerging life sciences of the nineteenth century. This model was supported by Foucault’s influential argument in The Order of Things about the epistemic break between the representational, spatial paradigm undergirding the classificatory approach to plant and animal life forms and the new epistemé of the nineteenth century that was open to the dimension of time and thus ushered in the possibility of turning to such conceptual entities as life, history, and labor. But more recent studies have questioned this schematic divide. Both Peter Hanns Reill and James Larson have shown that the Enlightenment cannot be reduced to a purely mechanistic, antireligious rationalism or empiricism. Reill has called attention to the fact that already by the mid-eighteenth century there was a sufficiently skeptical approach to earlier assumptions that all of nature could be studied according to a Newtonian paradigm based on principles or that all of nature would be explicable in terms of materialist, mechanical principles. Instead, a range of diverse eighteenth-century naturalists such as Albrecht von Haller, Buffon, and Hans Blumenbach postulated a shaping, creative force within living nature, which required its own epistemological adjustments on the side of the observer and student of nature.4 Whereas Peter Hanns Reill’s study of eighteenth-century vitalism emphasizes how diverse naturalists

(XX)

INTRODUCTION

prepared the grounds for the emergence of new humanist fields of inquiry, especially in the domain of history,5 James Larson presents Kant’s discussion of teleology as a response to the difficulties encountered by eighteenth-century naturalists who tried to reconcile their observations of generative processes in living natural phenomena with their respective teleological accounts of the order of nature.6 According to Larson, without the diverse metaphysical, and in some cases religious, models of a purposive order of nature, Haller, Buffon, and Linnaeus would not have been able to carry out their diverse research into various aspects of living forms, be it the formation of organs, the change of species over time, or the classification of the manifold forms distributed over the globe. And yet Larson also shows that these very same metaphysical assumptions also hindered these three great scientists in some of their observations.7 To the extent that my research is primarily based on literary and philosophical rather than naturalist texts, this book, especially the first part, offers a complementary study to the work by Larson and Reill, in that I trace a concern with nature as a creative, shaping force that must not be written off as proto-Romantic, or counter-Enlightenment, but that instead provides some of the discursive foci and practices to which Kant’s third critique would deliver a defining conclusion. Just as these recent developments in the history of science and knowledge production can be seen as productive and critical responses to Foucault’s early work, especially to The Order of Things, Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” has also become the impetus of much work on the history of the concept and practices of authorship during the eighteenth century. In this essay Foucault argues that it was during the eighteenth century that the author function, the understanding of how the identity of the writer of a published text as it is evinced in the thoughts, shape, argument, and style of the text and the concrete historical person should or should not be conceived as a tight unit, has changed both in the literary arts and in the natural sciences in the sense that the two different author functions traded places. Whereas the naturalist used to be recognized as a name and authority and closely connected with specific texts, in poetry and literature, traditionally not much used to be known about the composer of individual works. The case of Shakespeare provides a famous example for this. According to Foucault, however, things radically changed in the eighteenth century. The increasing formalization of scientific methods together with the standardization of publication venues and styles in the

INTRODUCTION

(XXI)

study of nature decoupled the writer/scholar/naturalist from the individual persona, whereas for the literary arts the biographical persona gained in importance.8 In spite of its elegance, scholars such as Roger Chartier have shown that upon closer look Foucault’s thesis does not hold up. Throughout the eighteenth century there were celebrity authors among naturalists as well as in the realm of literature, poetry, and philosophy, moreover, the eighteenth century also witnessed many complex uses of anonymous publication strategies.9 In light of such questions, namely how during the eighteenth century the concept of authorship was transformed and challenged, my study focuses primarily on the literary domain, the realm that supposedly produced the newly established tight nexus between the identity of a distinctly recognizable historical persona and the writer of a specific published text. I do so by studying the two famous autobiographies of Rousseau and Goethe as biographies of the author. In each case we are dealing with an extreme and an exceptional case of addressing the concept of authorship, not a typical, nor an exemplary one. For both writers use their autobiographies to make a case for their utter uniqueness, however in fascinatingly different terms. In Rousseau’s case we are dealing with a confessional account about the experience of becoming a published writer, the exposure to various kinds of real and imagined audiences, publics, and crowds. In Goethe’s we are dealing with an altogether different model of authorship, no longer the producer of a published work with certain claims to originality and uniqueness but rather the author as discourse innovator. The last and third part of my book, the part devoted to the Enlightenment ideal of a critical public, can be considered a contribution to the debates and studies inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s by now classic Transformation of the Public Sphere. First published in German in 1962 and in English only in 1989, this book might owe its staying power to some of its fundamental ambiguities. For “the bourgeois public sphere” (“bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit”), whose emergence Habermas describes with references to England, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century, holds a dual status in Habermas’s book. On the one hand, it is supposed to have been an actually extant form of communication, debate, and public gathering and exchange among private people that was independent of the state and government agencies, not defined by specific interests or allegiances, though informed by the ideals of intimate communication practices

(XXII)

INTRODUCTION

within the family and enabled and sustained by the capitalist mechanisms of the print market and a repertory theater independent of the court. On the other hand, as an example of critical rational exchange coupled with all-inclusiveness, it is certainly an important ideal for modern democracies. However, it is also just that—an ideal—to the extent that it will be exclusive in terms of educational level, economic and social status, and gender whenever it comes to its concrete instantiations. This second aspect has lead many critics to focus on one or the other group that was excluded by Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere. For instance, Joan Landes made the argument that the Enlightenment public was essentially exclusionary when it came to women.10 Keith Baker, however, countered her criticism by pointing out that though women might have been de facto much less part of a prerevolutionary French public, this was not a principled concern of all Enlightenment proponents of a critical public but rather the quite specific position of Rousseau’s concept of a public, which in any case needs to be understood as a special case or even an outlier with regard to the Enlightenment conceptualization of the public. For Rousseau’s concept of the volonté générale is exactly a democratic concept that is not based on deliberation and open dissent, as Rousseau also is the proponent of a model of a citizen’s virtue that necessitates the exclusion of women from freely circulating in public.11 Already just this one example in the exchange over whether Habermas’s model and account of the public sphere needs to be criticized for being blind to the issue of gender draws attention to the ambiguity between the degree to which his model of the bourgeois public sphere stands in for a normative ideal or whether it represents a descriptive account that can lay claim to historical accuracy. One way to address this ambiguity of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere has been to suggest that there were many distinct publics, which indeed can be studied in their historical specificity to a much greater degree. This then would entail the switch from “the public” to “a public,” which is not much more than just a specific audience, as it lacks any of the normative connotations. There have been a good number of historical studies devoted to specific communities and the practices that shaped the actual contours of eighteenth-century publics. Most important in this respect have been studies focused on salon culture and its relationship to the Enlightenment as well as studies concerned with the communication and publication strategies of the different institutions of the world

INTRODUCTION

(XXIII)

of learning and the production of knowledge as well as the secret societies and lodges of freemasonry. One important result of these studies has been to point out that the sharp distinction between the ancient regime and a new modern bourgeois public sphere that Habermas’s programmatic study proposes does not hold. The most comprehensive overview that has come to my attention is provided by Van Horn Melton’s detailed historical study of The Rise of the Public, which devotes separate chapters to all of these institutions, also differentiating between England, Germany, and France. As Van Horn Melton (among others) points out, Habermas’s term public sphere leaves the implied, concrete, or actual audience and public without contours as it stays away from such concepts as “the nation” which would give the public a far more space- and time-bound definition.12 It took the demoralizing understanding of the transformations of the concept of the nation by the anthropologist Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities to infuse the discussion of eighteenth-century publics with new energy and to pay attention to the different identities of Enlightenment publics, which in this respect have been studied more closely with regard to their specific institutional and medial affiliations as well as their linguistic boundaries. And yet, although there are certainly many different publics in the Enlightenment, as there are many different audiences and different kinds of crowds, what alone gives the concept of the public any political relevance and force is if it is used with the definite article: “the public” instead of “a public.” As Michael Warner persuasively argued, “the public” is always a discursive construct that postulates and produces an interrelationship between texts and their audiences, which has to be both open and open-ended, but also bound to a specific present and its future. The appeal to “the public” is one that always includes strangers, always extends beyond the concrete boundaries of a territory as well as the membership criteria required by a specific institution.13 My discussion of the concept of the public in Enlightenment discourse focuses on both its normative dimension and the fact that it is a discursive construct—moreover, a discursive construct that always entails a specific relationship to media and media technologies. As in the first and second part of this book, the third part provides new readings of canonical, wellknown texts, in this case especially Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” but its dominant concern lies with bringing attention to neglected or overlooked texts, which might differentiate and complicate our understanding of the various facets of the concept of the public. Already Habermas

(XXIV )

INTRODUCTION

characterizes the Enlightenment public with regard to the face-to-face interaction of private citizens gathering in coffee houses, taverns, and theaters, on the one hand, and the importance of newspapers, increasing literacy, and the new genres of a bourgeois sentimental literature, on the other hand. But, and this is an important lesson to be learned from Herder’s until now fairly understudied essay about the modern public, what matters about the modern public as opposed to the public of the ancients is print culture. Now it is not that print culture has to be seen as the opposite to live gatherings; rather, print culture can activate a live audience much faster and wider then the written culture of scribes. It is Herder’s reflection on the different ways in which a real audience and a virtual audience are interconnected, how one can activate and mobilize the other, a phenomenon that we have seen throughout history, even quite recently, be it in 1989 or during the Arab Spring, that deserves our attention. If the study of the Enlightenment has seen one important thematic shift during the past two decades, it is a shift that involves the relative importance of religion. Instead of positing the Enlightenment as an ethos that is by definition atheist or at least deist, certainly anticlerical and antiorthodox, recent research has shown how much the Enlightenment, if defined as a distinct set of evolving practices, was being shaped even from within by changing religious practices and theological concerns. Thus Martin Gierl in his Pietismus und Aufklärung examines one aspect of the history of theological debate in the very early eighteenth century, the one dealing with the radical piety movement from the perspective of Lutheran theologians who attempted to classify the Pietist movement as a sect and thereby exclude it from the Lutheran church.14 Gierl does not just focus on what was being argued from the side of Lutheran orthodoxy; he pays particular attention to the style and manner of argument, to the nature and venues of the exchange, and the concern with style, form, and format of the debate. His attention to the “how,” not just the “what,” of these theological debates reveals the emergence of a new culture of debate marked by a conscious attention to fairness, civility, and more inclusive accessibility and participation. He shows that the emergence of an Enlightenment ethos of debate was produced neither by the guardians of orthodoxy nor by the pietist innovators’ defense, but in the actual scholarly debates and struggles. Similarly, in his The Enlightenment Bible, Jonathan Sheehan examines the different phases of historical and philological Bible scholarship and commentary, interspersed by new translations of the Bible into

INTRODUCTION

(XXV )

the vernacular and fueled by the vivid exchange of scholarship between England and Germany. Comparable to the surprising results of intensified theological debate in reaction to the formation of the pietist movement, namely the emergence of a more open, fairer, and more rational format of scholarly debate within the discipline of Lutheran theology as shown by Martin Gierl, Sheehan’s attention to the detailed engagement with the biblical text and its possible variants and corruptions (whether through philological and historical commentary and editions or in the various attempts to offer better translations) reveals also an unintended, secularizing outcome. For all of these scholarly endeavors, ultimately, by the end of the eighteenth century resulted in the return to two far more traditional Bible translations, the one of Luther and the King James Bible, which at that time, once this return to them was ushered in, no longer merely served as the official access to a sacred text but rather turned them into “classics” as they moved from the exclusive domain of religion to the domain of literary culture and acquired the status of national treasures.15 Both Gierl and Sheehan trace the Enlightenment with its distinct ethos within religious and theological circles and show that at the level of transformations in the realm of discursive techniques and conventions, in terms of models of communication and textual authority, as well as in terms of the dissemination of texts, both the topic and the institutions of religion played a distinctive role, one that ushered in results that have been traditionally associated with a far more stridently open antireligious outlook, such as the later Voltaire’s and the French materialists’. This book also attributes to religious practices and institutions an active role in the production of Enlightenment practices. Indeed, as Talal Asad in his Formations of the Secular has persuasively argued, both the religious and the secular are being defined and transformed in relation to each other in different contexts and with different stakes attached to it.16 However, I do not follow or support the line of argument that the secular and any kind of secularism is necessarily a form of Christianity, which for Gil Anidjar is the equivalent of the concept of a globalized and globalizing religion.17 Quite to the contrary, I hope to show that in different contexts as well as with different goals and intentions during the Enlightenment we can witness the emergence of a secular humanism in the form of a commitment to a distinctly human capacity for nonself-interested behavior as well as a distinctly human capacity for innovation. This kind of humanism was not a self-ascribed term during the eighteenth century, nor

(XXVI)

INTRODUCTION

was it necessarily aware of itself as anti-Christian, though it represented a serious attack on one of the fundamental elements of Christian dogma, namely the doctrine of original sin. It was articulated in eighteenthcentury moral philosophy but also—and this is of particular interest to my argument—most originally in eighteenth-century aesthetics, in a commitment to the universality of aesthetic experience. Furthermore, this kind of secular humanism develops alongside an understanding of human language as a world making tool and the concept of literary authorship as radical innovation. It can also be traced in the late Herder’s account of what sets the modern public apart from the ancient public, namely the “invisible church” of literature. In The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public I investigate some of the fundamental transformations that were to assign a central role to aesthetics and artistic creativity in making the human being self-directed, critical, and responsible, a conscious participant of the Enlightenment. In other words, this book tries to situate the immensely civilizing, in fact, humanizing, power attributed to imaginative literature and aesthetics within the project of the Enlightenment.

PART I The BIRTH of AESTHETICS, the ENDS of TELEOLOGY, and the RISE of GENIUS

I

n her study The Author, Art, and the Market Martha Woodmansee isolates two key concepts of eighteenth-century aesthetics: disinterested interest and original genius. The concern of Woodmansee’s study consists not in elucidating Kant’s aesthetics, nor in writing the history of these concepts as a dialogue between theoreticians and philosophers, but rather in providing an altogether different, until then entirely neglected, rather mundane context to illuminate their sudden emergence: changes in the German-language book market in the second half of the eighteenth century, the sudden rise of general literacy together with a surge of entertainment literature in the vernacular, primarily comical stories, exotic travel narratives, and gothic fiction replacing the predominance of religious devotional literature of the first half of the century. Woodmansee explains the rise of the concept of disinterested interest as a reaction of ambitious but financially unsuccessful writers to losing out on the market against the writers of popular entertainment fiction. In this light, Karl Philipp Moritz’s concept of the work of art as a self-sufficient, autonomous entity that would not entertain its reader or beholder but instead demand an attitude of disinterested interest becomes a defensive stance of a writer who cannot profitably sell his own products.1 Similarly, Woodmansee situates the rise of the concept of original genius in the context of the utter absence of the protection of intellectual property: writers

(2)

PA R T I

were at best given an honorarium; publishers and booksellers obtained the profit; however, they too were plagued by the prevalence of unauthorized reprints. Not until Johann Gottlieb Fichte provided a way of distinguishing between three aspects of a literary work—1.) the physical object of the book, which could be sold; 2.) the ideas, which would already be part of common property; and 3.) the specific form, which would retain the work’s individualizing features, derived from the specific character of its author—was there a way of demanding an author’s copyright: The author would own the words in their unique articulation and should be granted legal protection for this kind of intellectual property by way of copyright. The concept of original genius as it became popular especially in Germany in the reception of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition then needs to be seen as providing the model for this connection between the quasi-organic individuality of the work of art and the unique individuality of its maker. The eighteenth-century concept of original genius would not only provide a rationale for legally protecting an author’s copyright but it would furthermore motivate a set of new procedures for reading and interpreting a work, namely those hermeneutic procedures that would read the text by fully engaging with animating and reconstructing the individualizing totality of the artifact.2 Part 1, “The Birth of Aesthetics, the Ends of Teleology, and the Rise of the Genius,” undertakes a comparable project to that of Martha Woodmansee in that it also privileges “disinterested interest” and “original genius” as crucial innovations of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Like Woodmansee, I am also interested in drawing attention to and examining until now neglected discursive contexts that have been crucial to the fate of these two concepts. First I shall study religious practices of contemplation as providing the background for the emergence of a new kind of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, but I will also look at the philosophical trajectory of conceptualizing this ability for aesthetic contemplation. Moreover, I shall show that the discourse of philosophy alone does not suffice to understand the trajectory of these concepts. Another discursive context, a teleological discourse about the order of nature, needs to be taken into account in order to come to a fuller understanding of the trajectory of these concepts. Thus I shall trace two aspects of a teleological understanding of nature in their relationship to the emergence of eighteenth-century aesthetics: I will show how the functional understanding of an animal’s appetitive and instinctual behavior crucially informs the

PA R T I

(3)

conceptualization of “disinterested interest” as a feature that sets apart the human animal from all other animals. Already here we can see the decisive break with the moral authority of nature in asserting the human animal’s instinctual weakness as the feature that allows for self-directed behavior that is not automatically self-interested. And then there is the teleological understanding of change in nature, which greatly informs the eighteenth-century concept of original genius as a radical innovator that produces unique individuals. Whereas Woodmansee’s contextualization of “disinterested interest” and “original genius” reduces these concepts to their ideological function in the context of important changes in the print and publishing market of the eighteenth century, the contextualizations I will unfold in the following chapters will show their role in the shaping of a secular humanist Enlightenment.

1 THE SURPRISING ORIGINS OF EN LI G H T EN M EN T A ES T H E T I C S

T

raditionally, when discussing the beginnings of Enlightenment aesthetics, intellectual historians and historians of philosophy point to the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who set out to investigate the particularities of sensuous cognition.1 With the creation of a philosophical subdiscipline, which he called aesthetics, Baumgarten designated a domain that valued the lower faculties, that attributed to the work of art a specific insight-generating power, and that reflected on the pleasures of the imagination.2 For the purposes of this chapter, however, I shall bracket this approach. Instead of tracing a certain trend in philosophical discourse about the value of art and the specific kind of access to truth that could be provided by works of art, I shall turn to a set of practices and habits. I am interested in investigating what in the wider population of a general, not philosophically specialized readership would have prepared the ground for radically rethinking the nature of aesthetic pleasure, so that it would be considered no longer an exclusive domain of connoisseurs but instead would become valued as a universal human and humanizing capacity. I shall do so by investigating practices of attention, of serious, committed observation directed at seemingly trivial, mundane, quotidian phenomena, which in the process of contemplation would reveal to the observer a hidden significance. My goal is to show that these practices of attention ultimately served to form habits of cultivating a pure, pleasurable contemplation utterly different from the interested engagement with something agreeable, capable of satisfying the senses. Such practices of attention, capable of endowing objects of observation

(6)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

with the ability to elicit in the observer a pleasure that would transcend sensuous gratification, constitute an important component of many kinds of spiritual exercises and practices of sublimation that can be found throughout history. Thus it is the challenge of this chapter to isolate one specific strand of spiritual exercises, which would have been widespread and enduring enough to be considered relevant for having actually shaped a certain mindset of the general readership of that period. The practices of attention and observation I shall isolate as the cultural site that prepared the ground for the promotion of “disinterested interest” as the key to Enlightenment aesthetics can be clearly distinguished from other practices of attention that also gained significance during the eighteenth century. In her “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” Lorraine Daston examines how within the framework of natural theology the practices of observation of eighteenth-century naturalists lead to the enshrinement of the moral authority of nature expressed in Pope’s dictum from his “An Essay on Man”: “Whatever is, is Right.” She shows how such naturalists as Charles Bonnet would devote endless hours to highly focused attention on the lowliest insects, to recording the most exacting, detailed descriptions of these observations, but also to the pleasures and joys they would take in these thus individualized creatures beautified by the art of attention and description. Daston argues that it was especially the focus on “what Bonnet would call the ‘organic Economy’ in which the ‘arrangement and play of different parts of organized bodies’ explained operations like growth and generation” that would guide the focus of these naturalists to analyze “objects into interlocking parts” and trace “the fit of form to function with an eagle eye for ‘fitness.’ ” 3 By contrast, the practices of attention that I will discuss in this chapter did not have as their goal the precise, detailed observation of natural phenomena within an overall framework of natural theology aimed at understanding and explaining the fitness and utility of each and every creature. Their aim instead consisted in the transformation of the observer and in the spiritual growth of the believer. And although these practices might focus on a mundane, lowly object, they are aimed at a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses. They are very distinct from the practices of attention of the naturalists, which involve the observer’s active interaction with concrete natural phenomena, placing them under the microscope, anatomizing, taking notes, and drawing details. The practices I shall study revolve entirely around the training of the observer’s own mental

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(7)

and emotional faculties. The activity of observing a specific sight or object is primarily a means to that other end, and in this regard such practices of attention are highly self-reflexive. These practices of attention began to take hold somewhat earlier than those studied by Daston, and they were much more popular. They emerged in the realm of popular religion, in Protestant areas during the seventeenth century. In what follows I shall base my argument on the analysis of one of the most popular books among the vernacular literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Johann Arndt’s devotional guide Vom wahren Christenthum (On True Christianity). First published in 1605, True Christianity went through numerous editions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it was translated into many languages. The cultural influence of this book was enormous. Arndt’s True Christianity gave lasting shape to the form of piety that became known as Pietism.4 Its formative, pivotal role for the development and spread of this religious movement can be glimpsed from one moment in its publication history. In 1675 Jakob Spener (1635–1707), generally considered the founder of Pietism, chose to publish his critique of the orthodox church establishment and hope for both institutional reform and religious renewal, his Pia Desideria, as part of a preface to a new edition of True Christianity. Already this move— Spener’s decision to integrate his programmatic manifesto into the preface of Arndt’s by then established devotional guidebook—indicates the kind of intervention that was at stake in this religious reform movement: religion was to rid itself of doctrinal pedantry and institutional authority and be based instead on a lived, practiced spirituality. Johann Arndt’s True Christianity went through numerous editions, was translated into many languages, and became, among the vernacular literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most widely read, or rather most widely used, books of the Protestant region of that time. It is a book that does not demand a linear reading, but offers itself as an organized resource of instructions for concrete exercises. In that sense, True Christianity is not a book that attempts to deliver a message but rather a guide that aims at recruiting practitioners. In order to get a better understanding of what was so special about Arndt’s approach to spiritual exercises, it is worthwhile to compare True Christianity with another quite popular devotional text. For Arndt was not the only one composing Protestant meditational literature. Beginning with Martin Luther there was an entire tradition of cultivating meditation as a means

(8)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

by which believers were to practice making connections between biblical passages and their own lives. A popular work of Protestant meditational literature (though not quite as popular as Arndt’s) was Johann Gerhard’s Meditationes Sacrae. Its first edition appeared in 1606, just one year after the first edition of Arndt’s True Christianity. Gerhard’s Meditationes were published first in Latin, then also quite frequently in German, and other translations were made into vernacular languages, including translations into verse. Although some editions of Gerhard’s Meditationes were augmented by visual emblems, these never achieved the lasting impact of the equivalent illustrated editions of Arndt’s True Christianity. The most important difference consists in the way in which the meditations are presented. Gerhard’s Meditationes offer a mixture of prayer and admonition with reflections on aspects of the religious message. They are primarily an ongoing back and forth between the address to God and the address to the believer’s soul. They are only interrupted by admonitions to the believer to remember crucial elements from the life and suffering of Jesus and to apply those to her or his own life. Arndt’s meditations, by contrast, as I will show, are quite differently composed. Whereas the meditation in the case of Gerhard is provided by the verbal text of each meditation as a complete unit, which could be compared to a “libretto,” providing the actual words of prayer to God or Christ, of admonishing one’s own soul, of lamenting one’s own depravity, etc., Arndt’s meditations work like a rebus, a complex set of narratives and images that involve the reader more actively and take the reader beyond the text of the meditation. For they focus the readers’ attention on external, secular phenomena, which then are to be considered and compared in their complex way of functioning to a religious phenomenon.5 Thus it is Arndt’s very special use and selection of images that sets his work apart from other devotional literature of his time.6 In Arndt’s work we can find a deployment of images that crucially involves the external, secular world for meditational purposes, an aspect that I will argue had a deeply transformative potential for this religious practice in the sense that it opened it up for its migration toward an exclusively secular context. In what follows I shall first show how Arndt’s text makes use of verbal images, of similes and comparisons, for the famous visual illustrations were not added to Arndt’s text until the Riga edition of 1678, about fifty years after its author’s death in 1621.7 Then I shall turn to these visual emblems, which in 1696 were enriched by prose explanations. I shall show

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(9)

how these illustrations together with their prose commentaries isolate and heighten the spiritual exercises that are already part of the verbal text such that they prepared the grounds for the cultural practices of observation, contemplation, and reflection that by the second half of the eighteenth century would be considered constitutive of aesthetic experience. The main goal of True Christianity is to guide each individual believer to become a better Christian, which means to bear the hardships of life without anger or complaint, and to reflect on the basic religious doctrines in terms of their applicability to the reader’s own life. The fallen nature of man, the nature of true faith, the value of patiently enduring suffering— these religious truths are carefully explained in view of complex verbal images that the reader is asked to contemplate.8 Thus, for instance, the second chapter of True Christianity is entirely devoted to bringing home the message of man’s fallen nature. Arndt’s readers are to see themselves as sinful and in dire need of redemption. His method of getting his readers deeply involved in thinking about the fundamental Christian dogma of original sin and applying it to their own lives is already captured in the table of contents below the title of the second chapter: 1) Adam’s fall as the most terrible sin. 2) Can be made clearer by looking at Absalom’s sin. 3) Through which man began to resemble Satan. 4) From this poisonous Seed grow the most horrific fruits, 5) Which already stir in little children, and which are augmented by anger. 6) This poison is hidden in the heart but breaks out in life. 7) This is why anger is strictly forbidden. 8) The fall and original sin [Erbsünde] cannot be eradicated; 9) Because it turned the human being into a beast; 10) thus that man will have to perish in that state unless he converts.9

Arndt selects as the key biblical passage for his discussion of the Fall not Adam’s and Eve’s transgression from Genesis but Absalom’s rebellion from the book of Samuel. Through this move he turns what could be viewed as a single event in human history into a universal human trait. For Absalom’s rebellion exemplifies for him a ubiquitous human flaw, a son’s aggression and competition with his loving father. He thus begins explaining the fallen nature of man with a universalizing gesture, depicting it as a result of a human tendency that can be commonly observed. Only then is the Fall explained as a radical transformation of a creature that initially was an image of God but then became an image of Satan.

(10)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

The eating of the forbidden fruit is not the cause for the expulsion from paradise, the first act of disobedience, but merely a symptom of man’s perverted heart, understanding, and will. Arndt’s use of verbal images can be further studied when he sets out to get his reader to imagine the concept of original sin: how the distinguishing feature of man, a creature who originally was created in the image of God and then transformed into its opposite, the image of Satan, was to be passed on from generation to generation. He proceeds by blending two images with one narrative, by having his reader think of a natural seed, invoking the image of the serpent-seed from Moses 3:15 to which he adds the adjective poisonous, and then by embedding this combined image into his retelling of the narrative of the Fall: For just like a natural seed in a hidden fashion contains all features of the plant, its size, thickness, length and breadth, its twigs, leaves, bloom and fruit, such that a big tree is hidden in a tiny little seed, and so many, innumerable fruits; this is exactly how in the poisonous, evil serpentseed, in Adam’s disobedience and self-love, there is hidden for all progeny inherited through natural birth such a poisonous tree, and so many innumerable evil fruit, that in those the image of Satan with all evil behavior and character will appear.10

The concrete, commonly observable phenomenon of the seed is supposed to provide an analogy for how the Fall is to be passed on to the entire species. Yet instead of providing an explanation of how the transmission of man’s altered state works, Arndt’s image makes the fact of that transmission as natural as trusting the apple seed to contain all the traits of the tree that will grow from it. Moreover, while this image naturalizes a point of Christian dogma in everyday experience, it also isolates a humble, everyday phenomenon, such as a plant seed, and invites the reader to contemplate its hidden complexity and latent danger. In what follows I want to argue that it is this kind of isolation and focus on relatively commonly observable phenomena, which are framed as bearers of a complex significance, that not only provides the key to the long-lasting popularity of Arndt’s work but also lays the groundwork for a kind of observational practice that eventually would become the domain of aesthetic experience.

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(11)

By aesthetic experience I mean not only the basis of an aesthetic judgment as it is analyzed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment in terms of the “disinterested interest” we take in the object of aesthetic pleasure, but also the kind of practice that made a much earlier appearance in Shaftesbury’s and Herder’s notion of “contemplation” or in Addison’s discussion of the “Pleasures of the Imagination.”11 The entire spectrum of contemplative practices that could be bundled under the rubric of aesthetic experience neither takes the engagement with art or artistic performance as its model nor derives from a culture of connoisseurship, a culture in which aesthetic appreciation and taste become a marker of social distinction. On the contrary, the kind of aesthetic experience for which I claim Pietist meditational practices laid the groundwork must be in principle universally accessible as it is also not at all engaged with the actual existence of a particular object, but much more engaged with the self-reflexive dimension of a perceptual practice. Arndt’s text marks a curious juncture between, on the one hand, the tradition of Baroque emblem books, which dominated the sixteenth and seventeenth century with their artful combination of visual and verbal materials, and, on the other hand, the seventeenth-century use of primarily often exclusively verbal emblems for religious instruction, for sermons, and in devotional literature. Whereas during Arndt’s lifetime True Christianity clearly belongs to that newer tradition that transformed the use of emblems from the expensive art book into a purely verbal device of devotional literature, beginning with the Riga edition of True Christianity in 1678/79, visual illustrations of the combined verbal/visual emblem tradition were added and kept for many, but by far not all, subsequent editions.12 In the following I will base my argument on these illustrations because they highlight one aspect of the specific use of images in Arndt’s True Christianity that is already a crucial component of the verbal images, namely the isolation of an unremarkable phenomenon, rendering it worthy of notice and contemplation, as we have seen, for instance, with regard to the image of the seed. In addition, in that these visuals are explained, framed, and presented with different kinds of instructions and clues for the reader as to what to do with them, they provide my argument with more explicit material to study the actual practices of observation and attention that were propagated by True Christianity. According to the introduction of the Riga edition of True Christianity in 1678/79, the newly added visuals are to “instruct the lover of True

(12)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

Christianity how to awaken at any time his mind to devotion, abstract it from earthly concerns and elevate it to God by contemplating things occurring in nature or art.”13 This instruction deserves to be read carefully. It seems to say not much more than what is expected from most spiritual exercises, namely that they are supposed to train the believer’s attention to move away from the material world to the spiritual realm. But how is this to be achieved? It is to be achieved by “contemplating things occurring in nature or art,” i.e., natural phenomena and man-made things. Moreover, the reader/beholder is not to remain with the book or the visual illustration, but rather the whole point of the illustration consists in alerting and stimulating the reader’s contemplative activity such that it would be set into motion by phenomena occurring in everyday life. In other words: these emblems first show the beholder how to focus on phenomena to be observed in the reader’s own reality and world, outside the confines of the book. Then they lead the believer’s contemplation from this-worldly things to the devotion to God. The fifty-six plates are not identical in theme with the guiding metaphors or similes from Arndt’s verbal text, but in their way of functioning they follow the same pattern as Arndt’s verbal images. For instance, whereas the verbal image in the text of the chapter about the Fall revolves around the seed’s latent power of transmission, the visual emblem added to this chapter shows a camera obscura (figure 1.1). This is to illustrate how the Fall has turned man, an image of God, into an inverted image, i.e., the image of Satan. There is, however, nothing intrinsic to the optics of a camera obscura that offers itself as an illustration of the meaning or significance of the Fall, its implications for what it means to be human. Instead the beholder is to conceive of the Fall as self-evident or natural as the fact of the upside-down image produced by a camera obscura. The facticity of the Fall is set into analogy with the effect of a commonly observable optical medium, which the observer knows obeys the laws of optics, that he or she nevertheless cannot explain or easily grasp and is not to attempt to do but rather to accept and marvel at. Indeed, the range of thematic choices for the illustrations in the Riga edition is quite telling. They are from the domain of tools and optical or print technology, the domain of natural phenomena of the macrocosm, but they also include observations, such as what happens when one is shouting in the mountains and creates an echo (figure 1.2), or if one tries to burn green branches (figure 1.3), or how a candle would attract and

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(13)

Figure 1.1 “Verfinstert und verkehrt” (Darkened and upside down). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

potentially burn insects (figure 1.4), or how a straight stick in a glass of water counterfactually appears to be broken (figure 1.5), or how chopping onions makes one cry (figure 1.6). The illustrations almost always present interesting, puzzling, but also quite predictable, and in that sense orderly, natural processes and mechanisms. These emblems must neither be understood as signs harboring a specific meaning nor as pictures representing something. Instead, they function as a model for the reader’s imaginative engagement with the natural or mechanical processes toward which they direct the reader’s attention. By generally omitting the depiction of an entire human figure, the

Figure 1.2 “Zur Antwort fertig” (Ready to respond). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Figure 1.3 “Je härter Krieg/Je edler Sieg” (The harder the war/The nobler the victory). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Figure 1.4 “Nicht zu nahe” (Not too close). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Figure 1.5 “Dennoch gerade” (And yet straight). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

(16)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

Figure 1.6 “Nicht ohne Thränen” (Not without tears). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

emblems invite the reader to place himself or herself imaginatively into the situation or process to be contemplated: thus an image of two hands peeling and chopping an onion is more directly analogous to the reader’s own experience of peeling an onion than if the image were of a housewife sitting at a table chopping an onion (figure 1.7). In fact, I would argue that this latter image, from an early nineteenth-century edition of True Christianity, the one that adds the human figure peeling the onion, marks the point in time when the kind of practice of attention propagated by True Christianity could no longer be associated with the use of devotional emblems. The role of these images as armatures or scaffolds for the imagination of the reader, prompting him or her to actively engage with processes and mechanisms as part of his or her own realm of lived experience,

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(17)

Figure 1.7 “Nicht ohne Thränen” (Not without tears). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum. Stuttgart, 1855. Scan of reproduction in Elke Müller-Mees, “Die Rolle der Emblematik im Erbauungsbuch aufgezeigt an Johann Arndts ‘4 Büchern vom wahren Christenthum.’ ” Dissertation. Universität Köln, 1974.

could also explain the rather conspicuous omission of references to the Bible. Through Arndt’s text the reader is situated in her or his everyday environment and lived experience; it is from there that the spiritual exercise is to take off rather than from remembering biblical passages.14 Arndt’s work does not operate within the framework of a general teleology. Instead, the world projected by his work entails many latent, puzzling, natural ways of functioning that have their own hidden teleology, which, however, cannot be conceptually grasped, but can become the occasion of absorbed wonder and contemplation. This explains why the Riga edition, in its unequal distribution of its fifty-six plates, devotes only one visual image to the chapter on the creation of the macrocosm, an image of a printer’s workshop with the boxes of individual letters and the motto

(18)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

Figure 1.8 “Im Setzen lieset man” (One reads as one is putting together the letters). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum, ed. T. Kohler. Philadelphia, 1854. Butler Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

“Im Setzen lieset man” (One reads as one is putting together the letters; figure 1.8). And the chapter about the creation of all living beings is prefaced by the visually rather stunning emblem of a pair of glasses and the motto “Durchhin auff etwas anders” (Through it on toward something beyond; figure 1.9). The creatures of this world should serve us like spiritual spectacles through which we will focus our love of the creator. The fact that Arndt’s True Christianity did not subscribe to a teleological approach to nature, where the careful observation of actual natural phenomena would lead us eventually to glimpse aspects of the creator’s intelligent design, an approach embraced later in the eighteenth century by many different kinds of observers of nature, deists and Pietists, like those naturalists discussed in Daston’s essay on the moral authority of nature, is relevant for my argument. We can see in Arndt a contemplative engagement with those “things

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(19)

Figure 1.9 “Durchhin auff etwas anders” (Through it on toward something beyond). Johann Arndt, 4 Geistreiche Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (edited by Johann Fischer, printed by Johann Georg Wilcken). Riga, 1678/79. Scan of reproduction in Elke Müller-Mees, “Die Rolle der Emblematik im Erbauungsbuch aufgezeigt an Johann Arndts ‘4 Büchern vom wahren Christenthum.’ ” Dissertation. Universität Köln, 1974.

from art and nature” with regard to their purposiveness, but we do not know exactly how they function, what makes them tick, nor do we have the clear concept of the mechanism we are contemplating. Propagating this kind of contemplative engagement with the world, especially as it is emphasized by the visual emblems that tended to dominate the many editions of True Christianity over nearly two centuries, Pietist meditational practice developed an everyday sensibility among broad swaths of the literate population, a mode of “contemplation” that then could be claimed to constitute a specifically human and humanizing capacity by the discourse of Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics. Especially with regard to their heterogeneity and their inclination toward the far-fetched comparison, the conceit, Arndt’s images resemble the typical Baroque emblem of the hybrid visual/verbal genre. Yet whereas

(20)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

Figure 1.10 Dionysius Lebeus-Batillius (Denis Lebey de Batilly), DIONYSII LEBEI-BATILLII REGII MEDIOMATRICVM PRAESIDIS EMBLEMATA. Francofurti ad Moenum, A0. M. D. XCVI. Reprinted in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, eds., Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, 755. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967. Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

much of this kind of wisdom literature invites its reader to reflect on the course of the world or life at court in generalizing terms, both Arndt’s verbal and visual emblems almost always involve the reader directly in those mechanisms or phenomena that are used to explain something central to the Christian faith. While in the Baroque wisdom literature the image of a bird in a cage is used to illustrate the force of habit, or where the bird is to stand for the voluntary prisoner of love (figure 1.10), in True Christianity the emblem appeals to the reader to identify with the bird: “Ich hab das beste davon” (I am better off in here; figure 1.11). The true Christian should feel so well taken care of by God that it would not make sense to escape from His providential oversight. It is not just a Christian versus a worldly use that distinguishes Arndt’s emblems; rather it is in the exact functioning of the image, its role as a prop

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(21)

Figure 1.11 “Ich hab das Beste davon” (I am better off in here). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

for the reader’s imagination, that we need to seek the specific contribution of these images. This can be observed in a Spanish advice manual for the Christian prince, by looking at how the image of a telescope (figure 1.12) is used to illustrate the distorting and dangerous aspects of flattery at court.15 The prose explanation tells the reader that flattery enhances the already regrettable discrepancy between the growth of desires and the late arrival of reason. By contrast, in Arndt’s work we find the image of a telescope (figure 1.13), and the prose explanation of 1696 reads: “Here we have a large tube perspective or telescope, through which the eye of the astronomer can look and perceive and recognize fairly clearly, very close up and present the most remote stars. In the same way the hope of a believing Christian has very clear eyes of faith, through which it can see through this-worldly visibility far unto the realm of invisibility, into God’s loving

(22)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

Figure 1.12 Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, IDEA DE UN PRINCIPE POLITICO CHRISTIANO, Representada en cien empresas. Cavallero &c.—AMSTELODAMI, Apud Ioh. Ianßonium Iuniorem, 1659. Reprinted in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, eds., Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, 1426. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967. Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

paternal heart and can delight in eternal splendor” (419). God’s otherworldly splendor is not to be grasped allegorically, by way of training one’s attention to one’s capacity for hope as if it were a perceptual apparatus, which then would transform our mere physical sight into a means of powerful vision of God’s invisible splendor. Instead, readers are asked to shape their own belief in analogy to how a telescope works: imagine and shape your mental attitude such that it functions like the telescope and lets you look through the worldly phenomena into the otherworldly. As opposed to Baroque emblems in general, both the verbal and visual emblems in True Christianity function as specific guides telling readers

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(23)

Figure 1.13 “Entfernet und doch zugegen” (Distant and yet present). Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Zu finden in der Johann Andrea Endterischen Buchhandlung). Nuremberg, 1762. B239 Ar61, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. “Der Emblematik im Erbauungsbuch aufgezeigt an Johann Arndts ‘4 Büchern vom wahren Christenthum.’ ” Dissertation. Universität Köln, 1974.

how to focus on common phenomena of the world in order to transform their inner faculties, be that the ability to bear suffering with patience, to hope, to trust in God, or to accept and fully experience the necessity of remorse. These images do not have the status of mimetic images; instead they are models for the contemplation of everyday phenomena. They might have the side effect of enchanting those everyday phenomena, of calling attention to their marvelous ways of functioning in a perfectly meaningful and predictable fashion, that nevertheless remains somehow opaque to the nonscientific layperson. They never appeal to the reader to figure out those mechanisms, to decipher from them any kind of religious, metaphysical

(24)

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

insights about the nature of God, the purposes of creation, or the intentions of Providence. The interpellation of the reader as a true Christian in training, the imperative to seek out everyday phenomena as illustrations of the workings not of God but of the believer’s own spiritual faculties, proposes a contemplative practice, which is universally accessible and highly reflexive, ready to morph into a perfectly secular version, in which the pleasures of the imagination and what only much later will be called aesthetic experience consist in this practice of mindfulness, such as studying the selfreflexive effects of contemplating a purposiveness without purpose. Finally, one might wonder, where in this take on the history of Arndt’s emblems would one be able to situate the decisive secularizing moves? In my argument I have isolated three stages of an increasing potential for the severance of this kind of spiritual practice from its official religious authoritative context, such as the Bible and church liturgy. First, there is the isolation of and dwelling on those surprisingly complex and interesting everyday phenomena, which can already be found in Arndt’s very own verbal emblems. Then there is the enhancement of this tendency by the addition of visual emblems by the three Swedish government officials Dunt, Meyer, and Fischer with their edition in Riga in 1678. Finally, and this might be the most decisive intervention in this trend, there is the addition of prose explanations to the visual emblems beginning with the Leipzig edition of 1696. Whereas the visual emblems selected by Dunt initially were only explained in Meyer’s elaborate poems printed on the verso page, explaining both the picture and motto in relation to the biblical verse reference as well as in relation to the addressee’s own life circumstances in the form of what one might call a miniature sermon, the prose explanations that were added below the visual images did not take recourse to the citation of a biblical verse but remained entirely within the focus on the mundane phenomena that were used as conceits for spiritual matters.16 Thus whereas the initial visual emblem version of True Christianity would implicitly depend on the reader turning the page to the miniature sermon, once the prose explanations were added below the visual image this reference lost its function. Once the image was combined with these prose explanations on the same page, it opened the door to a purely secular perusal, inviting its readers to wonder about its meaning, to seek in their everyday lives those seemingly mundane phenomena referred to, to contemplate their hidden, quite marvelous complexity, and to enjoy this act of contemplation

T H E SURP RISI NG ORIGI NS OF ENLIGH T ENMENT AEST H ET ICS

(25)

and attend to it as a strengthening of one’s own spiritual capacities. In other words, we can witness in Arndt’s illustrated spiritual self-help book a popular guide that would encourage the actual practice of attending to the human capacity of pleasurably experiencing a disinterested interest, which marked Kant’s turn toward aesthetics, Kant’s attempt to find a radically other kind of human nature, the one experiencing itself capable of freedom rather than determined by self-interest. Up till now I have argued that it was the specificity of Arndt’s use of images that promoted a practice of attention and contemplation that can be seen as preparing the ground for what then later in the eighteenth century became crucial aspects of an Enlightenment aesthetics, especially the concern with disinterested interest, a particular kind of pleasure that is different from the gratification of the senses. At this point it is necessary to take a step back and look at the role and function of these spiritual exercises in a larger context, in their effect on the Christian concept of man. On the one hand, Arndt is a loyal Lutheran theologian in that he does not advocate good works. He promotes a notion of religion as primarily being defined by piety and spirituality rather than dogma. On the other hand, Arndt’s effective promotion of the practices that train and enhance the individual believer’s spirituality weakens the position of and necessity for the church and its officials, which include such central aspects of Christianity as the church dispensing the sacrament of communion. Moreover, at a deeper level, the promotion of spiritual exercises as the key practice for becoming a better Christian easily endangers the central tenet of Christian belief, namely its insistence on the fallen nature of man. If self-improvement techniques are the means of becoming a better Christian, the Pelagian heresy, the belief in the fundamental goodness of man, is not far off. And indeed, when already in chapter 2 Arndt turns to the narrative of Absalom’s rebellion against God in order to make the fallen nature of man vivid to everybody he runs the risk of trivializing this fundamental doctrine. Since we can all observe the tendency of children to rebel against even the most loving parents, and since even very young children tend to have tamper tantrums, we are supposed to believe that Adam’s initial act of disobedience has been passed down to all future generations in that tendency to become angry. These examples might make the doctrine of original sin more vivid; however, they also fundamentally weaken it, since one can and must learn to control and manage one’s anger on one’s own.

2 D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T

The Human Animal’s Lack of Instinct

T

he conceptualization of our ability to take a disinterested interest, which shows itself in calmly contemplating an object of beauty or admiring even an adversary’s noble action, first emerges in the moral philosophy directed against a Hobbesian concept of human nature. Thus it plays an important role in the writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. It holds an equally prominent position in J. G. Herder’s philosophy of language and it provides the defining feature of an aesthetic judgment in Kant’s aesthetics. To trace some of the key steps in the fate of this concept by paying particular attention to its various contexts is the main goal of this chapter. In other words, I shall study how the capacity for contemplation came to be considered a distinctly human faculty. For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, “disinterestedness” is first of all a fundamentally ethical, moral attitude. It is motivated by the love for the thing in itself and thus diametrically opposed to self-interest. Although Shaftesbury was consciously opposed to certain aspects of religious orthodoxy, especially to the doctrine of original sin as well as the concept of the divine authority of Scripture, his concept and cultivation of “disinterested interest” nevertheless arose in the midst of spiritual, religious concerns. Jerome Stolnitz has situated it in the immediate context of Shaftesbury’s understanding of prayer. For Shaftesbury insisted that prayer must not be confused with an attempt at manipulating God, instead it had to be a loving approach to God for God’s sake.1 Similarly, Ernst Cassirer has shown that Shaftesbury’s concept of “disinterested interest” is deeply grounded in his ethics and religion. For

(28)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

according to Shaftesbury only those actions that are not motivated by fear of punishment or hope for reward can be called moral. True faith and true morality presuppose the believer’s freedom, which means the capacity not to be moved by self-interest. Cassirer emphasizes this aspect of Shaftesbury’s philosophy as the most critical point in which Shaftesbury departed from his teacher John Locke and calls it Shaftesbury’s “unrelenting war” against “heteronomy in morals and religion.”2 Ultimately it is in that sense that Shaftesbury’s work can be credited with laying the decisive groundwork for Kant’s and Herder’s aesthetics as well as for the notion of human freedom as it is developed in Kant’s philosophy. Shaftesbury’s conceptualization of “disinterested interest” can be illuminated by looking at the potential ways of contextualizing such a faculty, by asking not only about its religious, ethical roots but also how the capacity for taking a “disinterested interest” situates the speaking biped with regard to other animals. How does this curious faculty of being able to contemplate something without being attracted or driven to it by a particular interest, appetite, or drive fit in with regard to ways of conceiving of human motives as opposed to or in line with animal motives? This will be the focus in what follows, as I shall situate the reception of Shaftesbury’s concept of “disinterested interest” in the context of the conceptual history of “instinct” during the eighteenth century.3 Although throughout history not only naturalists but also farmers, hunters, and in fact anybody dealing with living animals have been witnesses to behavior that appears to be inborn rather than learned, which we have come to classify as instinctual, for the eighteenth-century naturalist this kind of behavior suddenly became a serious problem.4 The eighteenth century had a vexed relationship to attempts at theorizing and explaining such behavior as that exhibited by the spider constructing its elegant web. Only if instinct were to mean a very basic appetitive drive of selfpreservation did it not cause problems. But more complex types of animal behavior that seem to be inborn left the beholder and naturalist puzzled. There is, for instance, the frequently discussed behavior of a batch of young ducklings hatched by a hen instead of their biological mother. On one of their first outings, as they were passing a pond, the little ducklings did not heed the excited warning cries of their foster mother but happily splashed into the pond and swam around. What made it so difficult for many eighteenth-century philosophers and naturalists to engage with these forms of behavior is the fact that these animals appear to rely on an

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

(29)

innate program rather than on experience and learning. For such central Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke or Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, whatever seemed to evoke the programmatically rejected concept of “innate ideas” was simply unacceptable. For this would undo the entire empiricist edifice that all knowledge is acquired through our senses and through individual processes of learning. The entry “instinct” written for the Paris Encyclopédie by Charles Georges Le Roy, the royal gamekeeper and observer of animal behavior, is a good example of the vehement refutation of Descartes’s understanding of instinct as a form of automatism together with all other explanations that would allow for some model of innate knowledge or preprogrammed behavior, such as Buffon’s.5 Thus in his encyclopedia article on “instinct” Le Roy refers primarily to wolves and foxes in order to argue that their behavior can be explained as accumulated experience and learning and that especially carnivorous mammals become increasingly cunning with age. The faculty of memory plays a central role in Le Roy’s account, which concludes by defining instinct as the animal’s ability to feel, compare, judge, reflect, and decide based on a natural desire or aversion to environmental stimuli and situations. This natural desire is explained as being driven by self-interest, self-preservation, or the preservation of its kind. Instinct, in this sense, is a functionally motivated strong appetite, a natural like or dislike. All the more sophisticated types of behavior already present at birth are not addressed. Although animals can learn, they cannot make progress as a species the way humans can. Each individual, each generation has to start the learning process from scratch.6 The entry on instinct from the Protestant counterpart to the Paris encyclopedia, the Yverdon version from 1773, shares this approach to instinctual behavior as behavior directed by natural appetites. However, whereas the Paris entry claims that all complex actions rely on the faculty of reflection as a form of critical, active sampling of data and weighing of possible choices, for the Yverdon entry not all behavior implies conscious decisions, especially if the action is part of a routine. What furthermore makes the Yverdon entry interesting is the shift of the discussion of instinct from the empirical study of animal behavior to making instinct primarily into an issue of moral philosophy. Thus the Yverdon entry defines instinct as “a natural tendency or inclination, which makes us approve of certain things as good and laudable, and condemn others as bad or blameworthy, independently of any reflection.”7 In other words: instinct is what leads to a

(30)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

gut-level moral reaction. Clearly, instinct in this sense is deeply involved with questions about the natural, precultural moral makeup of the human being. Thus the Yverdon entry on instinct argues that, just like the view of somebody suffering makes us feel compassionate, it also makes us judge the attempt to help this person a beautiful and agreeable action. However, the article does not conclude by affirming this instinctual moral and aesthetic judgment but proceeds to demote this reaction to a merely circumstantially formed, quite frequently erroneous kind of prejudice. By contrast, the theory of moral sentiment as introduced by Shaftesbury and developed by Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith would allow for an inborn capacity for sympathy and benevolence. And Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality would claim that the aversion to harming a fellow sentient being, which he calls pitié, provides the basis for the human being’s fundamental capacity for goodness, for this capacity alone can hold aggressive behavior related to self-preservation and self-love in check.8 In that sense, the Yverdon encyclopedia entry can be seen as a critical response to Rousseau on pitié, but also to the theory of moral sentiment in the wake of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s theory of moral sentiment and his references to instinct are, however, more complicated than can be glimpsed through the Yverdon encyclopedia entry. In his “Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit” Shaftesbury first of all displaces the role of religion by a commitment to teleology. People are not morally righteous and virtuous because of their religious faith, or due to religious precepts, but because they have the innate capacity to be morally good to the extent that they are part of a system of creatures that have natural appetites or instincts that fit together in a well-ordered system of nature that coordinates self-interest and the interest of one’s own species, i.e., the common good.9 Already in this move Shaftesbury liberates the human being from the moral authority of religion. If human appetites and drives, just like animal appetites, are part of a well-constructed order of nature, they cannot be considered selfish or sinful behavior. Moreover, if the human being has an inborn capacity to distinguish good from evil, and can act accordingly, the human being can take full charge of its destiny, and hence is in need of neither religion nor redemption.10 When it comes to basic moral insight, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, Shaftesbury argues that this knowledge is universally and immediately available to any human being.11 This “moral sentiment” must not be acquired through experience or teaching. In this respect the

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

(31)

capacity to distinguish between good and evil has the innate characteristics of instinct. But as much as this capacity is inborn and shows itself in an immediate, gut-level response, it is also totally different from the appetitive drives humans share with the animals, drives like hunger, the sex drive, and defense of the young. The difference is that moral sentiment makes itself felt when a person feels pleasure when witnessing a righteous action that has no implications for the observer’s own interests, regardless of the observer’s own capacity to do what is good: “In these vagrant characters or pictures of manners, which the mind of necessity figures to itself and carries still about with it, the heart cannot possibly remain neutral but constantly takes part one way or other. However false or corrupt it be within itself, it finds the difference, as to beauty and comeliness, between one heart and another, one turn of affection, one behaviour, one sentiment and another and, accordingly, in all disinterested cases, must approve in some measure of what is natural and honest and disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt.”12 Here we can see how Shaftesbury’s moral sense shows itself as a disinterested interest or disinterested affective reaction to the good or the bad, the beautiful or the ugly. I have chosen the phrase disinterested interest deliberately to indicate how Shaftesbury’s model of “moral sentiment,” which he already describes both in moral and aesthetic terms, should be seen as a concept that represents a crucial ancestor for Kant’s take on taste. What is so interesting about Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment, and what makes it relevant for the history of ethics and aesthetics, is that it is, like an instinct or drive, an innate reaction as well as, to a certain extent, the negation of instinct. It might also be described as the pleasurable sensation of the absence of an appetitive urge, especially if we consider the fact that it involves the pleasures of the mind, the reaction to mental images, visions, sounds, and thoughts that we are processing and not actually part of a pressing reality surrounding us. This aspect becomes especially clear in a section in which Shaftesbury describes the pleasures experienced when one engages with mathematics: There is no one who, by the least progress in science or learning, has come to know barely the principles of mathematics but has found that in the exercise of his mind on the discoveries he there makes, though merely of speculative truths, he receives a pleasure and delight superior to that of sense. When we have thoroughly searched into the nature of this contemplative delight, we shall find it of a kind, which relates not in the least to any private

(32)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

interests of the creature, nor has for its object any self-good or advantage of the private system. The admiration, joy or love turns wholly upon what is exterior and foreign to ourselves. And though the reflected joy or pleasure which arises from the motive of this pleasure once perceived may be interpreted as self-passion or interested regard, yet the original satisfaction can be no other than what results from the love of truth, proportion, order and symmetry in the things without. If this be the case, the passion ought in reality to be ranked with natural affection. For having no object within the compass of the private system, it must either be esteemed superfluous and unnatural, as having no tendency towards the advantage or good of anything in nature, or it must be judged or be what it truly is, a natural joy in the contemplation of those numbers, that harmony, proportion and concord, which supports the universal nature and is essential in the constitution and form of every particular species or order of Beings.13

I have highlighted in this quote Shaftesbury’s insistence on the fact that the pleasure involved in this mode of contemplation is not at all related to any individual creaturely interests, but is directed to the admiration of the universal harmony intuited in that experience. Like Kant’s pure aesthetic judgment in the face of beauty, Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment is not acquired through learning, and in that sense it is universally available to each human being; like an instinctive reaction, it is universally available to a certain animal species.14 Unlike an instinctive reaction, however, the experience of beauty as well as moral sentiment make themselves felt to a subject marked as interested but not self-interested. Although in Shaftesbury we do not yet find the argument that will eventually become decisive for the philosophical anthropology of the Enlightenment, namely that the human being is distinguished by its remarkable lack of instinct, which in the case of Rousseau and Kant produces the flowering of an unbridled imagination and uncontrolled desire that brings about all the advantages and disadvantages of civilization, we can already see that Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment marks exactly this decisive juncture between the order of nature and the order of culture as it also overturns the Christian dogma of original sin. According to Shaftesbury, the human being has the capacity to know what is right based on its species-specific desire for sociability, in that sense the moral sense is like an instinct. In addition the human being also has the capacity to enjoy the use of the higher mental faculties, even when their deployment is of no

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

(33)

use to the well-being of the individual or the species. In that latter case, it seems that this kind of pleasure acknowledges the teleological, harmonious order of nature. During the eighteenth century, there is just one crucial contribution to the discussion of instinctual behavior that goes beyond the ruling appetitive model. And this can be found in Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (General Reflections on the Drives of Animals, especially on their Technical Drives and Skills) from 1760. A resident of Hamburg, Reimarus was not only a mathematician and scholar of oriental languages but also a careful student of nature. His magisterial treatise on animal instinct and their technical skills combines great attention to specific examples and wide knowledge of the naturalist and philosophical literature, ranging from classical antiquity to his contemporaries, with a refusal to adhere to the empiricist doctrine of the tabula rasa. An outspoken deist and critic of revealed religion, he was also a committed believer in the overall teleological order of nature. He opens his treatise on animal drives and craft by expressing his trust that the scientific observation and study of nature will contribute to a more complete understanding of the underlying intelligent design of the natural world. The teleologically grounded trust in nature as a harmoniously coordinated whole informs his functionalist approach. It motivated him to study different animals in their different behavioral patterns, drives, and appetites in view of how these instinctual behaviors were to secure for each species a specific fit with its particular environmental niche within an overall spectrum of biodiversity.15 Whereas, for Condillac or Le Roy, all complex behavioral patterns are the result of reflection, memory, and learning, for Reimarus, these kinds of behaviors are species specific and functionally predetermined. Reimarus does not argue that animals don’t have a soul. According to Reimarus, higher-developed animals are capable of adjusting their behavior and of learning. However, he insists—and this is the thrust of his argument against Condillac—that even complex animal behavior in its overall shape and scope is uniform, it does not vary or improve regardless where and when a particular kind of animal group, be it a herd of deer or a swarm of bees, can be found. These drives are to be understood as providing a feedback loop of an interactive system in which the sampling of sensory data from the environment elicits a set of locomotor behaviors that are specified by the species’ specific organs and tools for procreation, protection,

(34)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

and self-preservation. Unlike Le Roy, Reimarus does not reduce animal instinctual behavior to some kind of primitive cognitive behavior. Instead he describes all animal instinctual behavior as the living organism’s hereditary potential for successful interaction with its environment. For, according to Reimarus, all animals, in contrast to plants, must have instincts to the extent that they actively move around. Thus they have some kind of nervous system that allows them to interact with their environment and they need instinct to direct and select their intake of perceptual data and their responses. Reimarus explains this with the following example: If animals are born within their natural element, climate and region, and if they can remain there, no special skill or art to orient them towards the right kind of place seems to be required. However, if they have been hatched in the dry hot sand by the sun—a foreign element to the water— such as turtles and crocodiles—whence do they know to flee from the place that gave them life? What prevents them from looking for a more fertile place on land, where they would find something according to their taste that would satisfy their hunger? What makes them seek out an altogether different element and go into the water? If other animals do well in the one element, why do they occasionally venture into an alien element, such as amphibia and waterfowl? Who teaches the young ducklings hatched by a hen, even against the anxious warning cries of their foster mother to go confidently into the water and to move in an altogether different fashion, paddling into all directions? . . . Everything that animals undertake in this direction obviously serves their preservation and wellbeing, according to their life-style, necessary and indispensable. Only in order to acquire an inclination for this, to do all of this correctly and without mistakes required a distinct drive, which entailed a natural skill set, which did not require experience, reflection or practice.16

To the extent that it preserves the species an animal’s drive or instinct is fixed and inborn, not open to learning or modification. Instinct can be described as a set of programs that regulate the perception of internal and external sensations and the organism’s reactions to these, without involving the understanding, reflection, or reason. According to Reimarus, animals certainly do have an imagination, as they also have a memory in the sense that present stimuli can call up past sensations. However, there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals in that only

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

(35)

humans have the capacity to differentiate between past and present sensations, whereas for animals they are fused. Even if present stimuli call up past sensations, ultimately, animals live in an eternal present. The limits of the animal faculty of representation [Vorstellung] consist in 1.) the fact that animals do not have access to a discrete, general concept of things, and hence no faculty of language. .  .  . Without this discrete representation and language there are no true concepts, or any kind of true thinking. 2.) One can easily notice that their faculty of presentation is entirely enclosed in the sensory perceptual realm that is related to their body; and that their willpower has no further influence on what they present to themselves or what they contemplate, to the extent that their willpower is entirely determined by pleasure or unpleasure. That which can be seen by the eyes of the understanding only is inaccessible to the animal faculty of representation, and even whatever among the sensual realm does not produce a pleasurable or painful stimulus is indifferent to them, animals do not care to contemplate. 3.) The faculty of representation [Vorstellungstrieb] of animals without understanding hence does not aim at acquiring knowledge of things, if this entails a cognition, an insight into truth, a perfection of the understanding, but exclusively at what pertains to their sensual wellbeing or discomfort. 4.) Thus animals occupy their faculty of representation merely with what is present, with what moves the senses in a pleasant or unpleasant fashion. If the past mingles among those representations it happens without their awareness of this being from the past, without memory. And if the future lies in the present this too happens without their knowledge, without their foresight and without their intention.17

Based on the ability to differentiate between past and present, the distinctly human capacity for insight, reflection and “true thinking” emerges as the capacity to compare and contrast sensory data and to distinguish internal from external data. One could also say that the distinctly human capacity for thought and insight comes from the ability to interrupt the feedback loop, which for the instinctually driven animals keeps directing their ability to attend to something and act on it.18 This ability to interrupt the preprogrammed feedback loop, to willfully direct one’s attention to observe and contemplate, is also the precondition for human language, which is entirely different from animal language to the extent that animal language merely communicates present needs or sensations.

(36)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

Reimarus’s theory of instinct had a tremendous influence on Herder’s philosophy of language and, to a certain extent, also on Kant’s philosophy of history. For both thinkers develop a philosophy of history from an account of the human being as an animal that is distinguished by an extremely weak instinctual guidance in its orientation toward the world. For Herder this means that human language becomes the means of compensating for the instinctual lack, of allowing the human being to focus attention and to differentiate between internal and external sensations. Thus for Herder human language is a world-making tool. For Kant the human animal’s instinctual weakness means that the human being is characterized by unnatural desires, a capacity for error and hence learning, but ultimately also freedom due to the capacity to reflect on actions and decisions as well as on this capacity that sets the human animal apart from all other animals.19 The story of the ducklings hatched by the hen can function as a marker of the trajectory of the concept of instinct in the eighteenth century. It is told in Addison’s Spectator as an example of the mysterious, marvelous, ultimately unfathomable aspects of animal behavior. For Reimarus, as we have seen, the same observation becomes a typical example of instinct as innate behavior that is distinctly functional in a species-specific fashion.20 In Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language the same narrative is used to contrast the ducklings’ disregard for their stepmother due to the independence of their species-specific skills with the human infant’s love of its parents, its need for their care and desire to acquire language. Thus, in Herder’s case, language as the compensation for the lack of instinct in the human species takes on the function of instinct.21 Herder refers to the duckling example in the context of discussing the historicity and diversity of human languages, which respond to the specific needs of human societies in their direct contact with their environment. Reimarus’s model of instinct as a key element providing for biodiversity to the extent that it maintains a species’ functional fit with its specific environmental niche is here directly transferred to Herder’s model of language and culture. I have traced in this chapter how “disinterested interest” as a capacity for the contemplation of something that might elicit a spontaneous liking or aversion is conceptualized in contrast to an animal’s perception, which is driven by drives and instincts. As a basic faculty, the capacity for disinterested contemplation and the enjoyment of beauty appears to be inborn to all humans. It is discussed and explicitly contrasted with instinctive reactions in that it is not interested, not concerned with the beholder’s physical

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

(37)

well-being or sensuous gratification. In that sense it defines both a moral sentiment and an aesthetic enjoyment as a universal and a distinctly human capacity that does not fit in with any kind of concept of animal instinct or drives since the latter are always bound up with the interest in selfpreservation or species preservation. In fact, in both Herder’s philosophy of language as well as in Kant’s philosophy of history the human lack of instinctual guidance becomes the marker of the human being and the condition of the possibility of a freely roaming imagination, i.e., of freedom and of rationality. Of course, neither Herder nor Kant assumes that the human being is free of interests, passions, and irrational behavior. Moreover, at least according to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Kant’s Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, the human creature is subject to a far greater spectrum of needs, desires, and selfish interests. To a certain extent the capacity for taking a disinterested interest seems to provide the human animal with a break from appetitive drives and interests. It is not just a state of indifference, but is distinguished by a special kind of liking and supersensuous enjoyment. In Shaftesbury we have observed how this kind of pleasure is associated with the exercise of our mental faculties in a situation that is free of any immediate interest or pressure to act. Shaftesbury shows this, on the one hand, with regard to a scenario of moral approval in which the observer is not called upon to act and in that sense disinterested but immediately liking or approving as morally good a kind of behavior that might have even been quite alien to his own moral character. On the other hand, Shaftesbury illustrates the nature of the pleasure that is derived from such a scenario of disinterested interest with regard to the joy one takes in understanding a mathematical formula or procedure as an expression over the intuitive insight into the well-ordered arrangement of a harmonious nature or universe. Thus this faculty of contemplation, of taking a disinterested interest, can be situated both in the moral and the aesthetic domain—indeed, the two domains seem interchangeable when such contemplation involves our faculty of judgment. Since, for Shaftesbury, there exists an unbroken trust in a harmonious, teleological order of nature in which all living beings have their place, role, and function, the possible confusion between the aesthetic and the moral domain does not represent a problem. In the reflection on the difference between the instinct driven interests of animal behavior and the relative weakness of instinctual guidance in the case of the human animal we can trace the peculiar role that is played

(38)

DISINTERESTED INTEREST

by teleology in defining the human being. For Rousseau, who is eager to bolster the moral authority of nature against the morality of civilization, man left in the state of nature can compensate for his instinctual weakness by mimicking the different instinctual adaptations of animals.22 For Herder, it is the world-making capacity of human language that affirms man’s ability to study and hence renders the human a creature who is able to get to know its environment without immediately dominating or exploiting it. And, as we shall see in chapter 4, it is in the contemplation of a work of artistic genius that humans are made aware of this worldshaping power of human language. When Kant discusses the human lack of instinct, he makes the point that it can also be described as the result of man’s capacity to disregard the voice of nature (or the divine command, which for him is the same thing!).23 Human history and freedom can only evolve in a postlapsarian state, after the break with the instinctual command and once there is the possibility of choice, error, and learning. Then the human being is no longer part of the teleological order of nature, which has ethical implications. The human being as the creature that has to set its own ends has to recognize every member of its species in that capacity, which means that men must not use each other as means to an end, but must instead treat each other as ends in themselves. However, it is not only for Kant that the human being emerges as the animal that is no longer fitted into a set teleological order of nature and hence no longer subject to the moral authority of nature. Whereas this chapter has traced these teleological approaches in view of a philosophical anthropology, in view of the conceptualization of instinct and the capacity for taking a disinterested interest, the following two chapters will look at the uses and critiques of teleology when it comes to the relationship between nature and aesthetics and nature and artistic production, i.e., with regard to beauty in nature and with regard to original genius, which works with the creative powers of nature. In both these chapters we will see the different stakes that are involved in a critique of teleological discourse. First I will show how Lessing and Goethe, aware of the distinction between the normative and the descriptive, insist on separating beauty in nature from the moral authority of nature. In the final chapter I will analyze how the Enlightenment concept of genius makes use of various models of growth and organic unity borrowed from nature in order to posit a capacity of radical innovation, which would set the realm of the fine arts in contrast to the sciences and the mechanical arts.

3 B E AU T I F U L , N O T I N T ELLI G EN T D ES I G N

I

n the previous chapter, tracing the conceptualization of the faculty of contemplation, we could see how the appreciation of beauty, to the extent that it was considered an expression of the human capacity to take a disinterested interest, came to be conceived as a universal human feature rather than an acquired taste or marker of social distinction. In this context, especially in the discussion of how the human capacity for taking a disinterested interest was described as the feature that distinguished the human animal from instinct-directed animals, we could also observe the important role played by teleology. And yet, especially in light of the rise of the importance of teleological models during the eighteenth century, their validity was not accepted uniformly across different fields of knowledge and different discursive domains. When teleological models were invoked to fuse or confuse the order of nature and the order of culture, or the domain of the “is” and the domain of the “ought,” there was a possibility of considerable resistance, criticizing this as an abuse of teleology and demanding strict discursive boundaries. In this chapter I will turn to this critical resistance and show how it characterizes an emphatic Enlightenment. I will isolate and highlight two examples of this discourse that call attention to the use of teleological explanations and argue that the inherent purposiveness of natural phenomena, with their appeal to a sense of harmony and beauty, cannot be used to justify human values and moral standards. Instead, as we shall see, this critical discourse would claim the domain of beauty and the aesthetic as its own autonomous domain.

(40)

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Today Kant’s Critique of Judgment may be the first work that comes to mind when we look for an analysis of what is entailed when we judge something to be beautiful and what it means to attribute purposiveness to natural phenomena.1 However, Kant is by far not the only Enlightenment thinker to reflect on the implications of teleological models of nature in their relationship to our experience of beauty and our aesthetic judgment. Whereas in the case of Kant this critique received its own monograph, in Lessing’s and Goethe’s oeuvre this critique makes its appearance in terms of specific, exemplary interventions in the debate over particular texts. In what follows I will show Lessing’s and Goethe’s highly engaged responses to such texts of their contemporaries, in which teleological models from nature are being smuggled into the moral domain by way of their appeal to beauty. First I will isolate a passage from Lessing’s Laocöon, a work that discusses beauty from a semiotic and media theoretical perspective, then I shall turn to a piece from Goethe’s naturalist writings that discusses beauty from an evolutionary perspective. Although these two pieces are separated by about fifty years and belong to very different discursive contexts, they nevertheless share the same kind of opponent, a teleological discourse that uses the observation of nature with its intrinsic purposiveness as a means of illustrating and justifying human social relations or as a way of installing an anthropocentric cosmology, of situating the human species as the end point and goal of all change in nature. The concept of nature in the two texts I have chosen to analyze is not the same. Nature in Lessing’s discussion is a stable, more or less static, nature, a nature that has been created by a creator external to it, whose intelligent design can be admired and examined from the point of view of an anatomist, taxonomist, or botanist. Goethe’s text is concerned with nature as a creative force itself. In that the two texts are representative of a major shift that occurred toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the dynamic understanding of nature replaced the predominantly static approach, when natura naturata was replaced by natura naturans and the massive predominantly descriptive and classificatory enterprise of natural history was displaced by the newer life sciences of the nineteenth century. Goethe’s morphological studies both in zoology as well as in botany belong to the newer concern with understanding nature as a generative force, as does the concept of nature and teleology that informs Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was greatly influenced by Blumenbach’s study

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

(41)

of polyps and their regenerative capacities. And yet, despite these two very different concepts of nature, as we shall see, what irritates both Lessing and Goethe alike and motivates their vehement intervention is when nature is used to appeal to our sense of beauty and at the same time this invocation of a natural purposiveness and order is used to legitimate social relations, norms, and values.2 In a prominent place of his argument in Laocöon about the difference between the representational possibilities of the verbal arts compared with those of the visual arts, Lessing cites a passage from Albrecht von Haller’s poem “Die Alpen” describing the beauty of a flowering Alpine meadow. For Lessing, the quote serves as an example of a failed poem. It is meant to illustrate Lessing’s argument that description is counterproductive in the verbal arts if the aim is to produce a graphic, vivid effect. Lessing wants to show that, to the extent that they need to be deciphered and remembered, descriptive details encumber the engagement of the listener’s or reader’s imagination and block free and comprehensive access to the overall scene the poem aims to represent. However, Lessing’s choice of this particular passage from Haller’s “Die Alpen,” combined with his devastating criticism, by far exceeds the more technical point about description versus narration that is supposed to be illustrated within the context of his overall argument. What interests me is the fact that the passage Lessing chooses to quote verbatim does not merely engage in detailed visual description, but its description is framed and organized by an extended teleological metaphor of social hierarchy. For Haller compares and moralizes the harmonious order among the manifold Alpine flowers to the well-ordered social hierarchy within a monarchy in the following stanza: Dort ragt das hohe Haupt vom edeln Enziane Weit übern niedern Chor der Pöbelkräuter hin, Ein ganzes Blumenvolk dient unter seiner Fahne, Sein blauer Bruder selbst bückt sich und ehret ihn. Der Blumen helles Gold, in Strahlen umgebogen Türmt sich am Stengel auf, und krönt sein grau Gewand, Der Blätter glattes Weiß, mit tiefem Grün durchzogen, Strahlt von dem bunten Blitz von feuchtem Diamant. Gerechtestes Gesetz! Daß Kraft sich Zier vermähle, In einem schönen Leib wohnt eine schöne Seele.

(42)

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

There towers the noble gentian’s lofty head, Far over the common herd of vulgar plants, A whole flower people ’neath his flag is lead, E’en his blue brother bends and fealty grants. In circled rays his flowers of golden sheen Tower over the stem, and crown its vestments grey; His glossy leaves of white bestreak’d with green, Gleam with the watery diamond’s varied ray. O law most just that might consort with grace In body fair a fairer soul has place.3

Literally the last line of this stanza would have to be translated: “A beautiful body is the home of a beautiful soul.” Clearly, this stanza does not merely present the reader or listener with an image of a beautiful flowering Alpine meadow through a descriptive enumeration of the various flowers, their colors, names, and relative position toward each other. For this poem also activates a model of signification in nature, made explicit in its last line with the claim that the beauty of the external body stands for the beauty of the soul. In this assertion that external visible features naturally signify a matching invisible counterpart, presented as a poignant paraphrase of the immediately preceding rather hyperbolic normative claim, “O law most just that might consort with grace,” allegory poses as nature. The convertibility of one claim into the other is based on the assumption that a social and cultural order is grounded in a harmonious order of nature rather than on human artifact and convention. Even the narrative aspect of this stanza—an aspect that Lessing in principle should have affirmed, since according to his theory the narration of action tends to engage the imagination of the recipient far better than mere description—does not rescue Haller’s poem from Lessing’s condemnation. For here the narration does not contribute to rendering the Alpine meadow more vivid. Instead, it operates at the allegorical level in which the herbs and flowers are personified as representatives of a hierarchical social order. The manner in which Lessing subsequently refers to what he takes to be an utterly unfounded praise of Haller’s passage by the famous Swiss critic Breitinger underscores Lessing’s investment in the critique of this kind of ideologically charged approach to beauty in nature:

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

(43)

How can it have been said, that “the most faithful drawing by a painter would appear weak and dull in comparison with this poetic description”? It remains infinitely inferior to what lines and colors can express on canvas, and the critic who praised it in this exaggerated manner must have looked at it from a completely false point of view. He must have paid greater regard to the foreign ornaments which the poet has interwoven with it, to its elevation above vegetable life, to the development of those inner perfections which external beauty serves merely as a shell, than to this beauty itself and the degree of vividness and fidelity of the picture which the painter and the poet respectively can give us.4

Lessing’s sarcastic paraphrase makes it clear that there is no intrinsic necessity to use the image of a hierarchical social order in conjunction with the description of the Alpine flora. This metaphor doesn’t contribute anything to provide the reader with a unified, vivid image, which alone could make the passage truly beautiful. If anything, according to Lessing, it was Breitinger’s own apparent ideological investment in this feudal image that must have distracted him and made him incapable of paying proper attention to what he actually was feeling and capable of imagining when he read the passage. It had the power to distort the way in which he could process his own experience. For Lessing concludes that whoever claims “that these lines, in regard to the impression they make, can compete with the imitation of a Huysum, must either never have questioned his feelings or else have wanted deliberately to belie them.”5 Note how Lessing invokes access to one’s sentiment as an authenticating control for one’s aesthetic judgment in the same context in which he vehemently condemns the transfer of one’s sense of beauty to the social and moral domain. Lessing’s choice and discussion of the passage from Albrecht von Haller, especially in combination with the example of perfectly acceptable descriptive poetry that he subsequently quotes, calls attention to the political and philosophical stakes that are involved in a sign system that claims to be based naturally in a meaningful order of nature in distinction to a sign system that makes it the distinguishing marker of human language that it operates primarily with arbitrary signs. Immediately following the Haller discussion, Lessing returns to the semiotic paradigm underlying his aesthetic theory, as if to clarify his rejection of the Haller

(44)

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

passage. He reminds his reader that, due to its use of arbitrary signs, the depiction of visual detail in poetry is, of course, possible. It merely does not yield the effect of beauty, which can only be achieved if the arbitrary signs of language are used such that they can be deciphered in an effortless manner that makes them appear natural. Then, instead of leaving it at that, Lessing continues to say one might make an exception in the case of didactic poetry, where the attention to detail might have to override the attention to the overall effect. And thus Lessing generates an argumentative context for quoting two brief passages from Virgil’s Georgics, one describing with some detail the features of a cow, the other a foal. These descriptions are to highlight those didactic details that help in selecting the best animals for breeding. The passage from Virgil’s didactic poem, affirming human intervention in the order of nature through artificial selection, thus represents the strongest possible contrast to the approach to nature and beauty exemplified by the Haller passage. Whereas beauty according to Haller’s poem is part of a teleological natural order, which signifies to man the way things are and should be, even with regard to a social order and hierarchy, beauty in the Virgil passage is in the eye of the beholder who chooses to select an animal that promises to serve his own purposes, whether it is beautiful, as in the case of the little foal, or whether not, as in the case of the heavy, stout, and quite ugly cow, who nevertheless promises to be useful for breeding. Lessing dwells on the contrast between the Haller and Virgil passage because it allows him to reflect on the advantages of insisting on the strict separation of nature and culture, because his aesthetics and poetics ultimately claims the superiority of poetry over painting, which implies the artificial production of “nature.” According to Lessing, the verbal arts and poetry are graphic or painterly not by simply imitating the visual arts. Unlike painting, poetry does not naturally, or automatically, preside over a repertoire of natural signs. The signs of poetry are the conventional, arbitrary signs of human language. Thus it is only the artistic or poetic use of language, as opposed to the common use of language, that can “naturalize” the repertoire of artificial signs such that the representation appears to be natural and impress the recipient with an effortless access to the signified. Lessing’s choice of Haller’s famous poem and his vehement criticism of it far exceed his ostensible goal of illustrating how a poem is unsuccessful when it aims to depict a beautiful natural scene by way of description.

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

(45)

Beyond this specific, more technical, point, Lessing’s engagement with this particular poem also reflects on the far more extensive implications of two respective philosophies of language and their respective poetics and aesthetics. Haller’s poem, with its commitment to a semiotics of resemblances, grounded in a teleological order of nature, is contrasted with Lessing’s own argument, grounded in a semiotics of representation that argues for an aesthetics and poetics that takes responsibility for art and culture as a deliberate intervention in nature. As already mentioned, the Goethe piece I will focus on belongs to an entirely different context. It is about eight pages long and was published together with his other scientific writings about botany, anatomy, and changing forms in nature in 1822 under the title “Fossiler Stier” (Fossilized bull). It has been very little discussed or noticed by Goethe scholars or historians of science, although it is one of the relatively few texts in which Goethe directly addresses the teleological implications of species change in the animal realm. Goethe engages with a fellow paleontologist’s claim that species change is motivated by the animal’s trend to adapt to life as a domesticated animal. It is noteworthy that Goethe does not paraphrase his opponent’s anthropocentric model of species change, which he sets out to refute. Instead, he lets the fellow paleontologist, a certain Mr. Körte, speak in his own voice, providing an extensive citation of a recent article of his. Mr. Körte’s projected speech situation, which is thus brought into relief for Goethe’s reader, is quite remarkable. For it allows us to witness the juxtaposition of the precise description of the anatomical details of the respective bovine skulls, on the one hand, and rather value-laden teleological speculation and anthropomorphic projections and personalizations: They are lying in front of me like two documents, the one of the archaic steer provides a testimony to what nature had intended from eternity onwards; the one of the bullock provides a testimony of how far nature has succeeded in its efforts so far.—I am looking at the powerfully massive archaic bull, his colossal horn kernels, his deep sunk forehead, his eyesockets built far towards the side, his flat, narrow hearing chambers . . . By comparison one should look at the larger eye-sockets of the newer skull which are placed more towards the front . . . The expression of the newer skull is more thoughtful, more willing, more good-natured .  .  . Between the archaic bull and the modern bullock are thousands of years,

(46)

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

and I imagine how throughout those thousands of years the ever increasing animal desire to see towards the front eventually changed the position and shape of the eye-sockets of the archaic skull; how the desire to hear more easily, more clearly and from a further distance led to the hearing chambers of that species becoming larger and more concave towards the interior . . . I imagine how the archaic bull could roam through unlimited spaces and how the thicket of archaic wilderness had to succumb to his raw force; how by contrast the bull of today enjoys rich, well ordered pastures and well formed vegetation; I can comprehend how gradually through animal training today’s bull got used to the joke and to be fed in the stable, how his ear was lead to listen and obey the wonderful human voice, and how his eye got used to and inclined to the upright posture of the human form. The archaic bull existed before the human being, at least before the human being was there for it. Being in contact with and taken care of by the human being has certainly heightened the archaic bull’s organization. Culture has refined, i.e. tamed this unfree animal that lacked reason and was dependent on assistance into a bullock that would eat while chained and in a stable, that would be on the pasture herded by a dog and tolerate to be led by a stick and a whip.6

The guiding distinction in Körte’s argument and the criterion for the animal’s “refinement” and “nobility” consists in the contrast between an animal whose sensory organs, eyes, and ears appear far removed and relatively independent from a relatively small brain and an animal for whose sensory organs the connection to the brain appears very close, for whom the brain seems to operate as a central organ. To this distinction Körte adds a developmental trajectory that seeks the causes of change in nature’s desire to adapt an individual species ever more to human purposes. Goethe’s own approach to change in nature has no place for this kind of an anthropocentric functionalism. One might even wonder why Goethe would bother to engage with this rather inconsequential hobby paleontologist. Goethe’s position is clear from many of his other morphological writings. He refrains from privileging one species and subordinating the goal of development under the purposes and intentions of that species. Thus Goethe pointedly formulated in an earlier piece: The singular cannot be a model for the whole and this is why we must not try to find a model for the totality in the individual case. Classes, genres,

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

(47)

species and individuals are related to the law like individual cases; they are contained by it but they are not able to provide the blueprint of the law. The human being with its high degree of organic perfection, in fact exactly because of having attained this high degree of perfection is the last to be taken as a norm or measure for the other, less perfect animals. No creature, neither in its species, nor in its relative position to others should be studied and described in those terms one must take recourse to as soon as one focuses exclusively on the human being.7

According to Goethe, each animal species remains its own telos, and the overall goal consists in an ever increasing biodiversity rather than the advantages of the human race. So why does he bother to cite Körte and devote an entire essay to this discussion? Goethe’s article on the fossilized bull, however, does not argue against Körte’s anthropocentric teleology on those general grounds. Nor, via highly selective quotation, does he even engage Körte’s religiously inspired form of physico-theology. Instead, Goethe’s argument proceeds, on the one hand, by providing counterexamples to Körte’s arguments and, on the other hand, by introducing an entirely different teleological model, one that involves an argument about aesthetics and beauty in nature. By looking at a whole range of hoofed animals, both wild and domesticated, Goethe demonstrates that the relative specialization of the sensory organs and the related size of the brain are not signs of an animal’s increasing degree of domestication, since these characteristics can be found in both contemporary wild as well as domesticated species.8 The conclusion to be drawn from this is, of course, that the causes of change in nature are entirely unrelated to the needs of the human species. Finally, as if to sum up his critique of Körte’s anthropocentric teleology, Goethe introduces a new set of observations. Goethe remarks that the long horns of the prehistoric bull were strictly nonfunctional, of no good use for the bull whatsoever because they were bent sideways. Their only raison d’être was their beauty, as if to illustrate William Hogarth’s argument about the line of beauty, which says that beauty consists in an irregular spiral. Then, after Goethe has situated beauty in a cosmic order not centered around the human animal, Goethe proceeds to conclude his argument against Körte’s teleology by pointing out how man’s cultivating efforts were inspired by natural beauty, that primitive man was attracted to the hoofed animals not merely for their usefulness but for their beauty—

(48)

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

moreover, until this day farmers would artificially correct the horns of those animals born with certain deformities. And, as if to drive home the point about biodiversity both as the direction of ever changing forms in nature and as one aspect of a purely nonfunctional observation of nature, one that would give rise to aesthetic pleasure, Goethe places a quote from a commentary on Virgil’s Georgics at the end of his essay, which distinguishes three different kinds of cows exclusively with regard to the shape and direction of their horns. By way of this quote, which functions like an envoi, Goethe signs his article as a pagan and decidedly this-worldly intervention in its critique of a Christian inspired physico-theological approach to nature. Goethe even gives a separate heading to this final quote: “Vorläufiges aus dem Altertum,” which can mean that we can find precursors or a preliminary/ unfinished sketch in antiquity. Goethe thus additionally marks his critique of Körte’s teleology as a critique of a linear model of progress. He attributes to classical antiquity the power to aid us in breaking out of our contemporary frame of mind. His quote seems to suggest that in classical antiquity there was a noteworthy ethos of appreciating beauty for its own sake, just for the pure pleasure of it, without didacticism and without any other utility. This attitude toward beauty would be the perfect cure for the contemporary frame of mind and would allow us to gain a different sense of direction. At this point Goethe has transformed the focus of his scientific essay, namely the question how we understand change in nature and what alternative we have to a religiously inspired teleological model, into a model that argues for biodiversity as the engine and goal of change, as something that provides the source of purely aesthetic enjoyment rather than religious edification.9 Both Lessing’s and Goethe’s texts are very different in their focus and their overall concerns. Nevertheless, each author’s turn to aesthetics involves a critique of teleology when discussing beauty in nature. Moreover, and this is the most important aspect of Lessing’s and Goethe’s interventions, they both criticize their opponent’s uses of teleology through their rhetorical strategies. Albrecht von Haller describes the flora of an alpine meadow as if it were a naturally grounded allegory of social hierarchies, and Körte describes the direction of species change by personifying nature’s desire to be better suited to human interests and then by narrating species change through a focalization that animates and personalizes anatomical change. In either case, the criticism operates

BEAU TIF UL, NOT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

(49)

at two levels, in terms of a spirited argument along semiotic lines, in the case of Lessing, and in view of concrete counterexamples, drawn from the comparison of wild and domesticated animals, in the case of Goethe, at the textual, rhetorical levels. They both provide extensive quotes of the exact articulation of their opponent, quotes that put their opponent’s confusion of the nature/culture distinction into stark relief, and they both insert a citation from classical antiquity to depersonalize their intervention and to shift the discussion toward a more general terrain that reflects on the relationship between nature and culture as it has been concretely and metaphorically worked out in the domain of agriculture and husbandry. When Lessing and Goethe turn against what they characterize as ideological abuses of teleology, as abuses of the fusion of nature and culture, they do so in order to claim that very same territory for aesthetics and poetics as a separate, autonomous domain. Whereas, as we have seen in this chapter, this demand for aesthetic autonomy is to shield the aesthetic realm from moralistic and ideological appropriations, even, or especially, when it comes to beauty in nature, and assert the difference between the order of culture and the order of nature, when it comes to actual artistic production, something quite different from the appreciation of beauty, nature plays an altogether different role. For in that latter case, as I will show in the following chapter, nature as a creative force provides the model for radical innovation and sets the original artist apart from the merely skilled technician.

4 EN LI G H T EN M EN T D I S CO U R S ES O N O R I G I N A L G EN I U S

I

n the previous three chapters I have dealt with various aspects of Enlightenment aesthetics by focusing on the recipient or beholder. I have argued that we can point to specific religious practices of contemplation that would lay the ground for the Enlightenment claim that aesthetic contemplation is an essential aspect of human nature. Then I have traced those discourses that would situate the human ability for taking a disinterested interest and perceive beauty with regard to teleological approaches to natural phenomena. In this last chapter I shall shift my focus from considerations of reception to considerations of production, from the beholder to the artist, and study the Enlightenment transformation of the traditional discourse on genius. As we shall see, the Enlightenment discourse on genius makes the artist the figure of radical innovation and utter independence from both tradition and acquired cultural knowledge as well as from external sources of spiritual or religious inspiration. Thus, ultimately, the genius becomes a superhuman figure that usurps the position of nature or the creator—in brief: a figure that is its own progenitor. The concept of genius has a long history that goes all the way back to classical antiquity. During the eighteenth century, however, it acquires a new profile. Instead of madness, melancholy, or divine inspiration, which at other times are considered relevant aspects of genius, for the Enlightenment understanding of genius it is the capacity for originality, the capacity for radical innovation that becomes its crucial feature. Since this cannot be taught, it is considered a rare gift of nature. The products of original genius will challenge all existent norms and expectations and ultimately

(52)

ENLIGHTENMENT DISCOURSES ON ORIGINAL GENIUS

set new standards. In that sense the Enlightenment concept of genius entertains a fascinating relationship to a model of historical progress, on the one hand, and to the forces of change in nature, on the other hand. The Enlightenment concept of original genius does not rely on the older concept of nature as a created finished order of nonman-made beings and phenomena, but exclusively on the then emerging model of nature as a changing, generative, even creative force. More specifically within this context, as I will show, it is the model of natural growth exhibited by the individual living organism that plays a very important role for modeling the formative force and creativity of the genius. But, beyond that, there is also the concept of nature, as opposed to culture, as a critical resource for overcoming the deformations of one’s contemporaneous civilization that plays an important role. Thus, as we shall see, at a more abstract level, genius becomes a figure that is productively distanced, or alienated, from current cultural norms and expectations, an untimely figure. In what follows I will approach the Enlightenment discourse on original genius first by providing an overview of three influential models. Each one approaches the tension between the natural gift of genius, which is opposed to the teachable arts that generally define human culture, on the one hand, and historical progress and the individual artist’s relationship to contemporaneous cultural norms, on the other hand, differently. I shall begin with a discussion of Edward Young’s essay on original genius from 1759, which is still committed to a model of cumulative progress. By contrast, the second model, for which I have chosen to focus on Herder’s essay on Shakespeare from 1773, works with a radically historicist approach to change. In contrast to both the cumulative and the historicist paradigm, the third example of the genius as radical innovator, for which I will rely on Goethe’s Winckelmann essay from 1805, makes being out of sync with one’s times the condition of genuine innovation. I shall conclude this part with a close reading of one of the key programmatic texts promoting the new model of original genius, Goethe’s early pamphlet On German Architecture. A close reading of this text will add yet another aspect to our understanding of the Enlightenment discourse on original genius. For, especially in its performative dimension, this text engages with the spiritual, religious aspect of genius as Goethe stages his text as the record of a pilgrimage and models the aesthetic experience of coming to terms with the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral as the product of a contemplative practice.

5 “ W H ER E N AT U R E G I V ES T H E R U LE T O A RT ”

Y

oung’s “Conjectures on Original Composition,” a text that was to become particularly important for the German Storm and Stress poets of the early 1770s,1 introduces its approach to originality with the following image: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius: it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of preexistent materials not their own.”2 The talent of producing original works is not acquired but constitutive of the artistic genius’s nature. The notion of genius in the sense of “talent” (ingenium) and the notion of being a genius, where genius becomes the distinguishing feature that defines a person’s, work’s, or collectivity’s individuality, appear interchangeably in Young’s text. The more modern use of being a genius probably has been grafted on the term genius from ancient Roman mythology, where it denotes the tutelary spirit watching over an individual. In the case of Young’s concept of the vegetable genius, producer and product are inseparably connected, part of the same living organism. The process of production generates a whole form according to its own laws; the final shape of the product is akin to the nature of the specific organism: it is not dictated or acquired from the outside; it cannot be forced or artificially fabricated; it represents a naturally produced whole. As Young continues to argue, original and imitation differ not only with regard to their respective mode of production but also in their impact on a beholder or reader: “We read Imitation with somewhat of his languor, who listens to a twice-told tale: Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is

(54)

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

a perfect stranger; and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land: And tho’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more Solid, if not equally New: Thus every Telescope is lifted at a new-discovered star; it makes Astronomers in a moment, and denies equal notice to the sun” (13). Genuine originality is not just a new fashion, but it is the freedom from all convention and fashion that makes it so striking, beautiful, noble and exotic. The exotic stranger arouses not so much marvel, admiration, pleasure, awe, or approval but, above all, the desire to learn news from a strange land, i.e., the distinctly modern passion of curiosity.3 The fact that the original captures our attention by being so different from all we know does not mean that it can be imported. Young demands local genius. It is when he describes how to overcome the current paucity of originals, for which he blames the intimidating effects of illustrious examples from classical antiquity, that he deploys again the image of the noble stranger. For it is by finding the “stranger within” that one can avoid the damaging influence of powerful examples: Therefore dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full sort of mind; contract full intimacy with the Stranger within thee; excite, and cherish every spark of Intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body, let thy Genius rise (if a Genius thou hast) as the sun from Chaos; and if I should then say, like an Indian, worship it, (though too bold) yet should I say little more than . . . Reverence thyself. (53)

Young’s advice to acquire self-knowledge does not simply mean that one should become familiar with oneself but also that one must actively seek a difference within oneself. The image of the stranger within is part of a set of instructions on how to change one’s self, how to distinguish within oneself a source of originality; in that sense it is part of a technology of the self. The stranger within is the part of the self that needs to be isolated through the process of differentiating that which is merely part of one’s acquired cultural context, fashion, and commonplace from that which is a truer, more authentic self. It is noteworthy that this search for our own, innermost nature is quite different from a Christian examination of conscience. Indeed, Young even draws attention to this: instead of fallen

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

(55)

nature in need of redemption, we are advised to seek within an unblemished, pristine nature, and this inner nature is to be worshiped “like an Indian” in a scene that to his contemporary readers must have evoked a scenario of pagan idolatry. A schematic summary of Young’s figures of original genius highlights the following: the image of the vegetable genius emphasizes the inseparable bond between the individuality of the maker and her or his product, and it opposes the totality and uniqueness of the product of genius to any cultural product, anything pieced together according to recognizable rules, that would provide the recipe for its reproduction or imitation. The image of the stranger within is part of a set of prescriptions on how to become a genius and on how to avoid being merely an imitator. As part of a conscious practice of the self it appeals to a process of separating one’s own inner nature from what is culturally conditioned. The model of history invoked by Young’s idea of innovation is one of linear, cumulative progress. This is expressed, for instance, when he asks: “Knowledge physical, mathematical, moral, and divine, increases; all arts and sciences are making considerable advance; . . . these are as the root, and composition, as the flower; and as the root spreads, and thrives, shall the flower fail?” (75). As Bernhard Fabian has shown, Young models his genius on the image of the seventeenth-century scientist à la Bacon when he explains the kind of common benefits to be expected from an increase in original composition with the image of territorial gain: “Originals are, and ought to be great favourites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion” (69).4 In brief, Young’s genius is partly conquistador, partly empirical scientist and inventor. The historicist model of genius is most prominently articulated in Herder’s programmatic essay on Shakespeare. Thus he argues that even the oeuvre of such a great artist as Shakespeare will eventually no longer be relevant and accessible: Sadder and more important is the thought that even this great creator of history and the world soul grows older every day, that the words and customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves, that we are already so far removed from these great ruins of the age of chivalry that . . . even Shakespeare’s drama will become quite incapable of living performance, will become the dilapidated remains of a colossus, of a pyramid, which all gaze upon with wonder and nobody understands.5

(56)

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

However, Herder’s genius is not only a transitory historical phenomenon, which springs up, blossoms, bears fruit, and then dies away like all natural and deeply historically situated cultural phenomena. For, according to Herder, the genius is also an alter deus in what he produces. The original genius does not merely express the individual character of a historically specific culture; there is no simple continuity between original genius and its historical context. In fact, Herder illustrates the relationship between an original work and its surrounding cultural conditions with the image of the fruit or nut and its shell. The achievement of original genius, according to Herder, lies in the creation of a discrete, perfectly individualized totality out of the historically available material. Whereas the organic image of the vegetable in Young was used primarily to illustrate the distinction between the radical novelty of an original and the imitation, which is mechanically fabricated according to a known recipe with known ingredients, Herder assigns an additional function to the organicist analogy: it establishes a parallel between the overall teleology of an ever changing nature and the work of art. Thus Shakespeare’s genius consisted in his ability to work with the heterogeneous elements and the apparent chaos of his own world and shape these elements into perfectly individualized wholes. Shakespeare thus seems to approach his contemporary culture like the creator, who alone can oversee the totality of his creation. In other words, the playwright’s intelligent design, which the audience can only assume or stipulate as the cause or controlling instance behind the artwork’s perfect illusion, is what makes the artistic genius into an alternate god: Step before his stage as before an ocean of events, where wave crashes into wave. Scenes from nature come and go, each affecting the other, however disparate they appear to be; they are mutually creative and destructive, so that the intention of the creator, who seems to have combined them all according to a wanton and disordered plan, may be realized—dark little symbols forming the silhouette of a divine theodicy. . . . He who embraces a hundred scenes of a world event in his arms, orders them with his gaze, and breathes into them the one soul that suffuses and animates everything; he who captivates our attention, our heart, our every passion, our entire soul from beginning to end—if not more, then let Father Aristotle bear witness: “Creatures and other organic structures must have magnitude and yet be easily taken in by the eye;” and here—good

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

(57)

heavens!—how Shakespeare feels the whole course of events in the depths of his soul and brings it to its conclusion! A world of dramatic history, as vast and profound as Nature: but it is the creator who gives us the eyes and the vantage point we need to see so widely and deeply!6

Herder does not claim that the original genius provides the audience with a view, explanation, or justification of the chaos, misery, and injustice in this world. The artist does not supply the blueprint of a theodicy; quite to the contrary, it is the coherence and economy of his artistically shaped play that suggests a controlling point of view, the creator’s position, which can oversee the whole in such an ordering fashion that everything comes naturally, organically together as a distinctly individualized totality. The whole that is produced by the artist is the organized totality of an aesthetic illusion that manages to draw the reader or audience into its imaginary universe. Herder’s model of Shakespeare’s dramatic genius shows the distinct discursive function that was taken up by the organicist metaphor in the reorganization of the arts and sciences. For Herder not only decouples the product of genius from the professions and crafts that proceed with fixed rules of what constitutes excellence in their practice as Young does; Herder also separates the products of genius from those domains that subscribe to a realist epistemology and a model of progress. All of the fine arts, including architecture, can produce works of original genius, but all the professions, mechanical arts, and the sciences are excluded from the realm of genius production. With Herder we witness a decisive reformulation of originality: original no longer means radically new with regard to what is known within any given tradition, but rather it means radically individualized, uniquely differentiated, organized, and put together. With Herder’s model of the artwork as a quasi-organic totality, we can see what gave rise to the emergence of the secular hermeneutic procedures that were to inform the study of literature and art for a good two hundred years to come, namely all those forms of textual commentary that attempt to do justice to the uniqueness and individuality of the work of art, be they types of close readings, biographical criticism, an analysis of the distinct form as the individualizing deviance from generic patterns or rhetorical conventions, or impressionistic readings that would attempt to bring out the individuality of a work of art by documenting the encounter with the individuality of the specific critic.

(58)

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

In order to conclude the discussion of this second model of originality, I shall turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, paragraphs 46–50, where within an Enlightenment discourse on originality we can find the most thorough reflection on the status of the genius vis-à-vis the different domains of technology and knowledge production and the arts. Moreover, Kant relates the particular kind of innovation that is produced by original genius to an overall understanding of history and nature. Both Herder and Kant are aware of the proximity and distance of their respective understanding of the work of genius to a traditional, theologically informed teleology, namely a theodicy. The mind of the playwright in Herder’s case appears as a virtual illustration of the kind of superior organizing mind that would constitute the mind of the creator. When Kant, however, defines genius as “the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art,”7 he does not even bring into play the issue of intelligent design as the mind behind a complex meaningful totality; rather he invokes nature as a radically generative and innovative force. Moreover, unlike Herder’s model of genius production, Kant’s definition is based on a clear distinction rather than the continuity between nature and culture. Kant’s definition of genius emphasizes that in the case of original genius the relationship between nature and art is inverted. Whereas normally it is art that gives the rule to nature, in the case of genius it is the other way around. In contrast to the traditional understanding of art as techne, as a set of experientially based rules and prescriptions of the kind we can find in the traditional crafts and technology, we find art as a site of original innovation that is exactly opposed to the traditional, rulebased understanding of art. And yet not everything original is a product of genius. According to Kant, there is also such a thing as “original nonsense.” Although the products of original genius cannot be accounted for by any given set of rules or prescriptions, they must be able to inform the standards by which we create and judge such works. On the one hand, the products of genius do not translate into a continuous tradition or coherent paradigm that could be taught and that would be understood in terms of a model of progress—and here is the rationale for Kant’s exempting scientific discovery and insight, even Newton, from the domain of original genius. On the other hand, works of original genius must inspire emulation, not imitation. They have the capacity to incite the productivity and creativity of other artists across any particular historical context or horizon exactly because they cannot be reduced to any one specific tradition.8

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

(59)

The ability of genius to break away from tradition and the ability of art to cut across tradition and varying historical contexts and thus to incite radical innovation is what interests me in the third model of originality. This aspect of genius is not encompassed by Herder’s historicist model, although, as we have seen, it is crucial to Kant’s. However, it is further elaborated in Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann. I have chosen this much later essay by Goethe, written on the occasion of introducing a posthumous collection of Winckelmann’s letters in 1805, because it allows us to see yet another aspect of the Enlightenment discourse on genius. The essay is of interest for the way it positions genius historically (choosing a well-known Enlightenment figure as a polemic against the Romantics) and pragmatically (with respect to the position of genius in the arts and sciences). For Winckelmann was neither a scientist nor a practicing artist, but a scholar. However, Winckelmann was not just an accomplished scholar operating within the paradigm of Enlightenment antiquarian descriptions of ancient artifacts, but was capable of finding a radically new approach to Greek art. This cobbler’s son from the provinces became the founder of the discipline of art history. Goethe begins his essay on Winckelmann with a general typology of talent, which distinguishes: 1. Ordinarily gifted persons, who attempt to influence and change the external world in order to form a unity with their surroundings; 2. persons with special gifts, who withdraw from the world in order to create a separate world of their own making; 3. extraordinarily gifted persons, who search to match their particular gift by finding an equivalent in the external world. It is in Goethe’s description of the extraordinary genius that we can glimpse a further development of Young’s figure of the “stranger within.” For the extraordinary endowment of the original genius, according to Goethe, does not consist in any one particular capacity, skill, etc., but in this person’s general, overall relationship to what it means to be human.9 After those general, rather bland claims that an original genius is somehow “humanistically” gifted, Goethe turns to a brief character sketch, which emphasizes above all Winckelmann’s capacity to be happy and to be resilient when faced with misfortune. Despite the miserable circumstances of his youth and early career as a teacher, he did not lose his desire to see the world and travel. Winckelmann’s basic disposition is thus introduced as an example of what it takes to become an extraordinary genius. Goethe then starts the first section of his essay, “Antique Matters” (“Antikes”), with another set of generalizing

(60)

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

remarks about what it takes to produce something singularly unexpected (“das Einzige, ganz Unerwartete”). Whereas something extraordinary can be achieved if some faculties unite, the latter, the production of something radically new, demands that all faculties are used in perfect coordination and harmony, an opportunity that Goethe sees we moderns have practically lost, since we have to specialize in order to achieve anything. The ancients, by contrast, were capable of making a difference in their world, for their fatherland and their fellow citizens with all of their talents and all of their forces. What actually happened was of exclusive value to them. By contrast, the modern world can only attach value to what has been thought or what has become an object of sentiment. Through their commitment to living in the present, the ancients were not only capable of enjoying happiness to the fullest; they were equally capable of enduring misfortune and recuperating from unhappy experiences. In midparagraph, just after Goethe has asserted this radical difference between antiquity and modernity, he writes: “Such an antique nature, if one can say that of any of our contemporaries, had come back in Winckelmann, a nature that immediately, right at the beginning of his life proved itself by not having been tamed, dislodged or dulled by thirty years of misery, discomfort and pain.”10 In the subsequent subsection, entitled “Pagan Matters” (“Heidnisches”), Goethe proceeds to argue that what he had described in the previous section as an ethos that was particular to the ancient world, an ethos committed to this world and its goods, was only compatible with a fundamentally pagan sensibility: “That kind of self confidence, that active engagement with the present, the pure veneration of the gods as ancestors, their admiration as if they were works of art, the acceptance of fate as omnipotent, a future that with its high valorization of lasting fame made itself again dependent on the present, all these aspects belong necessarily together and form one inseparable unity, they shape themselves into a human being as if intended by nature, such that we can glimpse in the moment of extreme enjoyment and at the lowest moment of sacrifice, even of defeat [Untergang] an indestructable health.”11 In other words, the pagan humanist within is the logical successor of the noble stranger within. A certain disregard for the contemporary morality and conventions allows the genius to cultivate a radically different lifestyle, the resilience from misfortune, a commitment to living in the present and a thoroughly aesthetic attitude toward all things supernatural.

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

(61)

In what I have isolated as an Enlightenment discourse on originality, we can see three distinct ways of conceiving of originality as stages of a complex and evolving problematic: 1. There is the model of the original genius as capable of producing something radically new. To a certain extent, this concept of originality was conceived in analogy to scientific discovery or invention, especially in its appeal to a model of linear progress. Yet within this paradigm the idea of the original genius’s total disregard for tradition also comes into conflict with the established paradigm, which regulates and proceduralizes the mode of scientific knowledge production. This problem was recognized by Kant when he exempted even Newton from the ranks of original genius. 2. There is Herder’s further elaboration of the organicist metaphor within his radically historicist approach to language and culture. Herder’s model uncouples the products of original genius from any kind of naive epistemological realism. Within his historicist approach, the achievement of original genius does not lie in novelty, but instead in the production of a uniquely differentiated totality. In other words: unique individuality with Herder replaces newness and innovation. Modern, secular hermeneutic approaches to literature, aiming to do justice to the particularity and uniqueness of the literary text, though knowing they would ultimately fail vis-à-vis the unparaphrasable nature of the artwork, need to be understood as directly derived from that model of art and literature. 3. There is the model of original genius that builds on the figure of the stranger within, the model that I tried to illustrate with the aid of Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann. In this model the original genius can be a discourse innovator, an artist, an educator, a politician, or a collector. For at stake here is not the production of a uniquely organized whole, but rather a humanist ethos that finds and enhances in the external world those humanist values it finds within, a heightened understanding of what it means to be human, of accepting the human condition. Goethe explains this ethos as both an embrace of all aspects of experience and a commitment to living in the present, and he marks it as fundamentally pagan as well as fundamentally aesthetic. One last aspect of the figure of the stranger within, an aspect that emerged in Goethe’s appropriation of this figure, is the affirmation of a technique of the self that allows one to be out of sync with the dictates and fashions of one’s time, the affirmation of anachronism as a way of being culturally productive and innovative. In

(62)

“ W H E R E N AT U R E G I V E S T H E R U L E T O A R T ”

this sense we can see in the stranger within a figure of untimeliness that becomes so important for Nietzsche as a way of escaping an oppressive historicist culture. Goethe’s concept of the genius went through changes throughout his long career, especially with regard to how he conceived of innovation and originality. Yet there is one important constant as well. Ranging from its first exploration during his Strasbourg friendship with Herder to his later reflections on scientific innovation in the introduction to the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), and the zoological and botanical reflections on change in nature, as well as the autobiographical works of his later life, but also to the essay on Winckelmann, Goethe conceives of the genius as an exceptional personality who stands in an eccentric relationship to his own historical situation. I shall return to some of these concerns in part 2, when I discuss Goethe’s approach to autobiography, and I shall conclude part 1 with an analysis of Goethe’s very early text, the short pamphlet, entitled Von deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture) from 1772. This exuberant pamphlet of the young Goethe embodies the full range of what is new about the Enlightenment’s approach to genius. Moreover, in the sense that this piece also provides a vivid reenactment of Goethe’s discovery of the beauty of the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral and in that sense offers what could be called a script for aesthetic contemplation, it brings us back to the claims of chapter 1, namely that we need to look at spiritual exercises and religious contemplation for the cultural practices that were to inform what was new about the conceptualization of aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century.

6 T H E S T R A S B O U RG CAT H ED R A L

Edification and Theophany

C

elebrating the Strasbourg Cathedral and its architect Erwin von Steinbach, Goethe’s brief pamphlet “On German Architecture” from 1772 is generally considered within the context of the rediscovery of the Gothic, the Storm and Stress cult of original genius, and a generation of young poets asserting the independence of their “German” art from the ruling French paradigms of taste. Although these contextualizations are not wrong, they miss the point of what is specific, new, and important about Goethe’s text. Instead of reading “On German Architecture” as an essay about a stylistic preference or a patriotic agenda, I shall be reading it as a contribution to aesthetic theory through a performance, the mise-en-scène of a new attitude toward the Strasbourg Cathedral as a work of art and toward the genius of its architect, Erwin von Steinbach. A closer look at eighteenth-century discourse on architecture immediately reveals a number of decisive features that set Goethe’s essay apart from the then spreading general interest in the Gothic revival. Goethe is not interested in the Gothic cathedral as an actual building for specific purposes and collective use, but discusses the cathedral exclusively as if it were a work of art and in its powerful effects on the subjectivity of the beholder. And it is in the way that architecture rather than painting or poetry allows Goethe to discuss the effects of a work of art that the innovative thrust of this essay has to be sought. Regarded as such, the brief pamphlet far exceeds its various contexts and becomes legible as an important contribution to aesthetic theory, asserting a profound paradigm shift in the arts. Goethe, I want to argue, turns to architecture as

(64)

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

the model object of art when art is no longer to be considered primarily a matter of representation. Already Edward Young celebrates an emphatic artist capable of creating originals by comparing him to a magician. This magician, whose work cannot be codified in rules and hence not copied, is contrasted with the accomplished technician: “A Genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a good Architect; That raises his structure by means invisible; This by the skilful use of common tools” (26). Goethe’s programmatic choice of architecture as the model object of art also works with this discourse of original genius, only now the architect has to be viewed as that magician or genius. Goethe launches this discourse of original genius in his criticism of the then influential architectural theorist Marc Antoine Laugier. Laugier had attempted to resolve debates over architectural taste and styles by taking recourse to functionalist principles, famously invoking Vitruvius’s primal hut. According to Goethe, however, Laugier would never be able to do justice to the artistic genius of any true architect: “Schädlicher als Beispiele sind dem Genius Prinzipien” (To the genius, principles are even more detrimental than paradigms).1 Continuing to attack Laugier, he writes: “You neo-French, philosophizing connoisseur, what is the point of invoking the fact that driven by need the first inventive human being must have rammed four posts into the soil, connected them with four polls and covered the whole construct with branches and moss? Based on this you want to judge today’s needs, this is just the same as if you wanted to rule your new Babylon with the simple patriarchal wisdom of those times” (18:112). When Goethe makes fun of Laugier’s “simple patriarchal wisdom,” he targets the attempt to derive aesthetic principles from common, everyday uses, aesthetic form from primitive, archaic function. Of course one might think of the architect as a mere engineer or builder who has to meet well-defined needs. For the builder form is dictated by function. By contrast, according to Goethe, the architect as true artist and genius finds the form of his work by allowing himself to be inspired by the seemingly infinite multiplicity of forms in nature, i.e., by a manifold that appears confusing but has its own harmonic order and design. This is how Goethe illustrates the contrast between the functionally oriented engineer and the genius inspired by nature: You conceive of your buildings as if they were just two dimensional surfaces. The more they expand, the bolder they rise to the skies, the more they have to oppress the soul! Well! If that genius who inspired Erwin

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

(65)

von Steinbach did not come to our aid: multiply the immense wall that you have to raise towards the skies such that it rises like a sublime, widely spread-out tree of god, whose thousands of branches, millions of twigs and leaves like the sand on the ocean announces everywhere the glory of its lord and master. (18:113)

The engineer who derives the form of the building merely from its function is thus accused of being oblivious to the psychic impact his building will have on its beholders. However, the better he accomplishes his task from a technical point of view, the higher and broader his walls extend towards the skies, the more his building will produce an oppressive effect on the soul of its beholder. Apparently, architecture understood as art rather than just a form of engineering has as its goal not to erect a functionally adequate building but to raise, uplift, and edify the soul of its beholder. In this passage Goethe obviously plays with the relationship between a literal building, or edifice, and the spiritual effect called edification, an effect that comes from the religious domain, from a New Testament image describing the rebuilding of the soul in architectural terms.2 And, indeed, Goethe’s discourse proceeds to borrow from the religious register of devotional literature. However, the architect’s tower, which is compared to a splendid tree, is not supposed to proclaim the glory of the divine creator but the glory of its human builder. The architectonic work of art is compared to natural beauty as an object of devotional contemplation, and, at the same time, Goethe radically secularizes this loan from the religious domain. For what reveals itself in this act of contemplation is not the divine creator but the human genius of the artist. By thus making architecture the model object of art, Goethe redefines the function of art: the function of art is not beautification, ornament, or decoration, nor is it in the realm of representation and mimesis, instead, art is to present an occasion for a deeply moving encounter, a unique experience that will leave a lasting impact on the beholder. Art is supposed to provide the occasion for an enduring, strengthening, and uplifting experience comparable to the kind of experience that used to be found in the religious domain. Discussions of Goethe’s pamphlet are generally aware of the fact that Goethe never pays attention to the interior of the cathedral, but focuses exclusively on the facade as if it were a monument. However, nowhere to my knowledge is this text discussed as a systematic argument about

(66)

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

the function of art, which would be based on an analysis of how this text stages its own argument.3 And yet, immediately in the introductory passage, Goethe addresses the pragmatic function of art by thematizing the speech situation of his very own text in great detail. In fact, he presents his text as a “real-time” commentary on an autobiographical first-person speaker whom he portrays in the role of a pilgrim searching for the grave of Erwin von Steinbach. When he doesn’t succeed in finding the grave, he decides to endow a memorial for the great architect and artist. But then he quickly realizes that Erwin von Steinbach does not need a memorial because he has already memorialized himself through his very own work, the great tower of the Strasbourg Cathedral. The pilgrim concludes this train of thought by carving the name of the architect, like the name of the beloved, into the stem of a slender beech tree and by remodeling the beech tree into a primitive altar on which he offers some of the natural products he had collected during the day as sacrifice to Erwin’s spirit. By characterizing the speech situation of his text in these terms, Goethe is casting his discussion of the Strasbourg Cathedral and his mise-en-scène of an exemplary experience of art in bold anthropological and ethnographic terms. The functional approach to art, which, as we have seen, he rejects in his critique of Laugier, is replaced by a ritual/symbolic approach to art: Vitruvius’s or Laugier’s primitive hut is replaced by the poet’s improvised altar.4 The sequence of actions of this introductory passage, which is entirely kept in the present tense, could also be described as a critical reflection on the uses of certain religious and secular memorial practices situated in space or bound to a specific place. The search for the gravestone belongs to the Roman practices of pietas, i.e., the duty of the offspring to maintain the memory of the deceased.5 This religious practice of remembering the dead is subsequently contrasted with the decidedly worldly form of remembrance in terms of fama, which preserves the memory of a deceased person through the memory of glorious deeds and accomplishments. Whereas the religious practice depends on the piety of the survivors, the glorious remembrance of a hero can be influenced—at least to a certain degree—through clever public relations strategies. In either case, fame needs a medium, and this medium is traditionally associated with epic poetry. If the speaker presents himself in the role of the person who wants to memorialize the great achievement of Erwin von Steinbach, if he promises to endow a marble monument in his memory,

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

(67)

he places himself in the position of the poet on whose achievement the survival of the hero’s fame ultimately depends. And yet the opening paragraph does not end by marking the speaker’s position as the poet who would be charged with the memorialization of the hero. Instead, this task is viewed as a problem and a challenge when the speaker realizes that his intention of creating a monument in memory of Erwin von Steinbach is—to a certain degree—obsolete. The hero has already made himself immortal through the erection of the tower of the Strasbourg Cathedral, an achievement he compares in its extraordinary boldness to the building of the tower of Babel. “Few had the gift to engender a babylonic thought in their soul, whole, great, and all the way to the smallest part of it necessarily beautiful, like God’s trees; even less had the gift of meeting thousands of hands, willing to dig into the rock, and to magically build on that into steep heights, and then while dying say to their sons: I remain with you in the works of my spirit, complete what I have begun into the clouds” (18:110). Already the neoplatonic tradition of the Renaissance had rewritten the story of the tower of Babel by no longer criticizing the hubris of the entire enterprise but instead celebrating its superhuman achievement.6 What is new in the way Goethe mobilizes the reference to the tower of Babel is that he celebrates the superhuman achievement as the artist’s actual realization of his bold idea. However, this realization is both a quasi-divine creation, with its attention to complexity, infinite detail, and wholeness, and a work that memorializes its creator by being open-ended, by inviting its beholders to complete it in his spirit. In the imperative to complete the work of art in the spirit of its creator, we have a radical remodeling of the artwork-beholder relationship, a situation in which the generally triangulated situation is collapsed into two positions, the one of the creator and the work of art, whereby the beholder steps into the position of the creator. The beholder, in other words, is given a position almost of the same status as the bold hero/ artist. And it is here that we can begin to glimpse a solution to the aforementioned problem, namely how the beholder is to be protected from the intimidating, overwhelming impact of a work of genius. Recruited into an active position where he participates in the completion of the work of art, the beholder’s own spirits are uplifted; he feels strengthened and edified by his aesthetic experience. The artwork thus appears in a dual aspect: on the one hand, it is open-ended, to be completed in

(68)

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

its contemplation by a beholder. On the other hand, it appears as an independent, complete, autonomous presence. For the insistence on the actual realization of the building, not just its conceptualization, emphasizes the actual presence of the work, a presence that manages in a unique material reality to survive the physical presence of the artist, which is accessible beyond generations to be recognized, known, and remembered by those who are up to match the creative spirit of the artist. Just like a shrine devoted to a saint, Erwin von Steinbach’s building manages to guarantee the presence of the deceased. This is how Goethe presents the status of the work of art as a unique original. What is at stake is that we are not dealing with a semiotic system—this work of art is not based on a model of representation—but instead with the emphatic endowment of presence, which is described in terms of an experience of mutual recognition between artwork and beholder. This kind of aesthetic experience seems to require a specific disposition in the beholder—the wholeness of his soul—which is reflected back to him in its integrity: “What do you need a monument for! And from me! If the common crowd pronounces sacred names it is superstition or blasphemy. The weak philistine will always be dizzy confronted with your colossal monument, and souls of integrity will recognize you without help” (18:110). The speaker concludes by addressing Erwin’s spirit with the report of how he carves his name into the beech tree and presents to him a sacrificial offering. Some plants and flowers he gathered on his walks are handed over to decay in honor of Erwin’s spirit. The emphatic aesthetic experience, the self-affirming communication between a beholder of art and the spirit of a deceased artist, is here analogized to the sacrificial offering at a saint’s shrine. But this pilgrimage ritual is also decidedly modified by the autobiographical speaker’s persona. By putting Erwin into the position comparable to the one of the beloved whose name is carved into the bark of a tree, the loving exchange between beholder and artwork is analogized to the mutual recognition of lovers, which emphasizes the symmetry and reciprocity of the exchange. The lack of any official sacerdotal agency as well as any kind of an officially sanctioned altar highlights the improvisational character of the entire scene. The fact that the botanical finds are just handed over to decay but are not killed or burned removes the ritual as far as possible from the sacrificial rites of all of the monotheistic religions, especially from the central blood sacrifice of Christianity.

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

(69)

The experience of art understood as an intensified communication and exchange between the spirit of the artist and the beholder ultimately promises to grant exactly that kind of satisfaction and affirmation that is provided when lovers look into each others’ eyes or the infant finds him or herself reflected in the mother’s loving gaze.7 But how, precisely, is the work of art of all things to take over the mirroring function? It is capable of exercising this self-affirming mirroring function on account of its exclusive accessibility, and in that sense it is also comparable to the beloved or the mother. The original work of art only admits a very special kind of beholder, not the common crowd, nor the deformed connoisseur. Because the original does not fit any prefabricated schema of perception, its appreciation requires a beholder who is sufficiently artistically talented. Instead of being frightened and turned away by its uniqueness and openness, the beholder has to be able to understand its compositional logic in order to complete it in his own thoughts. And it is in this ability that the beholder is affirmed as another potential artist and creator capable of transcendence.8 In “On German Architecture” Goethe does not only attribute an edifying function to the work of art, he also stages this function in the detailed report of his encounter with the Strasbourg Cathedral. Although both paragraphs that focus on his encounter with the Strasbourg Cathedral begin as if we were dealing with the narration of a unique experience, which leads to the revision of his prejudice against the Gothic, upon closer inspection, we realize that what is being presented here is not a unique realization, but a process of contemplation that claims a paradigmatic status in that it calls for repetition and invites the reader’s identification and imitation of it. A whole, great impression filled my soul. Because it consisted of a thousand harmonizing details I could very well taste and enjoy but I had no way of cognitively grasping and explaining it. They say that it is the same with the joys of heaven. How often did I return to partake in this heavenly-earthly joy, to grasp the giant spirit of our older brothers through their works. How often did I return from all sides, from all distances, in all kinds of daylight to view his honor and glory. How hard it is for the human spirit if his brother’s work is so high above him that all he can do is bend down and adore. How often did dusk bring friendly relief and rest to my exhausted eyes until it melted the innumerable parts

(70)

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

into one whole mass, which then would stand simple and grand before my soul, and my entire force would unfold with great pleasure to be able to enjoy while gain insight at the same time! Then the genius of the great master of this work would reveal itself to me in quiet anticipations. What are you amazed at? He would whisper towards me. All these masses were necessary, and don’t you see them in all of the older churches of my city? (18:114)

The Strasbourg Cathedral passage can be read as the account of an experience not only with regard to the discovery of the beauty of the facade but at the same time with regard to the discovery and revelation of a contemplative technique of the self. The first-person singular of the experience as well as of the description of the experience is both an individualized “I” and an exemplary “I” inviting identification and imitation. The insight into the harmony of the composition, the overview of the confusing multiplicity of forms results only gradually after repeated contemplation— “how often”—under very different, varying light conditions. Before the overall composition is revealed to the beholder in the dialogue with Erwin’s genius, it cognitively reveals itself in a sensual, synesthetic experience. And this sensual experience is interpreted as a foretaste of heavenly joys. This kind of experience is famously rendered in Augustine’s Confessions, where the author describes his visit with his mother in Ostia. But the highly sensuous experience of the vision of God can also be found in Johann Arndt’s True Christianity, where it is described as one of the goals and rewards of spiritual exercises: “The vision of God is the enjoyment of God, to see God as he means to become aware of the entire fullness, and to be filled with the immeasurable and infinite goodness of God, whose fullness we can recognize in our Lord Christ and grasp it, taste it, we shall praise it with all the elect and holy angels, filled with the glory of Christ and the joy of the Holy Ghost in all eternity.”9 But the exemplary experience of art is not exhausted in its analogy to the meditative practice of the vision of God. For we can find even in this passage an oscillation between a cognitively overwhelming impression and a sensually mastered holistic comprehension of the fullness, between almost discouraging awe and an elevation of the self in the recognition of itself in the spirit of the master. One certainly would not go too far astray if one were to see in the previous passage not only the generic citation of the religious literature of devotion but also an affirmation of the purposiveness of sensuous

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

(71)

experience in its own right, a sensuous experience that is not immediately subsumed by cognition but asserts its own right simultaneously with cognitive insight and the force of understanding. This kind of experience is the one that is most carefully asserted and described in Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. But the experience of the Strasbourg Cathedral certainly cannot be reduced to the experience of the beautiful. For there is the other component of this experience that would much rather associate with the sublime, in which the subjectivity of the beholder first feels overwhelmed by the enormous multiplicity, an impression that is only remedied by the changing light, which ultimately provides the onlooker with a unified image of the totality of the composition. Yet, whereas in Kant’s mathematical sublime the beholder is confronted with the actual limitations of his imagination and the source of his pleasure lies in the affirmation of his reasoning ability, here the affirmation of the beholder consists in his ability to conceive of himself in a dialogue with the artistic genius. This dialogic exchange is prepared by the gradual aesthetic experience. The presentation of the Strasbourg Cathedral as the occasion for an exemplary aesthetic experience gives to the work of art the function of strengthening the beholder’s sense of self. The work of art, which initially threatens to overwhelm with its complex monumentality, is nevertheless so pleasing that a gradual exposure and repeated approach results in a contemplation of this artwork, during which the beholder intuits the compositional principles, the order and harmony of its creation, an intuition that appears to him like a dialogue with the creative genius of the artist. At the end of this process he feels so strengthened in his autonomy that he feels equal to a god: “I owe it to having been taught by you, genius, that, confronted with your depths I am no longer overcome by vertigo, that a drop of this spirit sinks into my soul, who can look down on his creation and speak like God, it is good” (18:115). The problematic symbolic and semiotic character of art is specified by way of invoking devotional art forms of edification as a very personal appropriation of a sacred presence. We are dealing here with practices of piety that work with techniques of the self that have been developed in meditational practice, which go back to antiquity and played both an important and a contested role in Christianity, as we have seen especially in chapter 1, where I examined the Pietist meditational practices of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity. Clearly, Goethe draws on, and appropriates in this text, the prevalent tradition of the seventeenth-century literature of

(72)

T H E S T R A S B O U R G C AT H E D R A L

edification.10 The contested role of meditation is comparable to the problematic role of the pilgrim. For the latter risks, to the extent that he starts to conduct his own negotiations at the shrine of the saint, questioning and rendering superfluous the Christological economy of redemption as well as the mediating function of the church.11 Goethe’s essay, “On German Architecture,” proposes a new, alternative paradigm of art. According to that paradigm, art no longer serves any higher agency but instead takes over the role and function of religion. This means, on the one hand, that the work of art is radically secularized with regard to institutionalized religion. On the other hand, however, the work of art is of course also endowed with a sacred aura as the unique original that can instantiate an emphatic presence. This new paradigm of an ultimately neohumanist aesthetics of autonomy pushes the previous paradigm of an aesthetics of illusion and representation into the background. Architecture in this essay plays the same role as sculpture in Herder’s essay from the same time.12 These three-dimensional art forms shift the emphasis from representation to presence and embodiment. Art aims at the self-affirmation of the beholders’ subjectivity, their ability to invent themselves as autonomous selves that create themselves anew as they create their world.

CO N C LU S I O N

G

oethe’s programmatic Storm and Stress pamphlet, “On German Architecture,” both in view of its systematic argument about the nature of original genius and in view of how the argument is actually staged as the first-person narrator’s pilgrimage to the grave of the architect of the Strasbourg Cathedral, brings us back to my initial proposition from the beginning of part 1, namely the claim that the two key concepts of an eighteenth-century discourse on aesthetics, disinterested interest and original genius, emerged against the background of specific religious practices and a changing concept of nature. In Goethe’s pamphlet the beholder of the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral experiences a theophany as he engages in a set of intense contemplative exercises, yet the spirit that speaks to him is not that of a divinity but rather that of the creative genius of the cathedral’s architect. The encounter is challenging, uplifting, and edifying, but it is also marked as a highly selective one available only to very few. This aspect of exclusivity, however, is not the case with regard to the kind of aesthetic experience I traced in the first chapter, where I looked at the religious practices that encouraged a specific contemplative approach to nature and the everyday world. Johann Arndt’s spiritual exercises trained his readers’ attention on apparently innocuous everyday phenomena and taught them to isolate these and focus on the activity of contemplation. They thus provided the background for the cultivation and appreciation of the activity of beholding a complex totality, which appeared to have a particular design or purpose that, however, could not easily or immediately

(74)

CONCLUSION

be deciphered and understood. Especially in regard to the history of the illustrations of True Christianity, this activity of contemplation did not have to be necessarily tied to a set of larger religious goals but could just as well be practiced on its own. Beyond its initial devotional context, this practice could become a purely secular engagement with the discovery of beauty as an appreciation of a purposiveness without purpose. And yet there is no immediate connection between the well-known and presumably widely spread practices of contemplation in the wake of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity and Immanuel Kant’s central claim that aesthetic judgment expresses the capacity for taking a disinterested interest. Although it is well known that Kant’s childhood was deeply affected by his mother’s Pietism, my argument is not of a biographical nature, nor am I primarily concerned with the more specialized questions of Kant scholarship. Instead, I have argued that there has been, on the one hand, a broadly established cultural practice, going back to Arndt’s popularity, that provided the practical, empirical base for a radically new conceptualization of aesthetic experience. On the other hand, and this has been the focus of the second and third chapters, I have studied the positing of a specifically human and humanizing capacity of taking a disinterested interest, which eventually could be matched to those cultural practices of contemplation. In chapter 2 I traced the various contexts that favored philosophical attention to the capacity for contemplation as the capacity for taking a disinterested interest. This isolation of the human capacity for taking a disinterested interest appears already in Shaftesbury’s writings. Right from the start, this concern with isolating the faculty of contemplation as a specific humanizing trait, a feature that would indicate man’s potential for goodness and moral insight, though associated with spiritual exercises, is also immediately in potential opposition to religious authority and the claims of orthodoxy and revealed religion. As we have seen, Shaftesbury immediately points out that religious orthodoxy would be offended by the belief in human goodness. Beyond the philosophical discourse in the wake of Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy, it actually took the naturalist concern with animal instinct and animals’ responses to the sensory/ perceptual data obtained from their environments to develop the implications of the relative weakness of instinctual drives in humans and argue that the human capacity for contemplation makes up for what otherwise would be a severe handicap. I showed how the concept of “disinterested

CONCLUSION

(75)

interest” migrates from Shaftesbury’s philosophical anthropology to the domain of naturalist observation and speculation, where the human ability to take a disinterested interest is discussed in contrast and analogy to the concept of animal instinct. In this context it was curious to note how the French Enlightenment could not engage with the concept of instinct to the extent that it was ideologically offended by what appeared to go against basic empiricist beliefs. Instinct too closely resembled the vehemently rejected concept of innate ideas. Apart from the secularization of religious practices of contemplation I have also investigated the uses and fates of teleological approaches to the study of nature and its consequences for the conceptualization of the human being. In that context Enlightenment aesthetics emerges as a rich terrain of secularization, in which teleological arguments and figures of thought play an important and complex role. I have shown how it was within the framework of a teleological approach to nature that Samuel Reimarus developed his complex account of innate perceptual and behavioral patterns against the predominant empiricist rejection of “innate ideas.” It was Reimarus’s account of how humans are different from animals, in that they have much less of an instinctually predetermined relationship to their environment, that allowed for a neo-humanist concept of human nature, in which humans are charged with having to actively construct their world through the work of culture. To a certain extent the teleological approach to nature furthered functionalist models of natural phenomena. And yet some Enlightenment thinkers were also keenly aware that any form of teleological thought could easily be mobilized for religious or other ideological purposes, invoking the moral authority of nature. Thus, in chapter 3, I have shown how both Lessing and Goethe, two very different critics, are keenly aware of this nexus as they also actively intervene and reject the practice of some physicotheologians to read in nature’s purposiveness an expression of the intelligent design of a creator. In fact, one might argue that both authors make a point of disaggregating the appreciation of beauty in nature from an argument for intelligent design. The implication, of course, is to assert the autonomy of the aesthetic realm not only from the religious but also from the moral sphere. In the final chapter, where I switched my focus from a concern with aesthetic experience and contemplation to the capacity for innovation and the production of art, we could observe the very conscious reversal of the

(76)

CONCLUSION

relationship between art and nature in the attempt to theorize innovation and the production of utter novelty. In two accounts of original genius, in the image of Young’s vegetable genius as well as in Herder’s reference to the unity and totality of the organism, we could trace a programmatic reference to the generative forces of nature as the model for radical innovation. And yet we could also see how a certain break both with nature and natural processes as well as with history was just as important for the genius to produce something radically new. This latter aspect already became apparent both in Young’s appeal to awaken the “stranger within” and in Goethe’s much later portrait of Winckelmann’s genius as being grounded in Winckelmann’s pagan nature, his affinity to the spirit of classical antiquity, an ethos that was entirely out of sync with his time and historical context. What we could see in this account of the ability to appreciate beauty, as well as in the account of radical innovation and original genius, was the development of what were to become key concepts for aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, which stand entirely apart from more traditional discourse about art appreciation and production. They are radically severed from the contexts of poetic, stylistic, and rhetorical rules, expertise, connoisseurship, etc. Taste becomes almost as inborn as the creative potential and power that makes an artist a genius. The various theories contributing to these novel concepts all relied more or less on certain religious practices, on the one hand, and certain concepts of nature as a meaningful order and totality, on the other hand. The result is a powerful anomaly: art produced by and appreciated by an isolated individual. The production of art could not be taught, nor did it depend on any specific skills. The reception and appreciation of art was not a matter of social distinction but rather an issue of furthering and expressing one’s general human capacity. If there were procedures associated with the understanding and appreciation of the work of art, they were to approach the organic unity and individuality of the artwork through an empathetic attempt at reconstructing and reanimating its internal coherence produced by the creative genius of the artist, as we could see both in Herder’s Shakespeare essay and in Goethe’s essay on Erwin von Steinbach. To a large extent, then, aesthetic experience and the engagement with art becomes a highly individualized and individualizing practice, which might be transcended but also reaffirmed by an encounter with an alterity, an encounter that can no longer remain a religious prerogative.

PART II CONFESSIONAL DISCOURSE, AU TOBIOGRAPHY, and AU THORSHIP

I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent, and the execution of which will have no imitator whatsoever. I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different. Whether nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which it cast me, is something which cannot be judged until I have been read. Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when it will; I shall come with this book in my hands to present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I shall say loudly, “Behold what I have done, what I have thought, what I have been. I have told the good and the evil with the same frankness. I have been silent about nothing bad, added nothing good, and if I have happened to use some inconsequential ornament, this has never happened except to fill up a gap occasioned by my lack of memory; I may have assumed to be true what I knew might have been so, never what I knew to be false. I have shown myself as I was, contemptible and low when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so: I have unveiled my interior as Thou hast seen it Thyself. Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthiness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to Thee, if he dares: “ I was better than that man.”1

T

hese are the famous opening paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. In them he announces his autobiography as a radically new and unique enterprise, which consists in the complete revelation of his interiority as only the eternal being has seen it. This claim justifies borrowing the title of Augustine’s work. In both cases an individual’s interiority is openly displayed with utter attention to detail and a total commitment to sincerity in a way that would match only the knowledge of an eternal being’s insight into that individual’s inner life. But in many other aspects it does not resemble Augustine’s work: certainly not in its relationship to Christian belief, nor in its way of referring to the eternal being. The last paragraph concludes with a request and a challenge. May that eternal being gather the vast crowd of the author’s fellow beings so that they may hear his confessions, so that they may cringe at learning about his disgraceful acts and blush at his woes. Would the work be received according to Rousseau’s challenge to his readers, each one of them would take his turn and open up his heart at the feet of the throne of the eternal being with the same kind of sincerity, and then just one should dare to address the divinity and say, I was better than this man there. It is rather remarkable that the function of God, the supreme judge, is not to determine the value and fate of the individual’s soul but rather to orchestrate and oversee the publication and reception of Rousseau’s book entitled Confessions. God is the authority to guarantee the utter uniqueness of Rousseau’s work. Especially after Foucault’s critique of the disciplinary aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions and practices concerned with examining the individual’s inner self, Rousseau’s challenge to his readers to “listen” to his confessions and then to follow in his footsteps and uncover their own hearts with the same kind of sincerity might be taken for the programmatic announcement of the modern culture of confession and sincerity. Indeed, it has almost become a commonplace to see in Rousseau’s Confessions the beginning of that individualizing subjection that would then with the aid of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis seek to localize in a person’s desiring structure the key to that individual’s secret, sexuality, and subjectivity that needed to be studied, cured, and normalized. In other words, Rousseau’s Confessions has been frequently considered the prototype of the transition from a religious to a worldly practice of the self, which only at first glance looks like a liberating move but actually maintains or even heightens the disciplinary aspects of the religious confession.2

PA R T I I

(79)

The emphasis on the sincerity of the confessing subject, the focus on the minute observation of the stirrings of one’s soul, and the disregard for worldly opinions and judgments are indeed decisive elements that characterize Augustine’s as well as Rousseau’s Confessions and the Christian practice of confessing one’s sins. However it needs to be noted that the sacrament of penance and the confession of one’s sins took on many different shapes throughout the history of Christianity. There has never been just one practice and speech genre of the confession. Moreover, throughout the history of Christianity there have been other uses and meanings of the term confession. The term has not only been used to refer to the sincere and accurate account of one’s trespasses and failings based on the thorough examination of one’s conscience but also to the kind of speech that professes one’s adherence to a particular creed (the profession of faith or the credo), as well as the speech genre that codifies a particular creed (such as the Augsburg Confession). In fact, as I shall show in the first section of the Rousseau chapter, Rousseau was quite aware of these different uses and aspects of the confession. He even experimented with them in view of their potential for being transferred into a more secular framework. He did so, however, not primarily in his Confessions but in his Émile, in the way he presented the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Yet, considering Rousseau’s autobiographical text and the religious practices of confession as instantiations of one and the same speech genre blurs the difference between an exceptional autobiography, conscious of its uniqueness, and a common, primarily oral practice. My approach to confessional discourse and autobiography does not privilege the oral practice of the confession of sins. Nor do I attempt to write or rewrite a genealogy of “our” culture of confession. Instead, I am interested in the valorization of individual experience as one aspect of a very specific confessional discourse that emerged in the late seventeenth century as part of Pietist reading culture, which produced a highly influential and popular practice. For the same piety movement that found its central spiritual guide in Johann Arndt’s True Christianity, which I discussed in part 1, also sought encouragement and examples in the first-person narratives of fellow believers. Heinrich Reitz’s collection of first-person accounts by Christian men and women of their conversion or spiritual awakening was almost as widely and frequently published as Arndt’s spiritual how-to manual. I hope to show that it was this specific kind of confessional discourse that provided the model of how even

(80)

PA R T I I

common people would have a voice and life worthy of being narrated by themselves, a genre that has been recently studied under the general term life-writing. To the extent that these conversion narratives were part of the Pietist emphasis on lived, practical piety, they provided a template for a narrative of the self that valorized subjective experience over external authority and the judgment of others. And for this reason, I would argue, it is a mode of confessional discourse that contributed just as much to the promotion of individual judgment and tolerance, as it might have spurred practices of interrogation, surveillance, and exhibitionism.3 Although the confessional discourse of the Pietist movement could be characterized as some kind of autobiographical writing, and although Jean-Jacques Rousseau titled his most prominent autobiographical work Confessions, there is no smooth and direct continuity between the confessional practices emerging out of seventeenth-century piety and Rousseau’s and Goethe’s own autobiographies. This discontinuity stems from the functional difference between a popular form of narrating and recording subjective experiences and the presentation of an autobiographical narrative in the service of constructing and authenticating a public persona’s or an author’s authority. In this context it is interesting to consider the autobiography of the radical Pietist author of devotional literature and theological writings Johanna Eleonora Petersen. For even with regard to this pious woman’s autobiography we can see her abstention from the confessional model of life-writing and her cultivation of a different mode, her assertion of her uniqueness and independence from worldly judgment grounded in her spirituality, which she portrays as an index of her having received God’s special attention, as the guiding principles of her autobiography. Petersen’s display of her disregard for worldly judgment, even her insistence on how she was slandered and mistreated by the rich and famous as proofs of her spiritual authority and integrity might very well represent an aspect of Protestant religiosity that can also be traced in Rousseau’s insistence on his disregard for the judgment of le monde. As we could see from the opening paragraphs of his Confessions, Rousseau’s position as an author is what motivates his claims for his absolute uniqueness. Being an author is what sets him apart from everybody else. In fact, if one considers Rousseau’s Confessions as working with the model of the conversion narrative, we have a prominent substitution at the center. Where in Augustine’s Confession the conversion under the fig tree consists in applying the words of the Bible to his own life, the turning point in Rousseau’s

PA R T I I

(81)

life as depicted in his autobiography is the moment when he becomes an instant celebrity as author of the essay on the use of the arts and sciences that won him the Dijon Academy prize. To a certain extent Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit could be characterized as the deliberate countermodel to Rousseau’s Confessions. Goethe abstains from Rousseau’s obsessive exhibitionism and instead presents his childhood, youth, and years of education and exposure to the arts and sciences from a deliberately distanced, even historical perspective. Nevertheless, Dichtung und Wahrheit is, as much as the Confessions, engaged in making a case for the uniqueness of its subject, the emergence of an inimitable author. Goethe, however, conceives of himself as an author quite differently. Whereas Rousseau’s uniqueness as a person consists in his sincerity and acute awareness of all the nuances of his emotions, which, only once coupled with utter disregard for the judgment of the world, makes him the inimitable author, at times loved but mostly persecuted by his readers, Goethe’s uniqueness consists in his very lively engagement and broad exposure to the world, all of which he took in but also overcame such that he rose above all trends and fashions. Goethe presents himself as a radical innovator in the domain of literature not just through the composition of one or the other original work but in the way he reconceived the function of art in its relationship to life. In order to understand Rousseau’s model of authorship, much can be learned by focusing on how he depicts his relationship to live audiences, anonymous crowds, and the virtual audience of print. His relationship to his audience serves him to prove his sovereignty, his independence from worldly judgment, which alone makes him an inimitable author. Goethe’s strategy of making himself independent from literary fashions is quite different. Not the disregard for the world, but the ability to step back into another time and culture, and above all one that is in its appeal and staying power above every changing trend, namely the Bible and the JudeoChristian tradition and religion as a most lasting, most powerful cultural force, serves Goethe in his autobiographical account as a crucial point of reference and reflection, in view of which he was able to become an author as a discourse innovator. It is along these lines that I shall analyze Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit as biographies of the emergence of a unique author, asserting a model of authorship that goes far beyond the simple, standard definition of the eighteenth century, namely as somebody who has published a book. If being an author is to

(82)

PA R T I I

mean more than that, if what is at stake consists in establishing the writer as an authority that lays claim to having something new and lasting to say to a wide audience, the writer cannot produce this kind of authority by way of depicting himself within a traditional mold, as the mere product of his education and times. But he or she cannot rely on the religious model of the conversion narrative either, for in that case the first-person narrator is not an author but merely a witness to the workings of divine grace. Thus, as I shall show, even within the religious circles of the radical Pietists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a religious leader and composer of devotional literature without the institutional support and backup of her male counterparts, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, would not choose the confession or conversion narrative as template for her autobiographical work. Whereas some of her male colleagues would write their autobiographies within the traditional genre of the scholar’s biography, which allowed them to justify their authorial role and authority based on their educational history, Eleonora Petersen chose another route altogether. She wrote her autobiography as that of God’s special child, who finds herself in the role of inspired prophet serving as a medium for the divine message, and she justified her authority in her utter disregard for worldly norms and expectations. The organization and structure of my discussion of “Confessional Discourse, Autobiography, and Authorship” is based on these reflections, which ultimately come down to the following observations: Pietist conversion narratives, as a popular form of life-writing, do not provide a template for a smooth transition to those autobiographies that should be read as biographies of the author, i.e., a form of life-writing that makes an emphatic case for an individual author, her or his authority and novelty, and hence relevance for a broad audience. However, as these same conversion narratives formed part of a larger culture of paying attention to an individual’s inner life as a source of inner strength in disregard of official dogma, external norms, and the opinion of others, they contributed to what we might call Enlightenment practices of independent thought and tolerance. Indeed, though neither Rousseau’s nor Goethe’s autobiographical works can be considered in direct continuity with this kind of life-writing, because of their own ambitious concept of authorship, which their autobiographies set to lay out, these very same authors, exactly in their exalted role as cultural innovators, paid close attention to these newly popularized discursive genres. They studied them closely and probed them

PA R T I I

(83)

and experimented with them in view of their secularizing potential for a new culture of Enlightenment that supported the individual’s inner sources of strength for independent thought and action. Both Rousseau and Goethe did so primarily in the pedagogical domain, Rousseau in his Émile, Goethe in the bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship). Thus in what follows I shall proceed in three larger units, each one juxtaposing the analysis of confessional discourse with the analysis of an author’s autobiography: Pietist confessional discourse will be contrasted with Johanna Eleonora Petersen’s autobiography, Rousseau’s presentation of the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in the Émile will be contrasted with his Confessions, and Goethe’s presentation of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship will be contrasted with his Poetry and Truth. In so doing I shall trace two different approaches to the issue of secularization. First I shall examine the different discursive forms of confessional discourse in different pragmatic contexts, from religious edification to the intimate exchange between friends and the probing of its ultimate shortcomings vis-à-vis the potential of art. Then, and this will primarily be the focus of my analysis of Goethe’s autobiography, I shall examine the conscious uses of religion in the assertion of an exalted model of the author as genius, artist, and discourse innovator.

7 PIETISM

T H E VA L O R I Z AT I O N O F I N D I V I D UA L EX P ER I EN C E

Generally, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) is considered the founder of German Pietism.1 Trained as a Lutheran theologian, Spener was a senior minister in the predominantly Protestant city of Frankfurt am Main when in 1667 he published a translation of La Pratique de l’oraison et méditation chrétienne (The practice of Christian prayer and meditation) by Jean de Labadie (1610–1674). In 1675 he published Pia Desideria oder Herzliches Verlangen nach gottgefälliger Besserung der wahren evangelischen Kirchen samt einigen dahin einfältig abzweckenden christlichen Vorschlägen (Pia Desideria or the Heartfelt Desire for a God-pleasing Betterment of the True Evangelical Church Together with Some Simple Proposals Aiming Thereto) as the preface to a new edition of Arndt’s True Christianity. In order to counter possible objections from the side of Protestant orthodoxy, Spener justified his great interest in the tradition of mysticism and the literature of edification by drawing on Luther’s model of religious belief as an active and divine work that transforms the individual from within. His concerns were an attempt to rejuvenate a Protestant church that after the Thirty Years’ War was worn out by internal theological fights over orthodoxy. Dry theological debate was to be replaced by religion as lived experience. Spener turned to mystical writers and invoked the authority of the historical ideal of an early Christian community. The role of the minister was to change. Instead of being primarily a learned authority in the interpretation of the Bible, he now was to become a living example of the faith. To accomplish

(86)

PIETISM

these goals, the education of ministers had to be reformed. In contrast to the radical religiosity of the Puritans in England, for instance, German Pietism, as it found its programmatic articulation by Spener, needs to be understood as an attempt to avoid separatist tendencies by integrating a mystical tradition into official church culture. Yet the potential for separatism was extremely high even within mainstream Pietism, as it sprang directly from the Pietist critique of the “external,” institutionalized aspects of the Christian Church. In 1670 a group of men around Spener began to gather regularly in his study. The aim of these meetings was to form a small group of friends who would support each other in their spiritual growth apart from worldly vanity and gossip. Soon these meetings were called collegia pietatis and exercitia pietatis. Until then the Protestant church had not supported any organized events apart from church services. Although initially the meetings included primarily Spener’s male colleagues, soon they were opened up to people of all social ranks and ages, students of theology, lawyers, doctors, merchants, craftsmen, and married as well as unmarried people. Even women could attend but not participate in the discussion, which was framed by a prayer at the beginning and end and focused on a biblical passage or a book of religious edification. These regular Bible study groups are still one of the prominent features of German Pietism. It was in Darmstadt and Frankfurt around 1677 that the term Pietists was first used to refer to those particularly religious church members who partook in the collegia pietatis. Very quickly, what started out as a derisive term was appropriated by the Pietists themselves.2 The concern with Bible study and pious praxis could ultimately be achieved only through increased literacy. Spener had articulated some social reforms concerning poverty, but the lasting institutional impact of Pietist reforms was left to his student, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who invented an entire educational system. It provided schooling ranging from literacy programs for the poor up to a Pädagogium regium to educate Prussian officers, high-ranking bureaucrats, and teachers.3 Another important aspect of Pietist literacy and its relationship to print culture was the intensive cultivation of biographical and autobiographical writing (from conversion and deathbed narratives to the confession, memoir, and diary) and its epistolary culture. Spener’s Pia Desideria was addressed primarily to his fellow ministers and leaders of the church. In the introduction Spener pointed out that

PIETISM

(87)

whereas in former times church reforms were initiated and organized by a council, he hoped that now the publication of his ideas (which he had already circulated and discussed with many of his colleagues) would take over the function of a council and lead to a productive exchange between responsible theologians and ministers. In his hope that wide discussion and a collective mode of decision-making could rely primarily on the print medium, we glimpse a model of the public sphere that was to be fully fleshed out in Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment” (1784). Spener’s manifesto for the reform of the Protestant church relies on the basic distinction between doxa and life. If he joins the widely voiced criticisms of the wrongs of the church, he nevertheless also distinguishes his own position by dissociating the teaching of the Protestant church from the lifestyles and religiosity of its pastors and members. The issue in the public debate is to be the reform of the praxis, not the nature of the teaching. Furthermore, he shifts the basis by which religious doctrine is to be measured from scholarly debate to individual belief. The true faith shows itself not by way of argument but through practice. This emphasis on religious praxis, on the actuality of a pious life rather than sophisticated doctrinal points, together with the emphasis on the urgency and the actual possibility of a better church, constitutes the core of the Pia Desideria. The distinction between the truth claims of the official religious doctrine, which if tinkered with would lead only to pointless argument and unresolvable conflict, and the truth of an individual’s spiritual experience as something that cannot be argued with but has to be respected and accepted on its own, introduces powerful arguments in favor of religious freedom and tolerance. It threatens the role and position of Bible and church by handing over the principal authority to the individual believer. The union of all true Christians, wherever they might be found, became a natural task for the Pietists. The unifying force did not have to come from membership in one particular church with one particular credo; rather it was derived from the experience of conversion, spiritual rebirth, and the pious life that ensued. This widened the horizon of German Protestantism to the treatises, prayers, songs, and in particular the autobiographical documents by Roman Catholic nuns, monks, and laypeople. The integration of these texts into a Protestant tradition meant a severe departure from orthodox tradition. Among its advocates were Johann Arndt, Johann Heinrich Reitz (1655–1720), and Gottfried Arnold (1666–1715).

(88)

PIETISM

Following up on Spener’s remarks from the Pia Desideria, Gottfried Arnold studied the early Christian community’s liturgy and government. His publications range from religious poetry and songs, to a systematic description of mysticism and its tradition, to the very controversial Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy) (1699/1700). Arnold uses the term impartial in the title to denote a position for the historian that is not congruent with any particular religious confession. Both heretics and church followers are subjected to the same critical eye that seeks to evaluate their adherence to Christianity by considering their lived religiosity rather than their doctrinal position. The lives of individuals, often their spiritual autobiographies, are reprinted in Arnold’s history and serve as manifestations of the general historical development. Arnold argues, against Luther, that the history of Christianity, presented as a “decline and fall,” should not be blamed on the power of the papacy alone. All kinds of alliances between church and state, an established class of priests, dogma, a rigidly codified credo, and this-worldliness are equally responsible. True Christians are those who live an ascetic otherworldly life. Arnold’s church history became a very widely read and influential book throughout the eighteenth century. It expressed in many ways the attitude toward religion that was to become dominant in the German-speaking Enlightenment, in that it held on to Christianity but rejected its institutionalized aspects. In a narrower sense, however, Arnold’s position was extremely limited by the chiliastic hopes that characterized the expectations of most radical Pietists at the turn of the century.4 Their rejection of any this-worldly arrangement or mediation could not be sustained over time. Arnold’s emphasis on the so-called heretics of the church and his attempts at their rehabilitation in light of the authenticity of their piety needs to be understood in conjunction with his condemnation of any form of sectarianism. Although one must not judge and condemn an individual believer for her or his departure from or critique of the official doctrine, any attempt at formalizing one’s own belief and of gathering followers amounts to a sinful sectarianism, or, in biblical terms, to an attempt to steal the bride from her rightful bridegroom.5 Arnold’s Impartial History gives a prominent place to the insights and lives of religious women of the later seventeenth century. He reprints at length Jane Lead’s discussion of the nature of visions, as he also reprints the visions and biographies of Antoinette Bourignon and Anna Vetter.6

PIETISM

(89)

He does not depict these women as spiritual leaders—although this title could certainly be claimed for both Bourignon and Lead—but merely as divinely inspired visionaries and exemplary figures of a pious life that did not shun exile and persecution.7 The overall picture that emerges from the individual examples in Arnold’s Impartial History is one of an increasingly atomistic individualism that does not know any secular concept of community, either as an actual organization that would exist apart from the church or as a more general humanist or universalist ideal. In the following section I shall show the extreme limitations of this kind of radical Pietist version of the self as it is artfully developed in Johanna Eleonora Petersen’s autobiography. In preparation for this discussion, however, I shall first take another glance at the Pietist use of autobiographical and biographical material as it became increasingly popular in the first part of the eighteenth century. Beginning in 1699/1700, Johann Henrich Reitz, another radical Pietist who had lost his position as a Protestant minister, started to publish, in ever expanding editions, the title Historie der Wiedergebohrnen (History of the Born-Again), a collection of conversion narratives, biographical and autobiographical narratives of spiritual rebirth.8 Reitz’s collection was an enormous success on the book market. Ten thousand copies had been sold by mid-century.9 The first of the three volumes of the first edition contains thirty-seven relatively brief narratives about the religious rebirths primarily of Puritan women from England. Reitz had selected and translated them from a collection by the nonconformist missionary Vavosar Powell (1617–1670) entitled Spiritual Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers. Held forth by them at severall solemne meetings (1653).10 The narratives of the first volume are uniform in composition: all contain some briefly described external or internal circumstances (the feeling of a great sadness, the experience of an illness or of the death of a beloved person) that lead to a spiritual crisis, the experience of a religious rebirth, and a conclusion that comprises several biblical citations or a confession of faith. Reitz, quite aware of the uniformity of the conversion narratives of the first volume, in the preface to the first edition alerts his readers to the second and third volumes, which contain a far greater variety of biographical material: tales of men and women of high and low rank from diverse countries. As opposed to the mere writing about “spiritual rebirth, temptation, divine sadness, faith, consolation peace and joy,” which often misses the truth when it lacks authenticating experiential depth and hence amounts to sheer hypocrisy,

(90)

PIETISM

Reitz advertises his collection as both grounded in experience and appealing to the reader’s own experience.11 A single spiritual autobiography, according to Reitz, could not accomplish his goal. Because of the highly specific and individual nature of true faith, it is important to provide a wide spectrum of conversion narratives to represent the multiplicity of God’s “process with the souls of his children.” “Then any reader can see and perceive in this history, as a living mirror, his own image and gestalt, the conformity and difference, what is lacking or how far he is still removed form the realm of God” (“Vorrede”). Thus Reitz encourages his readers to engage in an ongoing process of selfexamination, differentiation, and individualization that works by making detailed comparison with the different templates for spiritual rebirth. Reitz frames these confessional narratives with all their “anxiety, and labor, sighs and tears, hope, doubt and fear” (“Vorrede”) as an inner drama. Furthermore, he comments on the specifically literary nature, the aesthetic qualities and truth values of these narratives, which are not just a portrait of the human heart in general, but which provide immediate access to the drama of God’s work of redemption and revelation: “One can see from that how the entire heaven with all its secrets, indeed, how the entirety of Scripture is within us: Hell, Heaven, Adam, Christ, Cain, Abel, Sin, Justice, Judgment, Death, Life, Darkness and Light” (“Vorrede”). By elevating the individual confessional narratives into examples of God’s active intervention and by attributing to them the textual status of fractals of Scripture, he furthermore opposes the literary and scholarly standards by which they could be misjudged. They might not be learned, nor rhetorically sophisticated, but in their clumsy and simple language they can far surpass the Ancients, they can express true learning, the insight into the “essence of things” not in “art and order” but in “words full of spirit and life” (“Vorrede”). In the concluding pages of his preface, Reitz posits his collection as the essence of Pietist practice. He begins this argument with an appeal to the reader’s own experiential knowledge that the effective acquisition of an art of skill does not result from bookish learning, nor from lectures or theory, but from actual practical involvement: Whoever tries to become an experienced soldier by trying to get his war exercises merely from lessons, books and narratives will never succeed. Equally, that person will always remain a bad merchant who always

PIETISM

(91)

runs to the stock exchange and merely listens, but never undertakes anything, nor consults with those people who could teach him that science. One should not reject public general meetings [öffentliche allgemeine Versammlungen]. That is why one cannot shed enough tears about the fact that in many places the only kind of special meetings that are known and tolerated are held in the gambling- shooting- drinkingwhoring- comedy- tobacco- dancing- coffee- newspaper- and vain assembly houses that are mostly the market places, stock-exchanges and guild chambers of unholy people. (“Vorrede”)

Reitz goes on to offer his collection to his readers as a new and badly needed kind of public forum that would provide a better alternative to the worldly and lewd kind of public gathering. The activity of reading in his collection is thus made into an analogy of Spener’s collegia pietatis, a form of authentic, pious exchange of experience, an imaginary dialogue and participation in a Christian life, opposed to abstract, external doctrine as well as lewd worldly entertainment. Instead of the mere lip service of current Christianity, of hypocritical involvement with religious rituals and formulas, the readers will find an opportunity to learn by participating in the lived experience expressed in this collection. Long before the culture of sensibility arose, with its extensive private novel reading culminating in hallucinatory engagement and identification on the part of the reader, we find here a model for the cultivation of an interiority and authenticity. Reitz’s presentation of his collection of texts situates this book in opposition to dry theory and abstract learning on the side of experience, practice, and immediate involvement. For, according to Reitz, readers should be immediately and experientially touched by these writings because “what comes from the heart goes to the heart” (“Vorrede”). Both Arnold’s Impartial History and Reitz’s Historie situate confessional discourse at the heart of Pietism. In Arnold’s case the individual heretics’ visions, dreams, and religious insights, supported by narratives about their lives, become an occasion for studying the worldly corruption, intrigue, and rigidity of the official church and its officials, who slandered and persecuted those authentic believers. In Reitz’s case the emphasis is placed exclusively on the testimonial status of individual confessions with regard to the providential order. Especially in Reitz’s preface, we see a model in which the autobiographical material of the believer posits the

(92)

PIETISM

individual as distinct from other believers, fleshing out the specifics of concrete experiential, practical data and inviting readers into a process of self-examination by way of a contrastive comparison with the details of their own lives. When Reitz draws attention to the actual articulation, to the textual features of the conversion narratives, he does so primarily in terms of a modern, anticlassical, primitivist aesthetic that values the nonstudied, artless immediacy of expression in order to prove the authenticity and spontaneity of the individual account. He would, of course, not go so far as to seek an ideal of originality in those departures from rhetorical or stylistic standards. Nor would he present the individual narrators as authors who have claims to make or ideas to represent that could be considered on their own, apart from the biographical persona. Reitz’s appeal to the imagined community of believers as a quasi-public oral exchange is most instructive in this respect, because this model highlights how he prevents the dissociation of the narratives from the imaginary presence of their speaker as someone who must demonstrate everything she or he is saying through actual practice and experience. Along the same lines, it is important to note that Reitz only included lives of reborn believers after their death to make sure they could not lapse afterward.12 Thus one is led to a rather strange conclusion: the writers of the conversion narratives that are being collected, cited, and published do not really attain the status of authors. Their inclusion in the collection actually prevents them from assuming a public function that would extend beyond what they have to say about their lives and religious experience. After all, these believers have merely distinguished themselves in terms of their piety, their authentic belief, their intensely felt insight into the necessity and truth of Scripture. They are not at all of interest as senders of a message, merely as receivers. The most salient example can be found in the second edition of Reitz’s Historie, in the spiritual biography of Gottfried Arnold. Reitz summarizes, in a third-person narrative, Arnold’s vita, his education and activity as a scholar and professor of history. He even mentions a few of Arnold’s publications by title and praises their value for spiritual edification. Nevertheless, he quotes at length and verbatim only from Arnold’s explanation for his resignation from his position as a history professor at the university, which was published in 1699. In it Arnold describes at length first his temptations then his growing “disgust for the arrogant, vainglorious rationality of academic life.”13 Thus even the well-known scholar is radically isolated from the learned community of

PIETISM

(93)

scholars as well as from the discourse of that community. Instead he is integrated into the virtual community of the pious who do not debate doctrinal points or generalize from their experiential knowledge but merely testify to the manifold ways God has of calling his children. Hence we can also witness a distinct anti-intellectualism in this model of authenticity, experience, and practice. For the reader of Reitz’s collection to participate in this virtual community of believers, he or she has to engage in a minute process of comparison and self-reflection, but by no means in an empathic identification with those templates of conversion. T H E AU T O B I O G R A P H Y O F J O H A N N A ELE O N O R A P E T ER S EN

The autobiography of Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724) was not integrated into a collection, as part of the confessional chorus of many individual narratives by multiple believers. Clearly, it doesn’t fit into Reitz’s model in that she constructs for herself a position of authorial authority. However, in contrast to the autobiographies of the “patriarchs” of the Pietist movement, who frequently borrowed from the older secular autobiographical genre of the scholar’s vita, a partial model for the public presentation of the self to which they then would add a conversion narrative as they moved toward their conclusion, Petersen’s biography adheres to the Pietist rejection of all external worldly attachments in the most radical fashion.14 Historians of Pietism have tended to contrast her with her husband Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649–1726) and praise her autobiography as opposed to his for what they perceived as its genuine religiosity and emotional depth.15 In what follows I shall not pursue these kinds of speculations about her actual character. Instead, I shall pay particular attention to the construction of a self that allows her to publish radical theological insights.16 Johanna Eleonora Petersen believed that God has many ways of drawing men to him: “Insofar as it concerns me, I have experienced the drive [Trieb] of his good spirit from early childhood on, but out of ignorance I have often resisted this very same good spirit. I put up great obstacles by way of various identifications with the world, which was encouraged by the worldly outlook and values of the nobility, until finally understanding intervened when the wholesome word worked in me its powerful conviction.”17 In this phrase Petersen highlights the features that guide the

(94)

PIETISM

organization of her autobiography: 1.) a childhood distinguished by a not yet entirely conscious religiosity, 2.) a phase of youthful error encouraged by the worldliness of the courtly lifestyle of the nobility, and 3.) the recognition of her spiritual calling in conjunction with the development of an inspired reading practice during her adult life. Petersen recounts her childhood in a chronologically ordered sequence of six episodes. Her criteria for the selection of these individual events are not immediately obvious. Void of broader references to family, tradition, history, or culture, these episodes are told both rather matter-offactly, without any sentimentality or ponderous digressions, and, in spite of their brevity and relative triviality, with much attention to seemingly mundane details. Eleonora von und zu Merlau emerges as a child who was born into the impoverished gentry, who grew up without a formal education, a loving family, community, or comfortable home, who was exposed to betrayal, the unrest of war, poverty, neglect, abuse, and hunger. Yet—what might be most strange to a twentieth-century reader—none of these episodes focuses on the experience of loss or mourning. The reader of Petersen’s string of childhood memories is led to wonder about the significance of these seemingly isolated events, about potential connections and common themes. Probably the most persistent feature of these six individual childhood memories is that they all end in what I would call a disidentification with the world and disassociation from people around her. Petersen expresses this movement in her rejection of what she calls the identification with the world (Gleichstellung der Welt). The first episode, after the war in 1648, when Eleonora was only four years old, takes place when her family has moved to their country estate. One day the servants told Eleonora’s mother that a troop of soldiers was approaching on horseback. Thereupon Eleonora’s mother carried her infant daughter and guided her two older daughters through the summer fields toward Frankfurt. When they could hear the approaching troops a pistol-shot away, their mother admonished the girls to pray. As soon as they had reached safe shelter she told them to thank the Lord. But the older sister did not obey: “ ‘Why should we thank God, now that they can’t reach us anymore? ’ Then I had in my heart an actual sensation about this speech that truly hurt me, that she did not want to thank God or thought it was no longer necessary. I punished her for it with an ardent love of God whom I thanked with all my heart” (Mahrholz 205). The first childhood experience that Petersen mentions motivates her religious devotion

PIETISM

(95)

in the feeling of pain at her older sister’s flippant instrumentalization of God. Her ardent love of God neither springs directly from her own gratitude over being saved, nor is it merely the result of her obedience to her mother, no, it draws its affective energy from the righteous, punitive rejection of her sister’s calculus. With this simple childhood episode, Petersen introduces a relevant theological distinction: Eleonora is not just obedient and grateful, in contrast to her sister who is ungrateful and refuses to heed her mother’s words. Eleonora’s gratitude is part of her ardent love of God, her childish love of Jesus Christ of whom she has heard from her godmother. In that sense it is also a love of God that is different from her mother’s gratitude, which appears to be motivated by rescue from a concrete threat to their physical safety. Thus Eleonora’s religious sentiment at the age of four is already marked as otherworldly, and it draws its energy first from the active rejection of her sister’s position, from a disidentification with all of her female family members that leaves her alone with God. The second event from her childhood continues the theme of disidentification with the world. When she was six years old, and her mother had just given birth to another child, Eleonora noticed that her mother was crying a lot. Her nine-year-old sister told her that this was because a well known maiden of noble birth had become a whore. Although I did not know at that time what a whore was, I nevertheless thought that it must be something very evil, because my late mother cried so much. Thus I isolated myself, fell on my knees and prayed in tears to God that he should protect me from becoming a whore. The faithful God has mercifully heard this simple-minded prayer of a child. He has not only protected me from the opportunity to become one but he has also given me such a heart that I had an abhorrence of all language and gesture that was not chaste and that I did not remain in any society that was not chaste and honorable. (Mahrholz 206)

This event is concluded with a parenthetical explanation in which Petersen departs from her usual chronological order. She mentions that, in spite of her strictly chaste comportment, the devil of slander later accused her of having an illegitimate child when she was taking care of her sister’s second daughter, the legitimate child her sister had with her husband von

(96)

PIETISM

Praunheim. As in the first childhood memory, this second event also features the very young Eleonora distancing herself from the women around her. Her mother’s distress and recent experience of giving birth provides the negative affective charge to the sister’s obscure phrase, which yokes a young woman of their own class background with a morally reprehensible sexuality. Eleonora’s prayer is not concerned with others, but exclusively with asking God’s protection from the same fate. In view of the entire biography, this second episode furthermore introduces the theme of the potentially corrupting influence of society. For ultimately Petersen’s decision to live a religious life means both breaking away from the aristocratic society at court and forming a mésalliance with the learned theologian Petersen, who has neither wealth nor title. Both these decisions, as she narrates at some length in the middle part of her autobiography, gave rise to much slander, of which the speculation that her niece was actually her own illegitimate child was only a small part. Thus this childhood memory lays the groundwork for the later elaboration of her spiritual authority as her disidentification with carnal femininity and her family’s social standing. Her decision “not to become a noble whore” encompasses not just the fear of betraying the worldly code of her class by giving birth to an illegitimate child but also the fear of being corrupted by that very code. In that sense, it not only means the decision to remain chaste, as would be expected of any young noble woman, but it also means not to become a whore to the nobility, not to be defined exclusively by its worldly values. At the age of nine, Eleonora became a motherless orphan. Her father lived at court and left the children behind on their estate in the care of a schoolmaster’s widow, who gave to her own children in the village what she owed to her charges. At night she would leave the children alone, prey to being terrorized by cunning villagers. Some of the villagers, in complicity with the schoolmaster’s widow, would smear honey and sprinkle flour on their faces, put on white shirts, and appear in this ghostly disguise at night at the estate. Bearing lanterns, they would break open chests and boxes and steal whatever pleased them. Because Eleonora’s father treated them harshly, the children did not dare to tell him about these frightening apparitions. Thus it was not until the young von Praunheim, who later married Eleonora’s sister, came for a visit that the children dared speak up. Von Praunheim stayed with them and put an end to the appearance of the thievish ghosts by surprising them in flagrante.

PIETISM

(97)

The incident with the ghosts seems to fall out of the overall series of childhood memories: There is no connection to a religious experience. But, once more, there is the theme of fear and abandonment of the motherless orphans. Instead of dwelling on the loss of her biological mother, Petersen tells this episode about paternal neglect. Not only does her father choose a dishonest and uncaring caretaker for his children, but furthermore he has intimidated them to such a degree that they can not tell him about their troubles, “but were only glad when he had left again” (Mahrholz 207). In contrast to her heavenly father, in whom she can confide and who listens to her, her earthly father is mostly absent, and when he happens to be present he is too forbidding to be addressed. The ghost story allows Petersen to depict her father’s harshness without having to present his actual behavior in any negative detail. Furthermore, by keeping the story entirely within a natural and rational universe, this episode allows her to portray herself as someone who has learned from an early childhood experience about the crude and criminal abuses of such superstitions as a belief in ghosts. Especially for a religious figure whose later insights draw on visions and dreams, this story about exposing the false ghosts increases her spiritual authority. She knows how to distinguish between superstition and divine revelation. After the ghost story, Petersen tells of another event that builds on the theme of the orphan left in the care of an evil woman and bereft of the support of her biological father. After the father dismissed the neglectful schoolmaster’s widow, he employed the wife of a captain who had been recommended to him as a good housekeeper. This woman turned out to be a thief, an “un-christian woman, who had not yet forgotten her tricks of the soldiers” (Mahrholz 207). One day she spotted a flock of chickens, grabbed the best, and drove away the others. When she needed dry firewood to prepare her stolen roast, she sent Eleonora to climb up to the attic of a five-story tower to fetch some loose boards from a pigeon roost. After Eleonora had thrown down a few boards, pulling on another one, she slipped and fell down two flights of stairs. She lost consciousness and lay there for about half an hour. Feeling very weak when she regained consciousness, she climbed down the stairs and lay down to sleep in a bed in a chamber of the tower where her father used to sleep during his brief stays at the house. After a few hours she woke up refreshed and healthy. For the entire time after her fall, nobody had inquired after her. When she told about her accident, she was scolded for having not paid better attention.

(98)

PIETISM

Eleonora isolated herself and refused to eat of the stolen roast, but did not dare to speak up about it. To the extent that this childhood memory further unfolds the theme of the orphan exposed to the evils of the world, it is closely related to the previous ghost story. Again, wickedness and neglect appear in the guise of a female caretaker, again Petersen’s actual father is absent, and again this episode is devoid of explicit religious concerns, in contrast with the first two or last two episodes. Yet the narrative program of being saved from becoming the accomplice of a crime by a fall, a story about a fall with a happy outcome, suggests a number of religious interpretations reflecting providential order. The narrative does not pause to acknowledge her being saved from physical harm in a fall that could have ended much worse. She merely mentions that she could have tumbled down two more stories and that nobody seems to have cared about her potential injury. Oddly, she adds the detail of her perfect recovery in her absent father’s empty bed. She seems to suggest that in this place, as in the lap of a protective and caring father, she received the health and strength to withstand the scolding and to set herself apart from the consumption of the illegally obtained meal. The concluding phrase parallels the spatial movement she had used to describe her reaction to her sister’s comment about the noble whore. Then she went alone to the side—“und ging allein beiseits” (Mahrholz 206)—in order to pray; here she “went to the side and did not want to eat anything of the stolen roast” (Mahrholz 208). Whereas the first two episodes conclude with Eleonora assuming a position apart from the earthly fates of the women of her family and social standing, the second pair of episodes that begin with her as one among several orphans also conclude with an isolating move that sets her apart from her company, with her refusal to partake in the community of a shared meal. This fourth episode emphasizes the almost miraculous acquisition of a strength that allows her to value spiritual well-being over creature comforts. The final two childhood memories return to the explicit religious thematic. The fifth episode directly connects to the conclusion of the previous one. Petersen tells about her precocious desire to participate in the communion service. When she was ten years old, her older sister started her preparation for her first communion: “Then I had such a drive [Da bekam ich solchen Trieb] and wanted to join her” (Mahrholz 208). First her father refused, but Eleonora persisted until he agreed to let her go if the minister should judge her to be ready. The pastor tested not only whether she knew

PIETISM

(99)

the “words” but also whether she had the appropriate “understanding.” God’s grace permitted her to respond to the questions, and the minister was pleased to give her permission to participate in the preparatory class. Eleonora’s precocious desire to participate in the communion is clearly distinguished from a younger sibling’s mimetic desire vis-à-vis an older sibling. Petersen repeats the term Trieb for her religious stirrings, which she used in the introductory description of her vita. Her religious talent is not only articulated in the precocious wish but also authenticated in her ability to interpret the words in the spirit, a gift on which she is to build her later spiritual authority as a divinely inspired interpreter of the biblical word. As in the concluding passage to the first two episodes, Petersen again uses a particular kind of slander to demarcate her own position. A girl from her communion class, a close relative of hers, accused her of having said that when she obtained the chalice she would “heartily” [tapfer] drink from it. With this phrase her relative insinuated that Eleonora was expressing a love of wine, a slanderous attribution that pained the young girl tremendously. When the pastor first got word of it, he blamed the statement on her young age. But when he learned of Eleonora’s melancholy over the accusation and realized the girl’s true devotion to the “blessed chalice (which is the community of Christ)” he recognized Eleonora’s innocence and chastized the liar (Mahrholz 208–9). The final childhood memory is not based on any specific incident. Instead, it describes her overall psychic disposition, her management of her father’s household, and her unjust treatment by her impatient and punitive father, which nevertheless did not affect her general cheerfulness and quietist submission to her fate. Petersen emphasizes that her sunny disposition, which persisted in spite of the servile fear and terror of any voice that vaguely resembled her father’s, had nothing to do with lascivious enjoyments. She had a genuine disgust for whatever was unchaste and did not want to have anything to do with childish games that involved such things as marriage and baptism. Eleonora’s last childhood memory provides the transition to the middle part of her autobiography, a much longer part that describes her youth and apprenticeship with the nobility, first as a companion and guardian to the mad Countess von Solms-Redelheim, who then was a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Holstein. Again, the narrative is written entirely in view of Petersen’s later position as an isolated eminent Pietist and divinely

(100)

PIETISM

inspired interpreter of the Bible whose authority hinges on her commitment to an uncompromising rejection of all worldly ties and emotions. In contrast to Petersen’s brief collection of childhood episodes, where each individual episode sets the young Eleonora apart from her family, peers, and worldly comforts, the middle of her autobiography is a more sustained narrative about her life at court, which culminates in her decision to ask for her dismissal from the duchess’s services. The reason for this grave step, a step that surely would sever her permanently from the entire tradition of her family and class, from all prospects for the worldly success she could hope for as a young woman of an old though impoverished noble family, is her decision to live out her belief, to become a practitioner of true Christianity instead of being content with being a mere “listener.” Her Pietist radicalism, which entailed the rejection of any compromise with the world, and which ultimately led to her position outside any form of institutionalized religion, is prepared for obliquely. She does not, like some of her contemporaries, rant against the corruptions of the church and its members. The church and its function as a mediating institution, regulating the spiritual lives of its members while they are part of this world, is simply absent as a positive force; if present, the church is part of the compromising identifications with the world. How then does Petersen depict her break with her life at court? First, she is careful not to portray her break as a rebellion or a critique of her surroundings. Rather than ascribing an active role to herself, she primarily portrays herself as the beneficiary of the workings of divine wisdom. Thus, at the point when her life at court is at its happiest—certainly happier and easier than her harsh childhood or her initial life with the mad countess who mistook her for her dog, beat her, and tried to drown her—just at that moment God intervenes. For when she enjoyed the lovely clothes, the dances, and the praise of both secular and religious people she was closest to taking the wrong path. She points out that people considered her a pious maiden because she liked to read, to pray, and to go to church and because she could remember sermons in great detail, whereas in actuality she “led a life that was conducted in a loving and pleasurable identification with the world, a life that had not yet taken on the true imitation of Christ” (Mahrholz 213). Ironically, Petersen’s separation from courtly life is initiated by a marriage proposal from a not-very-pious army officer, Bretewitz. What at first sight might look like the perfect completion of her worldly trajectory

PIETISM

(101)

becomes the occasion for her severance from the world. It reintroduces her critical distance from a worldly position, that moment of being set aside from the world that continued to mark her religious talent throughout her youth. The fact that her father accepts the proposal protects her from other suitors, puts her out of circulation. The fact that her fiancé still has to advance himself in his career buys time and provides her with an opportunity to reflect on the values and obstacles by which life in the world is staked out. She is upset and unhappy to learn that her fiancé does not lead a religious life in the army. This grief translates into her losing the taste for her own worldly achievements. She can no longer enjoy being held up as an example by noble mothers for their daughters. Her distance from her fiancé thus establishes a break between her outward behavior, its recognition, and her inner disposition. Furthermore, she is distressed by the fickleness of her fiancé, who keeps changing his mind. In this state she seeks comfort in God. As if to emphasize the divine and beneficial nature of this breaking away from courtly life, she provides a miniature narrative to illustrate the particular relationship with God. She mentions for the first time that God gave her much strength through reading the Bible and through dreams that made her talk aloud in biblical language while she was asleep. A young companion of hers who had a pious heart was distressed that she did not experience the same kind of divine attention. Eleonora consoled her companion by telling her she should look upon her as a child that is cajoled by her father with sugar; she, however had already proven herself and did not need this kind of enticement. “For I could very well see that the world was attracted to me because of my cheerful spirit. My God, however, attracted me to him through joyfulness and love, and he disclosed the word to me that my body and soul took pleasure and strength from it” (Mahrholz 214). In brief, God intervenes with special attractions, with treats that make her reject worldly temptations. The special treat, the way God spoils his child, however, is also exactly what lays the ground for her later spiritual career, her identity and authority as an inspired reader of the Bible. Petersen describes the end of her engagement with Bretewitz as the result of the increasing conflict between her religious fervor and his efforts to find a wealthier bride, some intrigue, and a fair amount of slander. Her own position is again entirely passive, perfectly trusting in God’s providential order. The rumor and scandal over the broken engagement she portrays as God’s “wholesome examination of her soul” (Mahrholz 217).

(102)

PIETISM

She marks the end of the engagement as a decisive step in her disengagement from the world. She does not see in it just a rejected marriage option, rather she takes it as the final irreversible disidentification with her own social class: “Thus I was freed of that burden and strengthened in the meantime, so that I no longer considered the option of marriage. I have always been aware that among the nobility there was so much abuse that was thoroughly against Christianity. First, because they have more opportunity and force in drinking. Second, that they cannot stand any kind of insult and are willing to risk their body and soul for any kind of injustice or bad word” (Mahrholz 216). She hastens to add that her principled objection to the loose lifestyle and code of honor of that particular class made her reject the idea of marriage altogether. For, although she knew some very fine people of that class, the offspring of a noble marriage “would be exposed to such danger.” After she has decided not to marry, she is free to realize her true calling and to act on the insight that a genuine religious life would require her to leave the life at court behind. Her decision finds the support of the two famous Pietists Spener and Schütz, whom she had encountered on a journey by boat. Her departure from court, however, is narrated as a prolonged and painful phase in which she requested her dismissal and the duke and duchess tried everything to keep her. Finally, because her father is in need of her, she manages to leave. About the six years that she spends in Frankfurt with the pious widow Maria Juliane Baur von Eyseneck, she does not provide any narrative detail. Although she mentions that she had a very cordial relationship with this woman, she does not describe her, nor does she discuss the pedagogical, instructional work with young girls that she undertook in the widow’s house.18 Likewise, about her meeting Johann Wilhelm Petersen, his proposal, and her reaction, we learn scarcely anything except the bare facts. She left the decision entirely to her father, who against her expectations actually agreed to this mésalliance with a commoner. But, the resulting slander she narrates at length. Finally, about the nature of her married life, about her husband’s dismissal from his pastoral office after the couple’s controversial cultivation of their young houseguest, the visionary Rosamunde Juliane von der Asseburg, we do not learn anything at all.19 In fact, everything Petersen chooses to narrate is related to her own stylized position as a prophet, patriarch, church father, and spiritual mother. She associates and compares herself to Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Paul, Luther,

PIETISM

(103)

and Augustine, even to the Holy Ghost, who in Hebrew, she points out, is of feminine gender. What emerges from this analysis of Petersen’s autobiography in its radical disidentification with the world is a model of a public persona that presents an individual interiority. Unlike some of her male counterparts, Petersen does not give us a painstaking anatomy of her inner struggles and ailments but a depiction of an increasingly isolated and autonomous self that seeks to anchor its authority and freedom in its independence from worldly comforts, attachments, and opinions exclusively in direct contact with God. The often-mentioned emotionality and sensibility of Johanna Eleonora Petersen is absent, hence we cannot project any direct trajectory to the later culture of sensibility.20 The tremendous public recognition that she nevertheless claims through her alignment with authorities from the Bible and great leaders of Christianity draws on Petersen’s reliance on a model of honor and fame that is opposed to its secular counterpart: Instead of success in mundane business, she builds her reputation on her humiliation from all the slander she had to endure. Indeed, she opens her autobiography by listing the many wrongful accusations made against her (of being mad, unchaste, a heretic, a failure at court, etc.) not in order to defend herself and clear her worldly reputation but rather in order to seek in this humiliation a kind of martyrdom that confirms her pious life as imitatio Christi. Thus all the slander functions like negative publicity as it becomes an important means by which she is transformed from an obscure impoverished young girl into a public figure. Along with seeing secular talk and slander as a badge of honor and a sign of divine distinction, pious circles then cultivated the distinction of a “nobility of virtue” (Tugendadel) as opposed to nobility by birth (Geburtsadel). Petersen’s rejection of an aristocratic marriage and lifestyle tapped into this discourse, which also leaves its traces in occasional remarks by Reitz.21 In this context, however, it is important to remember that in spite of this at times quite strident critique of the nobility, early Pietist culture relied heavily on support, protection, and sponsorship by born-again nobles and princes. Finally, I would like to return to a point I made earlier with regard to the atomistic individualism of radical Pietism with its ideal of a supraconfessional impartiality that leaves little room for any kind of collectivity or solidarity that would go beyond the “virtual community” of the intimate experiential exchange between pious souls. In Reitz we found a model of a public forum that was situated in the privacy of reading in the collection

(104)

PIETISM

of conversion narratives. Reitz envisaged the reader’s isolated self-examination in her or his attention to the various voices of the distinctly different believers. In Petersen’s autobiography, apart from her reference to the conversation with the two eminent Pietists who confirmed her decision to break with her life at court, there is only one other episode that deals with an experience of community. It is the narrative of her husband and herself having the same experience of divine inspiration. She recounts that it was in the historically charged year of 1685, the year of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which led to the massive persecution of the Huguenots, that she gained her first significant access to an understanding of the apocalypse. For a long time she had avoided reading this difficult book, until accidentally her eyes fell on the Revelation of John 1:3: “Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.” She took this verse as encouragement, prayed ardently to God for his assistance, and when she then read the book she felt as if her heart was penetrated by the light of God and she understood everything she had read. She was also able to connect what she was reading with many other relevant biblical passages. In order not to forget these she wrote them down. Then she went to her husband and told him: “Look what our dear God has revealed to me in the holy Revelation.” He took the sheet into his hand in order to read and was startled by it and handed to me the sheet of paper he had written on, and on it still wet, written in the same hour, I could find all the foundations that also stood on my sheet of paper, and he said to me: “The Lord has truly revealed to you what he has revealed to me, go on, after some time we shall show to each other what the Lord will reveal to us.” And this is what happened. When I showed something to him that the Lord had revealed to me, he demonstrated how the same had been revealed to him; equally, when he would bring something to me I would have already received the same. (Mahrholz 237)

This episode summarizes some of the salient points about Petersen’s construction of her public persona as an inspired visionary and traditional prophet. She is careful to remove her visions from their potential association with a subjective experience, to present herself as a pure medium who has a particular relationship to reading and writing. Her visions are

PIETISM

(105)

generally not just based on supernatural sights; rather they are in most cases dreams that provide her with keys for an interpretation of a biblical passage by which she resolves a difficult theological problem related to eschatological questions. In the passage quoted here, she provides a narrative that offers a quasi-scientific empirical model for her prophetic observer position and demonstrates that she and her husband are both tuned into the same station from which they receive the same messages. This model emphasizes the externality and objectivity of the source of her divine inspiration. The fact that husband and wife are receiving these messages simultaneously but separately distinguishes their source from a joint hallucination, a folie à deux. Like the scientist who conducts an experiment that must be repeatable by another subject, her experience of divine inspiration is repeatable by her husband. The identity of their results proves the objectivity and validity of their divinely inspired notes. She and her husband serve as each other’s control groups. And yet, obviously, as closely as this model of herself as a medium and visionary fuses the position of the traditional prophet with the model of the Enlightened modern scientific observer, there is, on the other hand, an entire spectrum of both mystical traditions and modern scientific traditions that is excluded from this experimental model: the rich and complex nature of perception and sensation as well as her own embodiedness is strangely elided in the entire autobiography. The fact that Petersen does not portray her marriage as the meeting of true soulmates, and that she chooses to depict their joint reception of divine inspirations as isolated, separate dictations, again highlights the distance of this phase of Pietist culture from the later culture of sensibility, with its attention to forms of identification with another human being as a similarly embodied, feeling, sensate creature and with its celebration of empathy and pity as the guiding values for any form of solidarity and community. Nevertheless, this portrait is unbalanced in its emphasis on what is lacking. In the Pietist avoidance of what some Pietists would have called a “sinful sentimentality,” there is not only the absence of the writer’s sympathy with others but there is also the avoidance of selfstylization as a victim. To put it more positively, Pietist confessional discourse of the early Enlightenment develops the option of a radical individualism that is devoid of an emphatic subjectivity, but that supports the Pietist model of the authenticity of faith as an individualized experience. It thereby gains an impartiality and tolerance toward others

(106)

PIETISM

who cannot be judged by external forms and doctrine insofar as it also refuses sectarian camps. With this overview over the nature of Pietist confessional discourse and this discussion of some of the salient features of Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography I hope to have made a case both for the importance of Pietism for Enlightenment culture as well as for the differences between the confessional discourse of Pietism and the later eighteenthcentury development of autobiography as an author’s biography. On the one hand, we could see how the valorization of individual religious experience as the prime motivation for a spiritual reawakening and the uncontestable source of the individual’s belief provided the grounds for a certain indifference toward official doctrine, which could encourage both tolerance toward other believers, even other religions, as well as distrust of the institutionalized aspects of religion and its authorities. On the other hand, however, we could also see how the widely popular confessional narratives refrained from self-stylization but rather were presented as witness accounts to the workings of Providence as well as invitations for self-scrutiny and self-observation. The fact of their publication was not an issue of making their conversion narrative available to a larger audience as an individual, subjective message, but merely as one of many testimonies and cases against which individual readers would be able to hold their own subjective experience. They neither called for sympathy nor admiration but imitation. The examination of Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography showed both the potential and the limits for the transformation of confessional discourse into an author’s biography. Clearly, Petersen goes beyond the confessional discourse of her contemporaries and uses her spiritual autobiography to motivate her position as an especially devout religious practitioner who has an exceptional connection with the workings of divine grace as well as a special access to understanding and interpreting Scripture. To the extent that she uses the account of her personal experiences to legitimate her authority as a religious author she quite consciously goes back to Augustine’s Confessions. However, in distinction to Augustine, she never presents her autobiographical account as a prayer, addressed to God, but rather chooses the form of the defense of her reputation, of demonstrating through her personal narrative and authentic account her exclusive devotion to a religious life through her utter disregard of worldly norms and expectations. In this regard, Rousseau’s Confessions, as a secular autobiography and author’s biography, can

PIETISM

(107)

be seen to build on this attention to the disregard for worldly norms and audience expectations. For Rousseau, too, promotes his authorial autonomy by proving his independence from social norms by narrating in great detail—in that sense like Johanna Petersen—the tale of his disidentification with the world, his independence from what others thought of him. But, before turning to Rousseau’s Confessions and its vexed relationship to various kinds of audiences, I shall first turn to “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” in Rousseau’s Émile. I will discuss this text in view of its specific form, the intimate dialogue between two friends, and its content, the discourse about an individual’s relationship toward religious belief that is grounded in the subjective experience of an individual as well as careful rational reflection and its generic signpost provided by the title, namely the claim that the text will provide the equivalent of a “credo.” In other words, before turning to Rousseau’s Confessions, I shall analyze how, within the context of his semifictionalized pedagogical treatise Émile, Rousseau “stages” his position toward religion and official doctrine.

8 RO U S S E AU

CO N F ES S I O N / P RO F ES S I O N

When we call a pronouncement a profession of faith we can mean two radically different things: we might mean that we are dealing with an individual’s proclamation of her or his innermost beliefs regardless of their conformity with any particular official dogma or we might simply be indicating the speech genre of an individual speaker’s proclamation of his or her adherence to an official religious creed. In either case a profession of faith demands to be respected in its integrity, to be taken as utterly sincere. Moreover, the content or object of belief is not to be disputed. Its truth claims are based, in the latter case, on both the officially authorized version of what are to be considered the core doctrines of a specific religion and on the sincerity of the individual speaker. In the former case, however, they are exclusively supported by the purity and force of the individual speaker’s conviction. Thus today the profession of faith—if understood apart from its official religious context as the sincere expression of an individual’s set of beliefs—appears in the immediate vicinity of, if not entirely exchangeable with, the genre of the confession. It is from the confession that it seems to have borrowed a certain valorization of an individualized, hidden self that reveals itself. Indeed, modern subjectivity has been described in terms of a compulsion to confess, to proclaim publicly the most intimate, private thoughts and sentiments in a radically truthful, sincere manner.1 Rousseau’s Confessions represents one of the most prominent milestones in a cultural

(110)

ROUSSEAU

transformation that, beginning with the seventeenth-century critique of the kind of self-discipline, stoicism, and dissimulation required by courtly behavior, began to articulate itself in the affirmation of a private, possibly transgressive self, different from the public persona. The history of this aspect of modern subjectivity can be described as the transformation, secularization, and psychologization of the genres of the conversion narrative and the spiritual autobiography, and it can be situated in the context of the history of the declaration of love and the codification of intimacy.2 What have been less studied, however, are the kinds of communicative situations and pragmatic contexts from which the proclamation of one’s most intimate thoughts acquired its force, its monolithic status as an untouchable truth that not only cannot be subjugated to further inquiry or critique but also promises to be a socially redemptive act. In what follows I shall show that Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” represents an exemplary text that both inaugurates this new speech of the self ’s revelation in all its authenticity and sincerity and reflects on the generic conventions and transformations that are involved in producing this new speech genre in which the profession and confession become interchangeable. In more general terms, this one specific example shall provide me with the occasion to ask the question: What is entailed in the transposition of a distinctly nonliterary genre into the discourse of literature? How does the importing of a nonliterary genre define and transform the domain of literature, and what would be the effects of such a literary innovation on extraliterary forms of communication? A principal feature of the heterogeneous multitude of nonliterary genres is their relatively fixed set of ties to specific institutional, pragmatic, and contextual situations. Nonliterary genres, such as the prayer, the business letter, the legal contract, the insurance claim, the obituary, or the scientific article are firmly embedded in the context of a specific discursive domain, clearly defined in view of their pragmatic status and function and regulated with regard to what can be said, how it is said, and who can occupy the position of the speaker and the addressee. By contrast, literary genres appear to be rather open with regard to any one specific pragmatic determination. Moreover, the individual text pertaining to a literary genre invokes not so much a concrete pragmatic situation but rather distinguishes itself in terms of its agreements with, and departures from, the generic conventions it invokes. Thus literary innovation frequently takes recourse to the nonliterary domain by appropriating and transforming

ROUSSEAU

(111)

nonliterary genres. One such example would be the emergence of the epistolary novel out of the handbook on familiar letter writing.3 Michael Bakhtin, interested in the pragmatic dimension of literature, defines the unifying feature of the literary text in terms of its unit as an utterance: The vast majority of literary genres are secondary, complex genres composed of various transformed primary genres (the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, letters, diaries, minutes, and so forth). As a rule, these secondary genres of complex cultural communication play out various forms of primary speech communication. Here is also the source of all literary/conventional characters of authors, narrators, and addressees. But the most complex and ultra-composite work of a secondary genre as a whole (viewed as a whole) is a single integrated real utterance that has a real author and real addressees whom this author perceives and imagines.4

Bakhtin’s contention that the “secondary genres of complex cultural communication play out various forms of primary speech communication” distinguishes the literary domain as a discursive realm in which ordinary, everyday communication is relieved of its immediate, concrete pragmatic force and consequences. The concept of “playing out” suggests that the pragmatic dimension of ordinary speech genres within a literary work is not fully actualized but instead highlighted only in its pragmatic potential. Within the thus virtualized sphere of speech, the combination of different illocutionary genres allows for experimentation and innovation as well as recodification and conventionalization. The literary work then participates in the extraliterary sphere by way of modeling a text/recipient relationship as a form of communication. Bakhtin’s characterization of literature with regard to its modeling function of communicative situations is especially suggestive with regard to Rousseau’s framing of the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Indeed, in what follows I shall show that the manner in which the “Profession” is integrated into the Émile contributes decisively to the immensely provocative character of the text, allowing for a reflection on the transformation of discursive options that are ushered in by this fusion of the genres of confession and profession. Finally, I will show how this text demarcates the cultural work that can be performed by literature as it also assigns a specific function to aesthetic contemplation.

(112)

ROUSSEAU

The “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard” appeared in 1762 as part of the fourth volume of Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’éducation. The reaction to its publication was vehement and violent, not only on the part of the Roman Catholic archbishop Christophe de Beaumont in Paris but also from the Calvinist authorities in Geneva. The book was publicly burned in both cities, and an order of arrest was issued against its author. Fortunately Rousseau had been warned by friends and thus was able to flee in time to the then Prussian territory of Neuchâtel.5 Especially today, one might wonder what made this text so terribly offensive to the church authorities, for at first glance it seems much less provocative than the writings on religion by the French philosophes or by David Hume. After all, the Savoyard vicar advocates an attitude of respect toward the official creed and its rituals and insists on the satisfaction, joy, and pride he takes in being a vicar of the Roman Catholic Church whose only wish is to have a parish of his own. Furthermore, he advises his young interlocutor, Émile’s tutor, to return to the Calvinist religion, the creed of his country and his father. To the extent that this text argues against the miserable uncertainty of the skeptic and promotes a belief in God as something that must precede all rational inquiry, one might indeed wonder why it should have caused the furious reaction against it. Beginning with the Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont and still today, “The Profession of Faith” has been primarily discussed as if it were a separate publication titled “My Beliefs and Position Toward Official Religion” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Certainly, Rousseau contributed to this reception in his own letter to Beaumont when he pointed out that the Savoyard vicar does not argue anything that he, Rousseau, had not argued before, be it in the Discours sur l ’inégalité, his Lettre à M. d ’Alembert, or Julie.6 And even much later, in the third Promenade of the Rêveries, when Rousseau reflects on how he came to write the “Profession de foi” he portrays this text as if its main purpose and function had been to set down for himself, once and for all, the rules of his faith, the regula fidei.7 Thus in 1914 Jean-Pierre Masson published a critical edition of the “Profession de foi” to be followed by his three-volume study of Rousseau’s position toward religion. Similarly, Pierre Burgelin, in his introductory essay to the Pléiade edition of the Émile discusses the “Profession” as a relatively separate text and concludes that, though not terribly original in its critique of revealed religion and advocacy of natural religion, the text shows that Rousseau argues for a fundamentally humanist version of Christianity, one that does

ROUSSEAU

(113)

not leave much room for the Christian doctrine of revelation and redemption. Moreover, Burgelin wonders about the function of this text within the educational project of the Émile.8 Indeed, Émile’s education is characteristically devoid of religious instruction. The text of the “Profession” is inserted toward the end of the fourth book, which concludes the young man’s education, just before the tutor inspires him with love for the idea of the ideal woman. Especially if we read the Émile as an educational novel, the topic of religion is not further integrated within its diegetic universe, but remains marginal. Only from a systematic point of view does it seem an important aspect for an educational treatise to address. Thus it seems to be perfectly understandable that even Martin Rang’s carefully researched study of “The Profession” (part of a magisterial work on the Émile) reads the text as if it were a separate discourse on religion in which Rousseau works out various polemical positions vis-à-vis the philosophes, rewrites Descartes in the section on natural religion, and might be perceived as offending the Catholic Church with his critique of revealed religion and his comparison of Jesus to Socrates, but ultimately does not stray too far from the then acceptable positions of the Genevan authorities.9 Rang and Burgelin agree that Rousseau’s position in the “Profession,” with its emphasis on human perfectibility and rejection of the doctrine of original sin, culminates in some form of humanism. Rang, however, also emphasizes Rousseau’s desire to affirm his adherence to Calvinism and concludes that the “Profession” can be considered ultimately as expressing a fundamentally Christian position, in congruence with Rousseau’s explicit statement in his letter to Christophe de Beaumont.10 In brief, whatever their specific perspectives on Rousseau’s position toward the Christian religion, critics have tended to read the “Profession of Faith” as if it had been an isolated, separate text. And yet, although the “Profession” is not very well integrated into the systematic aspect of Rousseau’s treatise on education, it is nevertheless carefully situated within its fiction, or rather, hypothetical discourse. Introduced and fleshed out as a character who was a crucial mentor figure to Émile’s tutor, the Savoyard vicar belongs to that aspect of the Émile that makes the book something different from a mere pedagogical treatise—that might not quite justify calling the Émile an educational novel but that consists in Rousseau’s strategy to provide his reader with concrete examples and hypothetical experiments, which have the status of simulations of lived experience rather than merely dry theory.11 It is in this

(114)

ROUSSEAU

sense that the manner in which Rousseau introduces the “Profession de foi” belongs to the field of fiction and literature. For this introduction to the “Profession,” the carefully motivated speech situations that frame the vicar’s speech and his dialogue with Émile’s tutor—which in Bakhtin’s words could be said to “play out various forms of primary speech communication”—provides a reflection on a specific potential of fictional discourse, namely its experimental aspect with regard to the pragmatic dimension of speech. In what follows I shall pay particular attention to the ten or so pages that precede the subtitle “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard,” pages that have been generally neglected in the discussion of the “Profession de foi,” as if they were merely superfluous paraphernalia. Yet it is in these pages that Rousseau performs and reflects on the decisive generic transformation to be ushered in with regard to the role of religion in the life of the individual person. Just preceding the passages in question, the narrator/author tells the reader that so far Émile has had no contact with religion and that to a certain extent he wishes it were possible to keep the young away from religious instruction altogether, since they cannot understand it in any case. Yet religious institutions and religious instruction are to be found everywhere in the real world and represent great risks of breeding fanaticism and prejudice. Moreover, the religion one is exposed to and is brought up in seems entirely a question of historical and geographical chance. Hence, he argues, just as the goal of Émile’s education must be to provide him with a critical stance from which he can judge for himself how to approach any particular religion, he, as educator and teacher, will likewise abstain from preaching to his reader about religious choices, but leave his reader to make up his own mind, to judge for himself what he thinks about the religious ideas of a third person that he is going to transcribe: “Instead of telling you what I think myself, I will tell you the thoughts of one whose opinions carry more weight than mine. I guarantee the truth of the facts I am about to relate; they actually happened to the author whose writings I am about to transcribe; it is for you to judge whether we can draw from them any considerations bearing on the matter in hand. I do not offer you my own idea or another’s as your rule; I merely present them for your examination” (E 223; OC IV 558). Thus the “Profession de foi” is announced in lieu of an authorial statement about Rousseau’s own position towards religion. Clearly this cannot just be understood as a clumsy strategy to divert the censors; moreover, this was exactly the one thing

ROUSSEAU

(115)

it did not achieve. Rather, it is to introduce a character endowed with more authority on account of his being more worthy than the author (“un homme qui valait mieux que moi”). And it is with the aid of this other personality that the contours of a specific communicative situation—the dialogue between the vicar and the author—which is to model the dialogue between text and reader, are outlined. As if to amplify this framing of the text as an utterance, before “quoting” the vicar’s profession of faith, the text breaks into a detailed narrative about the narrator and the Savoyard vicar: how the narrator met him, how the Savoyard vicar became his mentor and friend and finally entrusted him with his profession of faith. The function of this transitional narrative, then, is to prepare, frame, and set apart the “Profession de foi” as an utterance and to reflect on the pragmatic dimension and implications of this kind of speech. Whereas this transitional passage begins as a thirdperson narrative, it switches midway into a first-person account, where Rousseau, the author of the Émile, reveals himself as that young man who thirty years ago was rescued by the Savoyard vicar, when he, after having left his native country and Calvinist religion for Italy, found himself in bad company, totally impoverished and destitute: “I am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution is unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that I myself was this unhappy fugitive; I think I am so far removed from the disorders of my youth that I may venture to confess them, and the hand which rescued me well deserves that I should at least do honour to its goodness at the cost of some slight shame” (E 226; OC IV 563). The reader is led to wonder about the function of this detour. Why not introduce the vicar from the beginning within the frame of an autobiographical account? What is achieved by this switch of pronouns? First of all, the explicit transition from a third-person to a first-person narrative ushers in another switch, the one from a “hypothetical discourse” to a “factual discourse.” Furthermore, by calling attention to the shift in voice, the text calls attention to its illocutionary dimension and changes its status from a mere story to a personal confession witnessed by the reader. Indeed, the manner in which it dramatizes the act of confession interpellates the reader as an understanding confidant and intimate friend and characterizes the act of confession as an homage or tribute to the memory of the old vicar. The act of confession is portrayed as a gift to the extent that it involves some cost, the shame of the speaker, and that it is freely and voluntarily

(116)

ROUSSEAU

given. Indeed, the gift-economic aspect of the confession has been prepared in the narrative leading up to the switch of pronouns, a narrative that focuses much on the act of confession without actually indicating what it is that is being confessed. Whereas we learn almost nothing about the actual transgressions of the young man except in the blandest and most general terms, we learn much more about the priest’s relationship to him, the manner in which he gained his confidence and was able to teach him, almost imperceptibly: He began to win [gagner] the confidence of the proselyte by not asking any price for his kindness [en ne lui vendant point ses bienfaits], by not intruding himself upon him, by not preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and treating him as an equal. It was, so I think, a touching sight to see a serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp, and virtue putting up with the speech of licence in order to triumph over it more completely. When the young fool came to him with his silly confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest listened and set him at his ease; without giving his approval to what was bad, he took an interest in everything; no tactless reproof checked his chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure which he thought was given by his conversation increased his pleasure in telling everything; thus he made his general confession [sa confession générale] without knowing he was confessing anything. (E 225; OC IV 561–62)

What is striking about this characterization of the vicar’s relationship to the young man is that the vicar apparently works with a radically secularized model of the confession. Instead of the codified examination of conscience that one might expect would provide the template for a Roman Catholic vicar’s approach to the genre, this vicar reveals himself as a forerunner of a psychotherapist/friend who elicits the “general confession” by virtue of his generosity and nonjudgmental way of listening. Though very different from the mature author’s confession to the reader, the young man’s confession is captured as well in a gift-economic register. Apparently the “general confession,” the young man’s perfectly open, unselfconscious manner of revealing his innermost self, is understood as an extension of his trust in the vicar, which the vicar receives in return for being kind without asking for any compensation. Finally, the text emphasizes that the priest, by listening in a receptive, nonjudgmental way, sets up

ROUSSEAU

(117)

a relationship of reciprocity that will eventually become one of equality. Again, in this last aspect, the priest’s handling of the speech genre of the confession appears to be not at all directed by the Roman Catholic ritual of the confession but instead by the more recent literary tradition of the confession of love that breaks with decorum but intensifies friendship and intimacy.12 The third-person account culminates and ends in an anecdote that shows how the priest gains his influence on the young man without attempting to impose his authority and without appearing to want to teach him anything: The priest was so well known for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy of the town. One day some one had given him some money to distribute among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some of it on the score of poverty. “No,” said he, “we are brothers, you belong to me [vous m’appartenez] and I must not touch the money entrusted to me.” Then he gave him the sum he had asked for out of his own pocket. (E 266; OC IV 562)

This anecdote illustrates not only Rousseau’s pedagogical valorization of concrete deeds and lived experience over lofty theories, his ideal of teaching through a highly engaged personal relationship, but also comments on the priest’s relationship toward his official position and authority. Just as the priest did not react to the young man’s “confessions” by assuming his sacerdotal role and authority, so also, in this instance, he exempts the young man from the group of the poor parishioners who would be eligible for charity, making him instead a “brother” and hence an equal with whom he shares his private goods. Indeed, the way the priest’s rationalization of his refusal to touch the alms is phrased, namely that touching the alms in this case would mean their misappropriation for his own (“we are brothers, you belong to me”), suggests an intensified relationship of equality, one based on an identification with the other in which the exchange of gifts gives way to the sharing of a common good. After the shift in voice, the focus of the narrative is no longer the misguided young man and the great skill by which the vicar manages to gain his confidence, but the young man’s description of the priest’s character,

(118)

ROUSSEAU

which is captured in terms of his sincerity and authenticity: “What struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with this speech” (E 226; OC IV 563). Significantly, this sentence follows immediately after the narrator has revealed himself as the young man about whom he had been writing. Thus the priest’s authenticity and sincerity are celebrated just after the narrator has proven his own commitment to these virtues. At this point, it is possible to summarize what is accomplished with the shift in voice from third- to first-person narrative within the context of preparing for the vicar’s “profession of faith.” 1. The switch from an anonymous biographical to an autobiographical narrative introduces the fact/fiction distinction by drawing attention to the narrator’s position as an authentic witness whose sincerity has to be trusted and celebrated as a virtue. 2. By calling attention to this shift in voice, the text brings into relief its work with generic conventions, especially the genre of the confession. The manner in which the author dramatizes his own “confession” vis-à-vis the reader, and the motives he has for it, characterizes the pragmatic dimension of the confession, the way it can be conceived of in secular terms as a gift, and the manner in which it can be used to bring about a relationship of equality and reciprocity that is based on solidarity and opposed to hierarchical distinctions. 3. The direct address of the reader and the switch to the first-person account activate a dialogical dimension of the text and a shift from the narrative past, or the atemporal present tense of pedagogical theory, to the here and now of the interaction between the author and reader and the priest and the young author. The medial status of the text has shifted to one that invokes immediacy and orality, which indeed is followed by the passages written in direct speech. The labor undertaken by these transitional pages that prepare the “Profession de foi” could also be characterized in terms of a reworking of the pragmatic implications of the various generic conventions involved: the use of the fact/fiction distinction and the highlighting of autobiographical authenticity as a means of creating a continuity with the reader’s discursive presence as opposed to the narrative past and

ROUSSEAU

(119)

the characterization of the confession in gift-economic terms project the ensuing text into a set of specific expectations as to the redemptive power of that particular form of communication and communion—a staging of the “Profession de foi” such that it achieves both a secularization of the profession of faith qua official credo and a sacralization of the intimate, confessional dialogue. In this respect it is extremely significant that Rousseau chose to set off the actual discourse on religion with the title “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard.”13 For, whereas the use of the speech genre of the confession has been radically secularized with regard to its highly codified form in Catholic ritual, the text also makes use of the nonliterary generic conventions associated with the confession and the profession of faith. For instance, it is noteworthy that Rousseau did not entitle the vicar’s discourse “Reflections on Natural Religion Followed by a Conversation About Revealed Religion.” If he had chosen that title, and maybe even replaced the character of the vicar with that of a friendly farmer or schoolteacher, the relationship of this text to Christian dogma, ritual, and liturgy would have been decisively weakened. By contrast, the chosen title calls attention to the extraliterary genre of the profession of faith and, by specifying the speaker’s identity as an official of the Roman Catholic Church, leads the reader to expect one very specific discourse, namely the credo used in Roman Catholic liturgy, which until the French Revolution would generally take the form of the Nicene Creed: I believe in one God, the almighty Father, maker of heaven and earth, maker of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before time began; God from God, light from light, true God from true God; begotten, not made, one in essence with the Father, and through whom all things were made. For us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, took flesh of the Virgin Mary by the action of the Holy Spirit, and was made man, for our sake, too, under Pontius Pilate, he was crucified, suffered death, and was buried. And the third day he rose from the dead, as the scriptures had foretold. And he ascended to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead; and his reign will have no end. I believe too in the Holy Spirit, Lord and life-giver, who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified;

(120)

ROUSSEAU

who spoke through the prophets. And I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I acknowledge only one baptism for the remission of sins. And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.14

This should be the profession of faith of a Roman Catholic vicar, since it is this that constitutes the core of Christian belief: what is taught in preparation for confirmation, what is pronounced and professed publicly during key church rituals such as the administration of the sacraments of baptism or the communion. There is nothing personal about it; the credo is formulaic and fixed. If one holds the Savoyard vicar’s profession of faith against the Nicene Creed that it replaces, its provocative potential becomes much clearer: except for the vicar’s belief in God, there is nothing that it shares with the Christian credo. Indeed, if the main part of the credo dwells on the necessity and possibility of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, the vicar’s credo rejects this core Christian mystery by taking up the heretical position of the Pelagians, arguing that the human being is fundamentally good, that is, not marked by original sin, free, and capable of perfection, a free creature of self-fashioning rather than a fallen creature in need of divine grace and redemption. And, indeed, this was one of the key issues at which Christophe de Beaumont took offense.15 Within the context of a pedagogical scenario of a wise old priest and a young man who has been led astray, who has lost any orientation with regard to religious issues, one would expect some form of religious instruction that would take its cues from the catechism, the codified, didacticized introduction to, and explication of, basic doctrinal issues. The catechism could even be understood as a didactic dialogue based on the credo. Now it is exactly this form of instruction, with its rigidly prefabricated questions and answers, that Rousseau has explicitly rejected and condemned as utterly useless when he introduces the topic of religious instruction.16 By choosing the “profession of faith” rather than the catechism as the occasion for a dialogue on religion, the formulaic, depersonalized nature of the official religious instruction does not follow some external institutional set of rules but is ushered in as a very personal, highly individualized response to the request by the young man. The occasion for that request comes as a result of the narrator’s bewilderment over the vicar’s strangely contented disposition, the ease with which he executes his duties as an official of the

ROUSSEAU

(121)

Catholic Church and his apparent happiness in spite of his poverty and lowly position: “You happy! So little favoured by fortune, so poor, an exile and persecuted, you are happy! How have you contrived to be happy?” “My child,” he answered, “I will gladly tell you.” Thereupon he explained that, having heard my confession, he would confess to me [qu’après avoir receu mes confessions, il vouloit me faire les siennes]. “I will open my whole heart to yours,” he said, embracing me. “You will see me, if not as I am, at least as I seem to myself. When you have heard my whole confession of faith [profession de foi], when you really know the condition of my heart, you will know why I think myself happy, and if you think as I do, you will know how to be happy too. But these explanations [ces aveux] are not the affair of a moment, it will take time to show you all my ideas about the lot of man and the true value of life; let us choose a fitting time and place where we may continue this conversation without interruption.” (E 228; OC IV 565)

The vicar’s profession of faith as a gift given in exchange for the young man’s confession of his sins thus stands in two paradigmatic classes: it stands in for the intimate, autobiographical confession of the vicar and it stands in for the credo of the vicar, the official belief. The two speech genres of the confession and profession are actually joined.17 The vicar very deliberately chooses the time and site of instruction in which he will present to the young man the gift of his profession of faith: his exemplary confession of the state of his heart. The intimate conversation takes place just after sunrise on a hill, overlooking the landscape. Thus stage and backdrop for the “Profession” are richly resonant with cultural history. Whereas Augustine, alluding to the dying Moses gazing toward the Holy Land, uses the view from the mountain as a simile for his own pseudo-conversion, Petrarch describes his ascent of Mont Ventoux as culminating in an insight into the futility of worldly desire. Upon reading a randomly selected passage from book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, Petrarch repudiates the expansive domain of nature opened to his panoramic view: “‘Men go to admire the high mountain ranges and the great flood of seas and the wide-rolling rivers and the ring of the Ocean and the movements of the stars; and they abandon themselves.’ . . . I was angry with myself for admiring the things of this world, when I should

(122)

ROUSSEAU

have learned long since from the pagan philosophers nothing is admirable except the soul, besides the greatness of which nothing is great.”18 Rousseau’s description of the setting for the “Profession de foi” displays an altogether different attitude toward nature: It was summer time; we rose at daybreak. He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture [le plus beau tableau] which the human eye can see. You would have thought that nature was displaying all her splendour before our eyes to furnish a text for our conversation. After contemplating this scene for a space in silence, the man of peace spoke to me. (E 228; OC IV 565)

In contrast to Petrarch, we are not presented with the juxtaposition of a written text and a landscape, a tension between a landscape evocative of worldly longings and a text that recalls the otherworldly concerns with the true nature of the soul, but, quite to the contrary, the landscape is likened to a tableau, a beautiful picture to be enjoyed, and to a text, the text of Nature that backs up the intimate conversation. In other words, nature is an object of aesthetic contemplation, but not a temptress, not worldly distraction but affirmed in its secular status, and nature provides an authoritative text that supports the conversing that is to take place. Not a book, not a learned authority, nor the written tablets of the divine law, certainly no writing and reading, but rather, a beautiful natural landscape provides the setting and background to the oral, intimate conversation between friends. Finally, the setting of this scene is not a high mountain but merely a hill; the two friends are not on those lofty mountain peaks where traditionally one would seek the contact with the divine or the sacred but remain immersed within the sight of the cultivated landscape. This nature, consciously contemplated in silence, replaces an authoritative or sacred text. To the extent that the “Profession de foi” is meant to show the young author, and by extension the reader, an exemplary attitude or ethos that is the condition of the possibility of happiness and morality, this very ethos is grounded in the aesthetic experience of nature.

ROUSSEAU

(123)

To a certain extent I have characterized the general thrust of the importing of the nonliterary genre of the profession of faith and its fusion with the confession in terms of a process of secularization. However, this is only part of the story. For one can just as well trace a certain sacralization of what would otherwise be a perfectly mundane and profane activity, namely the instructional dialogue between two people. The scenario of the communication on the hillside is marked as an exceptional occasion requiring a particular time and setting that sets it apart from everyday speech and endows it with a solemn and festive character. The vicar chooses this special site and time of day to reveal to the young man the narrative of his spiritual quest, laying bare to him the state of his heart in response to the question as to how he arrived at a disposition that allowed him to be so happy and contented with his state. To the extent that through the vicar’s profession of faith the young man is to receive the key to inner-worldly happiness, the scene on the hillside holds the promise of a revelation and a redemption. By way of this pragmatic determination as well as in its recall of the liturgical genres of the credo and the confession, the discourse on the hill asks to be contrasted with the Christian ritual of the communion. For our scene of gift giving, where the first gift, the confession of the personal failure and sins of the young man, generates the gift of the vicar’s creed that is to reveal how to live a life of peace and happiness, can be read in contrast to the sequence of liturgical genres that constitute the core Christian church ritual of the communion. Thus in the Calvinist ritual we have the following sequence: after the sermon there is an appeal to self-examination, then the confession of sins, then the creed, then the words of institution to be concluded by the actual communion through the consumption of the host, which represents the acceptance of Christ’s sacrificial death. Clearly the whole sacrificial aspect of the Christian ritual has been abolished, instead we have the “redemption” through the “profession of faith,” which represents a key to this-worldly happiness, not otherworldly redemption.19 On the site of the hill the contact with the divine has been replaced by the gift of the confession and the panoramic view of beautiful nature. The careful staging of the scene highlights its inaugural character, it frames the “profession” as an event that is to usher in a new era for the organization of Enlightenment culture. And this cultural work that is being performed by the form of the “profession,” both its site and its generic innovation, is the displacement of religion

(124)

ROUSSEAU

in favor of the domain that by the end of the eighteenth century will become the autonomous sphere of art and aesthetics. Rousseau’s text reframes the domain of belief in a secular manner such that it can address the question of “what we can hope” in a secular fashion. The “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar” secularizes the domain of teleology and relates it to an individualizable personal experience that nevertheless has a universalist note attached to it. The very particular sunrise on the hilltop has its unique beauty, however it inaugurates an aesthetic disposition toward nature that can be actualized by anybody. The vicar’s creed has nothing in common with the formulas of an official dogma but has grown out of his own life experience, as it is also ultimately rooted in his heart and sentiment, which he lays bear to his interlocutor. Nevertheless, this autobiographical specificity of the vicar’s discourse is not such that it would appear unique and exclusive, but instead asks to be actualized and confirmed by the reader’s own individuality. Analyzing the integration of the confession of sins and the profession of faith within a hypothetical narrative of education, I have characterized the importing of these nonliterary genres into the domain of literature primarily in terms of a secularization of these liturgical forms culminating in the transformation of the ritual of communion into an intimate dialogical exchange between individuals. Yet, to the extent that the speech situation in its uniquely beautiful natural setting stands in lieu of the church, it sets the personalized dialogical exchange apart from a merely mundane form of conversation and endows it with the soteriological promise of the sacrament. However, it would be misleading to end this analysis on the note of a certain trend of resacralization. For, ultimately, when the text is considered in terms of its pragmatic dimension as an offering, as an author’s/writer’s address to a reader, it is the literary, fictional, or virtual dimension that prevails. Clearly, the external addressee of this text is neither in church nor on a hilltop overlooking the Po, nor is he or she involved in any actual dialogue but reading a text that does not require any specific response or action, although the “staging” of the text together with its “framing” models a particular relationship to its discourse, which the reader is free to accept or reject. Likening the natural setting to a beautiful painting (tableau) appeals to a contemplative, theoretical freedom exercised by the beholder that could also be characterized by the Kantian term disinterested interest, whereas the vicar’s autobiographical narration and dialogical exchange with his interlocutor appeals to the reader to compare

ROUSSEAU

(125)

and contrast, to test and validate what she or he reads in light of her or his own lived experience. Nevertheless, the section entitled “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” did not protect Rousseau from being prosecuted for having published a position deemed hostile to the official creed both in the eyes of Roman Catholic and Calvinist authorities. It has been read all along as Rousseau’s position on the role of religion, albeit through the mouthpiece of another person, a vicar he had met as a young man on his travels through northern Italy. And yet what it also managed to accomplish through this form was the assertion of another realm, the realm of imaginative literature apart from the realm of official institutions: a realm of potential reality, one that would allow for the examination, testing, and transformation of existing speech genres. It also accomplished something more specific, something extending to the actual speech genre of the confession as well as the profession of faith: it fused them, it made them the equivalent by putting a supreme value on authenticity and the subjective experience of the concrete individual rather than the formulaic creed or the confession according to a prefabricated format. This latter achievement, an achievement of lasting consequences, went along with another generic move, the move toward a new secular autobiography. In the pages leading up to the “Profession of Faith,” in the framing of this conversation, the narrator, so to speak, breaks through the fourth wall when he switches from the third to the first person, calling the reader’s attention to the fact that the young man who had met this memorable Savoyard vicar was not actually an anonymous young man but he, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Through this move, the text as a whole becomes the unit of utterance and the external reader is also interpellated as the confidant of an intimate confession, the witness of authentic speech. The pedagogical treatise with its fictional pupil Émile becomes part of a piece of autobiographical writing where the text appears as the authentic utterance of its external composer. What remains constant, however, is the imaginative component of intimacy and direct, unembellished, authentic communication, a situation of an engaged solitary reader’s absorption in the text. To a certain extent, this is also the framing condition of Rousseau’s autobiographical writing in his autobiographical Confessions. Moreover, this latter work brings into play other audiences, which are far more problematic than this solitary, absorbed reader. It is this attention to different kinds of audiences vis-à-vis his work

(126)

ROUSSEAU

and his concept of authorship that will be at the center of the following section on his Confessions. T H E AU T H O R A N D H I S AU D I EN C ES I N RO U S S E AU ’ S C O N F E S S I O N S

Rousseau was very critical of his publics, especially when it came to the power play, networking, and trade in intimacy that informed the role of the philosophes and hommes de lettres of salon culture.20 And, indeed, his Confessions can be read as the narrative of how he became an author who increasingly avoided contact with his contemporary publics in favor of the virtual and ideal audience of posthumous print publications. Yet he was also proud of his celebrity status, of being known among an anonymous crowd of people. In fact, he even relied on it in the hope it would provide him with more work as a copyist and thereby secure his financial autonomy, providing him with a stable alternative to dependence on gifts and patronage.21 Moreover, to the extent that Rousseau conceived of himself as the producer not only of verbal but also of musical texts, he was intensely aware of the importance of a real as opposed to a virtual audience. For a composer of an opera to be able to enjoy his own work, the work has to be performed, which in most cases means before a live audience. When Rousseau points this out in book 8 of the Confessions, the center of his autobiographical reflections on authorship, he adds that when it came to the performance of his opera he wished to have it performed exclusively for him alone. Indeed, Rousseau’s self-portrait as a writer, composer, copyist, and author, his narrative of how he came to inhabit different positions toward authorship, ranging from the one of the impostor, who falsely claims to be able to provide valuable musical entertainment, to the censored and persecuted writer of an educational treatise, and the recluse who defers the publication of his Confessions to a posthumous date, is centered on his relationship to different kinds of contemporaneous audiences, be they the exclusive circles of the salons, the larger and partially anonymous group of readers and critics involved in scholarly polemics and debates, the coffee house publics, or the theater and opera audiences at court and in the city. How Rousseau developed his concept of authorship with regard to these different audiences, implying different media of publication and dissemination, will be the focus of this discussion of the Confessions.

ROUSSEAU

(127)

According to his Confessions, Rousseau becomes a famous author all of a sudden. At one moment he is an unknown individual among the anonymous crowd of the print audience of the Mercure, an ordinary reader encountering the question of the essay competition, seized by excitement, feeling he has an important insight, jotting it down. A year later, suddenly and unexpectedly, he wins the first prize of the Dijon Academy and becomes a public figure. Although he mentions that it was Diderot who encouraged him to finish the piece and who eventually found a publisher for it, and although he also acknowledges that Raynal, the editor of the Mercure, was a good friend to him, he does not elaborate on Raynal’s role. Instead, he presents the case as if he had become an instant celebrity by winning the Academy prize. Rousseau does not mention that he did not attend the award ceremony but sent a proxy and was not present when the piece was read aloud to the members of the Dijon Academy. Moreover, his essay was not published then, but first made available to a print audience through Raynal’s summary. According to Cranston, Raynal devoted an entire year’s publications of the Mercure primarily to calling attention to Rousseau’s piece.22 Both Rousseau’s actual account together with these significant omissions make it clear that Rousseau is highly invested in attributing his status as a publicly known author exclusively to the quality of his writing and the originality of his thinking, not to personal connections and the publicity generated by reviews and scholarly debate. This is why he has to present himself as an author who emerges all of a sudden out of the anonymous audience of a printed journal. Whereas Rousseau downplays the importance of the salons and the republic of letters, he does acknowledge the importance of anonymous crowds for his role as an author. There are, however, two exceptions among those publics when it comes to the issue of anonymity: King Stanislas of Poland is the most prominent audience member of the print audience of his first discourse, and King Louis XV of the live audience of his opera Le Devin du village. Both kings become crucial reference points for how he portrays himself as an author. As opposed to two other critics whom he merely mentions in passing as minor figures of whom he made short shrift, King Stanislas’s status provides Rousseau with an addressee to whom he can offer an exemplary response: Up to the present, this piece, which somehow or other has made less commotion than my other writings, is a unique work in its type. In it I

(128)

ROUSSEAU

seized the occasion I was offered to teach the public how a private man could defend the cause of truth even against a sovereign. It is difficult to take a more proud and at the same time more respectful tone than the one I took to answer him. I had the good fortune to be dealing with an adversary for whom my heart was full of esteem and therefore could bear witness of it to him without adulation; that is what I did successfully enough, but always with dignity. Being frightened for me, my friends already believed they saw me in the Bastille. I did not fear that for a single moment, and I was right. After having seen my answer this good Prince said, “That is enough for me, I will not have anything more to do with it.” Since then I have received several marks of esteem and benevolence from him some of which I will be citing, and my writing circulated tranquilly around France and Europe without anyone finding anything to blame in it. (C 307; OC I 366)

According to this account, the exchange with King Stanislas provides Rousseau with the opportunity of showing himself exclusively subject to the pursuit of truth, not beholden to anything or anybody else. His fearless but respectful behavior provides him with a mantle of authority that sets him apart from his concerned philosopher friends and makes him into the equivalent of an enlightened king. It becomes a template for his model of an author’s relationship toward his public. It does not, however, present an example of how any individual (particulier), regardless of rank and power, should be able to speak up in pursuit of truth and engage in a public debate. Note that nowhere in all of the Confessions does Rousseau give credit to dialogue or debate as a means of arriving at an insight. Truth is obtained solely by way of an epiphany, such as the one he had on his way to Vincennes, when reading the Mercure or by reflection and authentic experience, not discursively through a spirited exchange.23 In other words, when he engages in this public exchange with the Polish king he fearlessly defends his position, but he does not publicly engage in a process of truth finding. Towards the conclusion of book 8, just before Rousseau announces to his reader his decision to publish the Confessions posthumously, i.e., to avoid contact with his contemporary audience altogether, he returns to his relationship vis-à-vis Stanislas.24 In that context he narrates how he drew on his personal connection with the king in order to save an impudent

ROUSSEAU

(129)

playwright from being expulsed from the academy. Pallisot, member of the Academy of Nancy, had one of his plays performed before Stanislas at Lunéville, which showed a man who had dared to pit himself against the King pen in hand. Stanislas, who was generous, and who did not like satire, was indignant that someone dared to make personal attacks in his presence in this way. M. the Comte de Tressan wrote to d’Alembert and me by the order of this Prince to inform me that His Majesty’s intention was that the said Palissot be expelled from his Academy. My answer was a lively prayer to M. de Tressan to intercede with the King of Poland to obtain clemency for the Said Palissot. The clemency was granted, and when he notified me of it in the King’s name, M. de Tressan added that this fact would be inscribed in the records of the Academy. I replied that this was less granting clemency than perpetuating a punishment. At last as a result of solicitations I obtained the promise that there would be no mention of anything in the records and that there would remain no public trace of this affair. (C 335; OC I 399)

Rousseau characterizes the offense of Pallisot’s performance as showing “un homme qui avoit osé se mesurer avec le Roi la plume à la main” (“a man who dared to pit himself against the King pen in hand”), i.e., he uses a phrase that could describe his own response to Stanislas in the debate about his Discours sur les sciences et les arts. And yet he does not express his solidarity with the fictional character or the playwright, although he intercedes for him with the king. Ultimately, it is exclusively from his pen then that the final record of events is to issue. He even calls his reader’s attention to the contradiction in his opposition to the recording of the Pallisot affair by the Academy Annals and his subsequent narration in his own autobiography. For this allows him again to assert his uniqueness, consisting in his utter truthfulness. Moreover, he adds at the conclusion of this book, being the victim of relentless persecution and slander, his narrative is necessary to guarantee the survival of his name, albeit posthumously.25 The narratives about the composition and performance of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village provide a counterpoint to the episodes that deal with the composition and the publication of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. In the case of a musical composition as opposed to a verbal text, the author tends to be far more dependent on its actual performance by

(130)

ROUSSEAU

musicians. Already, if he wants to have a clear idea of his own work, merely reading it and imagining the sound and sight will not so easily suffice. Moreover, if a musical composition is not actually performed, it is very unlikely that the print medium would be able to conjure up a significant audience for it. Whereas the author of verbal texts can rely on the print medium as the guarantee of the ultimate validity and endurance of his work in its appeal to an ideal, virtual audience, the author of musical texts, by contrast, depends to a much greater extent on the concrete production and performance of his works for live audiences. Isolated, individual readers do not allow for the survival of musical texts and their composer. Just as the first discourse was the product of “a calling,” depicted as the almost feverish composition of Rousseau’s thoughts upon reading the Mercure, the composition of his second opera is also depicted as the result of an almost accidental, but fateful, encounter. Rousseau tells how he spent some days in the country at the home of his dear friend and compatriot, the shell-collecting Mussard, who shared his love of Italian opera. After one of their animated evening conversations about opera: “I began to dream about how one could write songs to give the idea of a Drama of this type in France”(C 314; OC I 374). In this narrative Rousseau presents himself as dreaming about intervening in the taste of the French nation, though he needs the encouragement of his host to carry out the actual composition.26 Considering himself above the taste of his contemporaries, he wants the piece performed not to please others but for his very own enjoyment: Being excited by the composition of this work, I had a great passion to hear it, and I would have given the whole world to see it performed at my whim, behind closed doors, as it is said Lully had Armide played one time for himself alone. Since I could not have this pleasure except along with the public, in order to enjoy my Piece I necessarily had to get it accepted by the Opera. Unfortunately it was in an absolutely new genre to which ears were not at all accustomed, and moreover the poor success of The Gallant Muses made me foresee that of the Soothsayer if I presented it under my name. Duclos extricated me from the difficulty and took it upon himself to get the work tried while leaving the Author unknown. So as not to reveal myself I was not present at that rehearsal, and the little Violins who directed it themselves did not know who its Author was until after a general acclaim had attested the goodness of the work. (C 315; OC I 375)

ROUSSEAU

(131)

Many details of how he composed his opera betray a great anxiety when it comes to coming into contact with actual audiences. However, apart from hiding from live audiences, there is the added option of being above them, controlling them, while being untouchable by them. Through the reference to Jean-Baptiste de Lully (1632–1687), the most powerful musician, ballet and opera composer at the court of the Sun King, Rousseau reactivates the alignment of the author with a figure of sovereignty. However, instead of a public dialogue between two autonomous partners, as in the case of King Stanislas, here we have a powerful composer/author who, in the manner in which he can exclusively enjoy the fruits of his labor, projects an image of autonomy that would be associated with his patron Louis XIV, but in this instance actually allows him to usurp the latter’s place. But there are also essential differences between the model of authorship associated with Lully and the one Rousseau proposes. Most importantly, Rousseau is opposed to any form of patronage. The king has no influence on the nature of the work, and the author is decidedly not a courtier. Already when he insists that he made sure nobody would know about his authorship when his friend Duclos let some musicians perform it in order to decide whether the piece would be worthy of a whole-scale production, Rousseau clearly creates a parallel to the essay competition of the Dijon Academy, which also based its decision on an anonymous submission process. He is not subject to pleasing an audience, but merely wants to enjoy his work by himself. Yet, for Rousseau to be able to inhabit successfully the role of the sovereign author, he must undergo an internal transformation, which consists in overcoming a terrible bashfulness, one of his most distinct personal handicaps. Furthermore, he raises the stakes. Whereas the public exchange of letters with King Stanislas was conducted in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual respect, in the case of Le Devin du village Rousseau is exposed to the audience of the court of Louis XV, a situation where his ultimate reference point is not just the exiled king of Poland (who did not publicly reveal his identity in his critique of Rousseau, although Rousseau was aware of it and most conscious of it in his public response), but the ruling monarch of France.27 As in all of his narratives about the performance of his pieces, his focus is almost exclusively on the relationship between the author and the audience. The singers, musicians, and virtuosi are entirely eclipsed. Rousseau does not trace the fate of his piece in terms of the evolution of

(132)

ROUSSEAU

its production. Instead, he narrates how the day after the dress rehearsal he witnesses the lengthy narrative of an older man, an officer, who claims to have attended the rehearsal, to have seen and heard the author’s comments. Entirely unaware, the officer speaks about this in the very presence of the one about whom he is speaking: He appealed to me in spite of his impudence and in spite of me: while he was retailing his lies, I blushed, I lowered my eyes, I was on thorns; several times I sought within myself for some way to believe he was in error and good faith. Finally trembling that someone might recognize me and insult him with it, I hastened to finish my chocolate without saying anything, and lowering my head while passing in front of him, I left as early as I could, while the people present perorated about his report. In the street I noticed that I was in a sweat, and I am sure that if someone had recognized me and named me before my exit, they would have seen the shame and embarrassment of a guilty man, from the sole feeling of the pain that this poor man would have to suffer if his lie was recognized. (C 316; OC I 377)

With this scenario Rousseau demonstrates his social handicap, to look guilty and to act bashful without any actual reason for it; in fact, by being only too good, too empathetic, he is led into this demeaning position and behavior. In that aspect this narrative sets up a clear goal. Rousseau has to overcome this fear of anticipated feelings of shame if he wants to be accepted as the person he is—namely the author of the opera—within the audience attending his piece. In other words, what this narrative about the dress rehearsal’s discussion in the café has accomplished is that it has entirely reframed what will be at stake during the premiere of the opera: the premiere will be about the author/composer being accepted by the audience attending the performance, rather than about the successful production of the piece. And, indeed, exactly as if to take up Rousseau’s narrative about the discussion of the dress rehearsal in the café, the narrative about the actual premiere of Le Devin du village at court initially focuses on his self-conscious realization that he looked like a total misfit in the audience, which he then managed to overcome. The narrative then turns to the audience’s and Rousseau’s own reaction, until finally the various reactions to the opera flow together into one of oceanic bliss. Although the narrative focuses on

ROUSSEAU

(133)

the anticipation of the king’s arrival, the actual entrance of the king and his entourage are not narrated, nor are any of the king’s reactions or his appearance part of the record.28 The spotlight is exclusively on Rousseau in his box and on the surrounding ladies: When it was lit up, I began to be ill at ease seeing myself in this outfit in the midst of people who were all excessively adorned: I asked myself whether I was in my place, whether I was suitably dressed? and after several minutes of anxiety, I answered myself, yes, with an intrepidity that perhaps came more from the impossibility of withdrawing than from the strength of my reasons. I told myself, “I am in my place, since I am seeing my piece played, since I was invited, since that is the only reason I composed it, and since after all no one has more right than myself to enjoy the fruit of my labor and my talents. I am dressed in my ordinary way, neither better nor worse. If I begin to be enslaved to opinion in something, I will soon be enslaved to it in everything all over again. To always be myself wherever I am I must not blush at being dressed in accordance with the station I have chosen . . . I ought to be able to endure ridicule and blame as long as they are not deserved. . . . but from either the effect of the presence of the master, or the natural inclination of hearts, I noticed nothing except what was obliging and decent in the curiosity of which I was the object. . . . I was armed against their raillery; but their caressing air, which I had not expected, subjugated me so much that I was trembling like a child when the performance began. (C 317; OC I 377–378)

Rousseau gathers himself at this moment of embarrassment by asserting his right to listen to the music he has composed, to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Only in a second step does he assure himself that his physical appearance must not give him reason to be embarrassed. The initial critical remark of the first-person narrator is recalibrated: as the composer, he is not just anybody in the audience, but he holds an absolutely unique position. The main source of confidence lies in his authorship of the piece; it overrides both issues of rank and issues of decorum. What makes it possible for him to regain his self-confidence, however, is not alone the question of what is rightfully due to him, as based on an insight, but the actual reaction of the audience to seeing him, providing him with an actual physical sensation. Yet both the audience’s and his own

(134)

ROUSSEAU

intense enjoyment of the piece would not have been possible had it not been performed at court and in the king’s presence: One does not clap in front of the King; this made it so that everything was heard; the piece and the author gained from it. Around me I heard a whispering of women who seemed as beautiful as angels to me, and who said to each other in a whisper, “That is charming, that is ravishing; there is not a sound in it that does not speak to the heart.” The pleasure of giving some emotion to so many lovable persons moved me to the point of tears, and I could not hold them back at the first duo, while noticing that I was not alone in crying . . . Nevertheless, I am sure that at this moment the pleasure of sex entered into it much more than an author’s vanity, and surely if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured, as I was ceaselessly, with the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow. I have seen Pieces excite more lively outbursts of admiration, but never as full, as sweet, as touching an intoxication reign during a whole spectacle, and above all at the court on the day of the first performance. Those who saw this one ought to remember it; for the effect was unique. (C 318; OC I 378–379)

The presence of the king, which guarantees that the audience abstains from applause, prevents the tribute to the performers. Moreover, it creates an audience, which does not display loudly and openly its own judgment about the piece by clapping, booing, or hissing. Instead, the audience members are subdued in their expressions and thus can pay attention to their own sentiments, which allows Rousseau to focus exclusively on the nuanced reactions among individualized audience members, the emotional reactions of beautiful ladies moved to tears sharing their sentiments with each other and by way of contiguity also with him. He sees himself, from his perspective in the front row of the director’s box, as almost the only male audience member. In this observation he also eclipses the king. The experience is portrayed as one of synesthetic pleasure, arousal, and oral gratification and thus more resembles sexual gratification than the enjoyment of one’s glory. The indulgence of glory is interestingly contained and managed in the narrative presentation. It is addressed through the memory of the terrible performance before M. de Treitorens, when Rousseau had agreed to

ROUSSEAU

(135)

present a musical entertainment composed by him while he was in fact barely capable of reading music.29 “This reminiscence had the effect of the slave who held the crown on the head of the triumphant generals, but it was short, and I am sure that at this moment the pleasure of sex entered into it much more than an author’s vanity, and surely if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured, as I was ceaselessly, with the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow” (C 318; OC I 379). Yet, whereas at the concert of M. de Treitorens Rousseau was exposed as a shameless impostor who did not know music, and hence could not produce any pleasing entertainment for his audience, now, by way of contrast, he is the true master of the operatic performance. The comparison with the Roman ritual of the triumph, the grand honoring of exceptionally victorious military leaders as godlike or kinglike creatures, not only brings out the contrast between public stature and the human, mortal body, but it also aligns him further with the figure of the absolute sovereign, a figure he ultimately usurps and eclipses in blissful sexual union with the tears he is eager to drink, his own and those his piece produces in the reactions of the angelic, deeply moved ladies surrounding him. Furthermore, by way of this comparison he manages to transform his impostrous behavior into a common feature of human mortality. The narrative about the performance of Le Devin du Village at court provides a model of an author who asserts his power over his audience by speaking directly to each individual’s heart and emotion, who enjoys this power in terms of a sentimental union with his audience, and who does not allow for any expression of criticism or applause that arrogates to itself a position of superiority. Though not distinguished in terms of social rank, power, or influence, nor in terms of external displays of luxury, this author must not be confused with any particular individual from his audience, for he is unique as the sole and original creator of his works.30 In that respect the sovereign author is absolutely different from a common audience member, like the mendacious officer who claims to have attended the dress rehearsal as well as all the squabbling scholars and philosophers of the republic of letters. The author has an intimate relationship with his audience, but not one where any mere audience member could presume to respond from the position of an equal. The performance of Le Devin du village at court is presented in stark contrast with the performances of the same piece in the City Opera as

(136)

ROUSSEAU

concerns the depiction of the public’s relationship to the figure of the author. Whereas the court performance lets the composer inhabit the role of a sovereign ruler over the audience’s nuanced emotional responses, the audience of the City Opera is portrayed in a string of narratives, which focuses on the fickleness of the Parisian crowds as part of a factionalized political landscape. Immediately preceding the narrative about the performance of Le Devin du village in the City Opera, Rousseau provides a strangely dense and somewhat obscure account of how he became the focus of insults, even the victim of a planned assassination attempt. The public’s abuse of him, however, comes to a sudden halt when it becomes known that the opera guild had withdrawn the author’s customary privilege of free admission: “In this proceeding there was such a combination of iniquity and brutality, that the public—at that time in its greatest animosity against me—did not fail to be unanimously shocked by it, and the next day those who had insulted me the day before shouted loudly in the room that it was shameful to deprive an Author of his free admission in this way when he had deserved it so much and could even lay claim to two of them. So accurate is the Italian proverb that ogn’un ama la giustizia in casa d ’altrui” (C 323; OC I 385). The fact that the opera audience ultimately comes to his aid, defending his right of free access to the performances of his own work, does not produce for Rousseau any confidence in the general goodwill and fairness of the public. He is certain that the public will always be fickle and entertain a vicarious, spectacular relationship to the execution of justice. Beyond his general distrust in the fairness of the public, Rousseau is actually proud of the public’s animosity toward him, for this animosity is the effect of his intervention in the Querelle des Bouffons, where, according to his rather outlandish-sounding statement, the publication of his Lettre sur la musique françoise managed to prevent a revolution: The letter on music was taken seriously, and raised against me the whole Nation, which believed itself offended in its music. The description of the unbelievable effect of this pamphlet would be worthy of the pen of Tacitus. It was the time of the great quarrel of the Parlement and the Clergy. The Parlement had just been exiled; the fermentation was at its peak; everything threatened an approaching uprising. The Pamphlet appeared; instantly all the other quarrels were forgotten; only the peril of French music was thought of, and there was no longer any uprising except

ROUSSEAU

(137)

against me. At the Court they wavered only between the Bastille and exile, and the letter de cachet was going to be expedited, if M. de Voyer had not felt how ridiculous it was. When you read that this pamphlet perhaps prevented a revolution in the State, you will believe you are dreaming. Nevertheless, it is a very real truth which all of Paris can still attest, since today is only fifteen years since this peculiar anecdote. (C 322; OC I 384)

According to this account, the Lettre sur la musique françoise prevented a revolution by distracting from the engagement in factionalized battles such as the one that was about to cause an uprising, the conflict between the clergy and the Parliament.31 As opposed to real, live publics that interact in face-to-face communication, the nation transcends those temporal and spatial limitations. Rousseau claims to have replaced factionalism with national unity. Instead of the battle where the party of the “Corner of the King” is opposed to the party of the “Corner of the Queen,”32 and the clergy against the Parliament, neither spatial limitations, nor institutional affiliations and interests divide the people, who are suddenly gathered in the virtual, imagined community of the nation. And yet when Rousseau attributes some kind of agency to this imagined community, he transposes it into the live audience of the City Opera, of which he claims there had been a group of people that attempted to have him assassinated, a mob that did not carry out its intent, and a crowd that was swayed to take his side once they learned that his authorial right to free entry had been abrogated. Book 8 of Rousseau’s Confessions provides a detailed, engaged, and politically telling portrait of how he conceived of himself as an author. On the one hand, he portrays himself as an author who owes his celebrity status merely to the quality and novelty of his work, not to the power of influential friends or the sponsorship of a patron. On the other hand, and here his concept of authorship is fundamentally different from the one supported by many of his contemporaries, especially the philosophes but also the larger community of scholars and critics, academy members and attendees of Parisian salons, he has no interest in open, public debate, he dreads polemics, and rejects any form of factionalism. The authorial status he occupies cannot be taken up by just anybody among the general public of a print audience, or of the clients, discussing current events and the arts in publicly accessible cafés. In that respect he portrays himself as

(138)

ROUSSEAU

an exception, as unique, as the equivalent of the king, whether the exiled king of Poland or Louis XV. It is in the presence of the latter that he gets to realize and sensually enjoy the emotional influence of his work over his audience. This audience expresses sentiment in a nuanced and individualized manner, neither as a group nor as factions that would pass judgment. This model is ultimately crucial not only for Rousseau’s approach to live audiences but also to the virtual audience of a reading public, which has the crucial advantage of not needing the disciplining presence of a king. When Rousseau published Narcisse, a comedy he had written much earlier, but which he had performed on the Parisian stage only right after the success of his opera, he curiously reminds his reader of the court performance and the possibility of the sovereign’s presence, when he adumbrates the title page of the printed version of his play as follows: “Narcisse ou l’Amant de lui-même, comédie par J.-J. Rousseau, représenté par les comédiens du roi, le 18 Décembre 1752” (Narcissus or the Lover of Himself, a comedy by J.-J. Rousseau, performed by the king’s comedians, December 18, 1752). Through this not altogether unconventional reference to an actual performance the readers of the play are invited to imagine themselves at the performance of the piece at court. The creation of a virtual audience of sympathetic readers trumps the actual gathering of live publics. In that sense, Rousseau’s depiction of the lady who had been too absorbed in the fiction of his epistolary novel Julie to attend the ball she had been invited to, a lady though he somehow wished to have known but nevertheless chose not to meet in person, is the perfect embodiment of his ideal readership.33 As concerns actual live audiences and their collective affects, rather than individualized, nuanced emotions, there too, as we have seen with regard to Rousseau’s depiction of the effect of his Lettre sur la musique françoise, the virtual audience of print trumps everything else. It is only the print medium that can transcend the spatialized, temporalized limitations that allow for the imagined community of readers—united, in this case, in hatred against its author who dared to defile the reputation of French music. In contrast to those audiences, the audiences who hated, persecuted, and harassed Rousseau, Rousseau himself, as he claims at the conclusion of the penultimate book of the Confessions, was only too ready to forget the evils done to him. Though he might be moved to anger, he was constitutionally incapable of bearing grudges and plotting revenge. He illustrates his forgiving nature by telling his readers that at the time of

ROUSSEAU

(139)

the worst treatment by his audiences and the political authorities, when he had to flee Montmorency, he occupied himself with rewriting one of the most horrifically violent stories of revenge, the story of the Levite of Ephraim from Judges, in the manner of his compatriot Salomon Gessner’s idylls. This most gruesome narrative of gang rape, murder, and collective revenge and warfare, a story about the concerted collaboration of the Israelite tribes, which often has been taken as the most powerful illustration of the generation of a united front by way of the Levite’s distribution of the severed body parts of his concubine to the various allies, becomes for Rousseau, according to his Confessions, the occasion to demonstrate his forgiving nature to his reader. What at first might appear as an utterly outrageous claim, actually reveals an additional and important aspect of Rousseau’s concept of authorship vis-à-vis his audiences and vis-à-vis his oeuvre by calling attention to the textual model that is operative in his account of himself as an author. When he claims that the persecutions are aimed at him as a person, not at him as an author, he supports that claim by pointing out that both his second Discours and Julie were well received. The “Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard” from the Émile and certain passages from the Contrat social, however, got him into trouble with the censorship authorities. To the extent that Julie’s deathbed speech already contained everything that was seen as offensive in the “Profession de foi” and the second Discours already contained everything that was considered too daring in the Contrat social, the sudden clamping down of censorship must mean that it is not the author, the mind behind an oeuvre, who is being persecuted, but instead the biographical persona producing a series of works for different audiences, in different times and contexts.34 The autobiographical Confessions are dedicated to doing justice to that person and the survival of his name. In the passages about Le Lévite d ’Ephraïm, Rousseau writes about the person, not the author, to the extent that he focuses not at all on the content of the piece, nor on his thoughts, political aims, or intended effects on a given audience. Instead, as in the narration involving his other texts treated in the Confessions, he depicts the concrete context of the composition of the piece, the pragmatic situation that gave rise to this particular text, which then finds its way into the genre, characterizing the speech situation, namely the rewriting and transformation of a gruesome tale of violence from Judges into an idyll in the mode of Gessner. It is in this

(140)

ROUSSEAU

sense that the specific text can then be read as a document and expression of the writer’s psychic disposition at the time of composition.35 In other words, the biographical persona of the writer dreams up, invents, and creates a series of speech situations and pragmatic contexts into which he embeds specific utterances; this biographical persona is the subject of the autobiography. The author, by contrast, is the figure who creates and controls an oeuvre that is made available to the audience of print, a virtual audience, bound by neither space nor time. Ultimately, it is this distinction that defines Rousseau’s concept of and approach to authorship.

9 GOETHE

From the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” to Poetry and Truth

T

he primary focus of this chapter will be on Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. I will show how this autobiographical work provides a sustained reflection on what it takes to become a creative artist both from a historical perspective and in terms of an individual’s talents. For authorship in this work is considered not primarily as the making public of one’s own text or composition, as in the case of Rousseau, but rather as involving an intervention in an entire cultural domain. Dichtung und Wahrheit shows the childhood, youth, education, and early adulthood of the author as the phase that prepared him for reshaping the literary field in its entirety over the course of his life. Dichtung und Wahrheit thus presents the autobiographical account of the formative phase of its author’s life as the historically informed biography of an artist who happens to be the author of this biography.1 In Goethe’s move, of presenting his autobiography as if it were a biography, there is a decisive, even programmatic gesture of treating the self in a distanced, critical, and objective fashion, rather than in the inward-looking tradition practiced by confessional discourse, be that in its religious tradition or even in its decidedly secular adaptation, such as in Rousseau’s Confessions. For Goethe’s understanding and portrait of himself as an author who is a cultural innovator, neither subjection to a providential scheme provided by a positive religion nor the detailed focus on one’s own subjectivity with its valorization of authentic feeling rather than an externalizing approach to truth is acceptable. Ultimately Goethe’s rejection of the confessional mode involves an ethical position, an attitude

(142)

GOETHE

toward the self, which is grounded in a thorough reconsideration of the roles and functions of religion and art both for the formation of an individual self, in terms of their educational, formative benefits, but also in terms of the historical potential of these domains in view of their respective claims to benefit a specific culture. Too often Goethe’s autobiography and even Rousseau’s autobiography have been discussed as if they were to model an exemplary or prototypical self. I hope to have shown in the previous chapter that, in the case of Rousseau, though there are certainly claims that his autobiography provides new insights into some aspects of human nature, there is no attempt to present himself as representative of an everyman or an average citizen of his times. Quite to the contrary, he presents himself as an exceptional persona and an author in a position of sovereignty. Goethe’s authority and autonomy as an author is invested with a comparable degree of sovereignty, yet it is constructed in a totally different fashion. It is committed to a historical perspective, to conceiving of his own artistic potential and achievement in view of what was historically possible, which means a critical evaluation of a whole range of cultural domains in their specific settings.2 Before focusing on Goethe’s autobiography, and his portrait of his emergence as a cultural innovator, I shall focus on Goethe’s critical examination of the potential of art and religion for the formation of subjectivity. I shall first turn to his novel Wilhelm Meister, where Goethe thoroughly investigates the potential for the formation of subjectivity provided by the conventions of confessional discourse, and it is in this novel that we find a comparative assessment of the roles of religion and art. Whereas in Rousseau’s Émile there is almost no place for fiction and the arts, this is definitely not so for Wilhelm Meister, which could be considered the neo-humanist novel of education. In Wilhelm Meister a very particular relationship to art is crucial for the formation of the self. In fact, and this will be the focus of the following section, art takes over where religion— and not just institutionalized religion—falls short. Art alone can help the individual to transcend her or his own boundaries. T H E CO N F ES S I O N S O F A B E AU T I F U L S O U L

Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre narrates a coming-of-age story as the eponymous hero’s gradual realizations of his limitations in making it in the world of the arts. Infatuated with a beautiful actress and the magic of

GOETHE

(143)

the stage, Wilhelm tries to become an actor and not a businessman, as his father wishes. Ultimately, however, he has to come to terms with his limited talent, with the fact that he can always only act himself, always only impersonate a character he believes he is or he wants to be, never a character that is not part of his own narcissistic repertoire. Through the protagonist’s joining and following a wandering troupe of actors, the reader learns about many aspects of the theater as a changing cultural institution of the eighteenth century, ranging from the fickle fate of a wandering troupe of performers to the amateur ambitions at court and the high hopes invested in founding a permanent repertory theater. The protagonist, Wilhelm, learns through trial and error that he lacks the talent for acting: he can only act out his own narcissistic projections. Once he has gained that insight, he has to find one area where he can be useful. In the end he decides to become a physician. Wilhelm’s gradual, productive though painful realization that he should not become an actor and that his calling lies elsewhere, however, is not at all a critique of the arts or the institution of theater; quite to the contrary, it is through his engagement with the arts that he learns about his own limitations. The novel is divided into eight books. Whereas the first five narrate Wilhelm’s engagement with the theater, the last two books focus on Wilhelm’s departure from the theater and his entry into a secret society through which he learns to assume more responsibilities, to act as a mentor toward his natural son, to find his profession, and to choose a partner for his life. Book 6 stands out as a separate entity on its own. It is presented as a first-person narrative, which the protagonist is given to read just as he is about to recognize and come to terms with the limitations of his own aspirations in the theater. The author of this book is—by the time Wilhelm is given her autobiography—the deceased aunt of the woman he is to fall in love with and marry, a prominent member of the family with whom Wilhelm becomes increasingly intertwined. Her memoires, entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” are presented to the protagonist as another means of realizing the limitations of a life that cannot extend beyond the limits of the self. The trajectory of the life of the beautiful soul provides a countermodel to Wilhelm’s education, to the extent that it is a life based on the withdrawal from the world, from an engagement with production, a life guided by the attempt to avoid error and risk. The term beautiful soul (schöne Seele, belle âme) is a technical term and designates an ideal character type, a person in whom duty and inclination

(144)

GOETHE

coincide. It becomes popular in England first through Shaftesbury’s and then Samuel Richardson’s concept of virtue; in France it is central to Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, in Germany to Christoph Martin Wieland’s bildungsroman Agathon and to Friedrich Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education. Hegel finally puts an end to this ideal by criticizing the beautiful soul for preserving its virtue at the cost of utter inefficacy in the world.3 Goethe’s critique of the beautiful soul in Wilhelm Meister is not that different from the one in Hegel’s Phenomenology: The beautiful soul in Goethe’s bildungsroman manages to cultivate a self that finds contentment and inner peace by regularly withdrawing from the external constraints and distractions of society at court, as well as from religious society, even from her secret fellow believers, the Pietist Moravians. To a certain extent she takes the position that if she cannot control external circumstances, nor what happens to her body, she can at least control the state of her soul, her feelings. She compensates for the love objects she cannot obtain by loving the Invisible One. What makes Goethe’s critique of the concept of the beautiful soul especially interesting is the fact that he joins the ethical concept of the beautiful soul to the cultural technique of self-observation as it has been developed by first-person singular confessional discourse and that he allows this ethical ideal to stand at a particular juncture of secularizing trends in eighteenth-century religious practices. For Goethe’s “Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele” can be read as a document of the attempt at spiritual growth and an ethics that does not succumb to the subjection to the available official religious doctrine, its liturgy and rituals. She, i.e., the author of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” attempts to lead the life of a nonsectarian believer in a higher principle committed to cultivate her inner self, since she believes that this is the only thing she can control. Nevertheless, in spite of its departure from orthodoxy, the narrative also betrays the beautiful soul’s attempts to fit into certain prescribed patterns, which appear almost generically programmed by the confessional mode that seems to require a period of remorse followed by a conversion experience. In the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” Goethe analyzes the limits of a purely subjective approach to religion and spirituality. Not only in her worldly life but also in her religious life the beautiful soul rejects all external forms. Initially attracted to the secret community of the Moravians, to their liturgy and forms, in the knowledge that she needs external

GOETHE

(145)

mediation and images for her spirituality, once she joins them on a more regular basis she sees them as just as bigoted and intolerant as the orthodox church they repudiate. This becomes particularly apparent in the intolerance of that community toward the Court Preacher; only after his death do its members admit that though they might not have been on the same page doctrinally, he had nevertheless been a very good person. Goethe thus has his virtuous heroine realize the limitations of all kinds of religious communities, even—and to a certain extent especially—those that rely primarily on each individual’s experiential, subjective access to the divine, such as the Pietist community of the Moravians. In addition, toward the very end of the Confessions Goethe confronts his heroine with the limitations of her own subjective approach to spirituality via an encounter with art through an uncle of hers. This uncle is not an artist, but he is committed to integrating various art forms into his life, whether it be through the artful arrangement of his house or the cultivation of choral music and paintings. He even sends selected paintings to her. In these instances she has to realize art as a force that succeeds in pulling the individual outside of her or his usual habits to provide a concrete structure of how a gathered company spends time, to let a group enjoy the marvels of a well-trained and well-practiced multivoiced choir, and to respect artistic paintings as conscious choices rather than mere representational attempts. The confrontation with the challenges of art, and art’s ability to draw the individual out of her enclosure is introduced just at the moment when the beautiful soul has realized the limitations of any kind of institutionalized religion in the context of the harsh and unfair judgment of the court preacher by the Moravians. The beautiful soul uses a remarkable formulation for how she takes a distance toward her own religious practices: “Auch ich mußte um diese Zeit das Puppenwerk aus den Händen legen, das mir durch diese Streitigkeiten gewissermassen in einem andern Lichte erschienen war” (I too had put away childish things [Puppenwerk] at this time, for these took on a different aspect for me during this period of troublesome conflict).4 The term Puppenwerk refers to the Moravian songs and images she had been fascinated with. By calling these vehicles of her devotional practice “toys” or “dolls,” she shows how what before had attracted her to this form of Pietist religious practice now appear as trivial or frivolous playthings.5 The potential of the domain of art for leading the individual beyond his or her self is introduced exactly at the moment when the beautiful soul is

(146)

GOETHE

ready to lay aside those toys, which are merely props for the imagination. The encounter with art, first of all, makes the recipient leave the confines of his or her self by being challenged to come to terms with another’s spirit. When she first visits her uncle’s house to attend her sister’s wedding and sees his careful arrangement of the festivity, she comments: “But how much more satisfying it is to feel the spirit [Geist] of a higher culture, even though only a culture of the senses” (WM 245, translation modified; SW IX 776). It is noteworthy that here the term spirit refers to the thoughts, considerations, and choices of the person who has arranged the living quarters she is admiring. The notion of “spirit” here is comparable to the concept of “authorial intention” when one analyzes a specific text. To a certain degree, this spirit is also opposed to the Invisible One the beautiful soul tries to love and worship. For whereas the latter spirit remains caught between an unapproachable divinity and subjective projections, the former, the reigning spirit of a pleasant living arrangement, is very concrete and accessible through our senses. The beautiful soul’s aesthetic appreciation of the choral performance is described in a highly interesting formulation: “Now for the first time, external things brought me back to myself, and I learnt to my great astonishment about the difference between the natural beauty of the song of the nightingale and a four-part alleluia from human throats” (WM 246, translation modified; SW IX 776). The beautiful soul’s aesthetic enjoyment produces two significant insights: She suddenly understands the difference between beauty in nature and beauty in art and that there is a selfreflexive dimension to aesthetic experience. Something external leads her back to her self; what she actually learns about herself does not become clear until the subsequent explanations by the uncle. However, already in the beautiful soul’s reaction we can glimpse the end of the eighteenthcentury aesthetics of reception, an aesthetics that does not differentiate between beauty in art and beauty in nature. In chapter 1 we have seen how the emergence of aesthetic experience as a universally available, anthropological constant can be traced back to the spiritual exercises of Pietist religious practice. In the concluding pages of Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” we can see Goethe’s critique of exactly this concept of aesthetic experience through the voice of the beautiful soul’s uncle. Why, one might wonder, should only beautiful art, not beautiful nature, possess the capacity of drawing the individual out of being confined to the self and the self ’s wishful thinking and imagining?

GOETHE

(147)

What the beautiful soul begins to glimpse in the distinction between the song of the nightingale and the performance of a choral composition is how artifacts allow the beholder another kind of understanding of what is distinctly human. Aesthetic experience is no longer to be left unquestioned as a particular subjective feeling, no further to be examined. Instead, the recipient is to engage with the external product, the work of art as a conscious, deliberate artifact: “Noble souls like to see God’s hand in His creation; but why shouldn’t we give some consideration to the hands of his imitators?” He then drew my attention to some pictures that had not struck me particularly, and tried to make me understand that only the study of the history of art can give us a proper sense of the value and distinction of a work of art. One must first appreciate the burdensome aspects of technical labor that gifted artists have perfected over the centuries, in order for one to comprehend how it is possible for a creative genius to move freely and joyfully on a plane so high that it makes us dizzy. (WM 248; SW IX 780)

It is noteworthy how the uncle deliberately shifts an admiration of God’s intelligent design to the respect and admiration to be gained by studying artworks within the context of the history of artistic techniques and crafts and within the history of art. What is gained from this well-informed and educated approach to art is an appreciation of artistic genius and innovation to be gotten only by realizing how individual art works, if executed by a genius, will work with the available tradition in order to subsume and change it. For when the artistic genius moves freely and serenely on the summits of what is artistically possible, the artistic genius no longer takes cues from the available paradigm of a specific period style but intervenes in it unpredictably, freely, but also in such a manner that any subsequent art needs to take into account the aesthetic innovation achieved by this intervention. In admiring and truly appreciating a work of art, the beholder then admires what the human spirit at its best is capable of. The concluding pages of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” promote a clear argument that art should take the place of religion. Not just the institution of a particular creed is doomed to fail but also the individual who is rational, sensitive, optimistic, and committed to spirituality as a

(148)

GOETHE

principle beyond the self and self-interest. The reason: religion degenerates either into dogma/irrational occultism if codified or into an empty abstraction—it does not solve the problem of mediation and alterity in a productive way, i.e., how to relate to an other as other, how to love an other as other and imperfect, how to accept error and imperfection, how to take risks, how to desire and to sustain desire. By contrast, the engagement with art as a schooled dilettante, that is, as somebody who can appreciate the stylistic and technical choices of a work of art, trains one to pay attention to the particular instant, to take responsibility for one’s environment as something made, to see the human being as the maker responsible for her or his fate as a being who can actively intervene and shape the historically available options, to focus on the present, here and now. Whereas Goethe’s bildungsroman deals with the limits of religion as opposed to art in the case of the confessions of a beautiful soul, his autobiography reexamines the role and function of religion in a much larger historical context. Goethe treats in great detail his relationship toward the belief in a personal God, his relationship to organized church services, sermons, to the Catholic Church’s position with regard to the sacraments, as well as his relationship with a more abstract concept of divinity, sacrifice, and the demonic. In addition, he considers his relationship to the Bible, especially the Pentateuch in the context of his desire to learn Yiddish and study Hebrew, while in another book he reflects on Luther’s Bible as a literary, cultural treasure.6 In what follows I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of Goethe’s relationship to the many aspects of religion, rather I shall isolate and discuss only a few of the twenty books of Poetry and Truth in terms of their treatment of the emergence of a radically innovative author, in which key aspects of religion play an important but not exclusive role in that they enable the mature narrator Goethe to show how the young Goethe could find a critical distance to the reigning educational and literary paradigms in order to develop his own exploration of human culture and creativity.7 The books I have chosen to focus on have been selected in terms of how they allow the reader to trace key stages in Goethe’s presentation of the discovery of his own mission as an artist, author, and discourse innovator. Thus, in book 4, Goethe reflects on how the historical Bible scholarship encouraged by Robert Lowth’s lectures on the Bible from the mid-eighteenth century provided him with a means of gaining his own critical understanding of the nature of religious belief in relationship to

GOETHE

(149)

sacred scripture and official dogma.8 It also shows the adolescent boy discovering and pursuing his own interests and intellectual development apart from the already rich offerings arranged by his father. In the two middle books, 10 and 11, religion plays a less prominent role. These books deal with Goethe’s time in Alsace. However Goethe provides a summary of his dissertation, which dealt with the relationship between church and state, which he wrote at the conclusion of his legal studies in Strasbourg. The work was not published, and there is no manuscript extant. This media-technological aspect, namely the contrast between a printed, reproducible work and a unique manuscript or live performance, is what leads to the key question of these two central books: The issue of how to understand the role of the artist and of art apart from the individual written works he may or may not leave behind. For the final section of this chapter on Goethe’s autobiographical account of his emergence as a discourse innovator, I shall focus on books 14, 15, and 16 and show how he uses the figure of the prophet as a way to examine the relationship of a cultural innovator to his contemporary culture. Here we shall see that Goethe examines in particular the question of how the artist who sees himself on a mission must find a way to preserve the integrity of his enterprise. We have already seen that for Goethe turning away from the world in the manner of Rousseau or the Beautiful Soul is not an option. These books trace the way he finds an answer, guided by his discovery of Spinoza. R EV E A LED R ELI G I O N A N D T H E F U N C T I O N O F T H E B I B LE

Book 4 of Poetry and Truth is set in Frankfurt and treats the early adolescent years of Goethe’s education at home, which was—according to his father’s hopes—ultimately geared toward a career in law, administration, or diplomacy. Distrusting the efficacy of schools, Goethe’s father took great care to expose his son to a very broad curriculum through private tutorials, taught by both specialists and dilettantes covering their fields and hobbies, ranging from mathematics and training in foreign languages, drawing and music, the cultivation of silkworms and the study of papal history, to fencing, horseback riding, and an acquaintance with various crafts and influential men in the city of Frankfurt. The book ends with a recapitulation of the father’s goals for his son, and the narrator’s

(150)

GOETHE

explanation that whereas he did not yet have a clear trajectory for his own wishes, not even a clear idea of what exactly he wanted to do, he had decided he wanted to reap the laurels that had been braided to honor the poet. With this conclusion to the book the reader is lead to wonder what in the youth’s education directs him to the goal of becoming a poet rather than a lawyer. Although somewhat peripheral to the curriculum provided by Goethe’s father, in this book there is some attention given to literary concerns by the young Goethe. It is furthermore telling that all that concerns literary activities is somewhat related to religion and the Bible. Thus the narrator points out that among the then favored literary topics were adaptations of biblical tales. He mentions Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s ability to endow biblical figures with sentiment and tenderness and Friedrich Carl von Moser’s retelling of the story of Daniel as a tale that left a great impression on him during that phase of his life. In line with this fashion, the fourteen-year-old Goethe turned to the story of Joseph, an extremely talented young man, with whom he identified. He dictated his version of the Joseph story to an aide of his father’s.9 There is also a brief mention of how the young Goethe began to memorize, write down, and collect the sermons that were given by a new pastor. Yet, the narrator adds, the youth eventually got tired of this activity once he noticed that, in spite of the didactic aspirations of the minister, these sermons did not provide him with a deeper understanding of the Bible, nor with a freer understanding of Christian teachings. It is in this context, in the context of how the young Goethe managed to depart from the educational offerings surrounding him and glimpse what he wanted to aspire to in contrast to received wisdom and contemporary fashion that we must read the long narrative about the Old Testament patriarchs, interspersed by speculations about the nature of religion and belief, a narrative that has puzzled many readers of Poetry and Truth. The narrative digest of the Pentateuch is not presented as yet another attempt to retell biblical stories; instead, it is to illustrate a particular use of the Bible. The narration is from the mature Goethe who looks back with a distinctly historical perspective. He marks the young Goethe’s interest and access to the Bible as a fascination with an archaic, strange culture, with a privileged site for the understanding of the nature of religion, and a superb resource for anthropological speculation. He shows how the young

GOETHE

(151)

Goethe had access to a Bible that was not the Bible of religious edification, not Holy Scripture, but also not the Bible of Luther’s translation that by the end of the eighteenth century was to become enthroned as a text of a national, cultural heritage and a highly esteemed literary resource. The young Goethe’s study of the Bible as depicted in book 4 is not part of his father’s curriculum, nor is it part of religious instruction. The interest stems entirely from the boy, who is initially motivated by curiosity and attraction to what he perceives as a strange, unfamiliar living culture. On his strolls through Frankfurt he was intrigued by the Jewish ghetto, by people who looked as if they were from a different time and place, by the hospitality of those in whose homes he had been received, by their language and customs, and by their pretty daughters. Knowing some spoken Yiddish, the boy wanted to learn to write Yiddish, which made him request Hebrew lessons under the pretext of wanting to study the Bible in the original. This marks his interest in the Bible as secular, rooted in his contemporary worldly surroundings; it also marks it as a decidedly exogamous interest. The way in which Goethe describes the attitude and pedagogical approach of his Hebrew instructor furthermore supports this decidedly external, non-orthodox approach to the Bible. For he makes the point that his private teacher, the rector of a grammar school, was an older eccentric, utterly independent, highly critical and sarcastic scholar, whose only persistent source of reading material was Lucian. This feature, which the narrator actually mentions twice, highlights the external, exogamous approach to the study of the Bible. For Lucian, the Syrian satirist from the second century, was not only famous for having written what came to be considered the first novel in Western literature but also for his decidedly critical and pagan perspective on Christianity. With this teacher at his side, Goethe makes some progress in learning Hebrew, but very soon drops the study of the ancient language in favor of an engagement with the content of the Bible. Goethe mentions that already in a prior phase of reading the Bible he had been struck by all the contradictions of the tradition with what is real and what is possible. He decided to focus exclusively on the Old Testament and turn to the literal translation of the Bible by Sebastian Schmidt. Initially his teacher briefly tried to bring him back to the study of language. But ultimately the teacher was amused and supportive of the boy’s interests and directed him to the

(152)

GOETHE

great historical translation and study of the Bible by Lowth as well as Lowth’s German translation: The original text, thanks to the great efforts of the German theologians, had been improved through translation. The varying opinions were cited and then an attempt was made to reconcile them in a way that allowed the Book’s dignity, the fundamentals of religion, and human reason to exist next to each other on more or less equal terms. He would then point to that repository whenever, toward the end of the lesson, I would register my customary doubts. I would fetch a volume, he would bid me read while he paged through his Lucian, and when I made my comments about the Bible, his only answer to my sagacity was the usual laughter. . . . A person may turn in any direction he pleases, and undertake anything whatever, yet he will always return to the path that nature has once and for all laid out for him. That was the case with me too in the present instance. My efforts with the language and content of the Holy Scriptures resulted at last in the awakening of my imagination to a more vivid conception of that beautiful and celebrated land along with its surroundings and neighborhoods, as well as of the peoples and events that have made this patch of earth glorious for millennia. (PT 105; SW XIV 142–43)

With this contextualization of his approach to the Bible, by making it clear that he approached the Bible not within the context of religious instruction, Goethe also makes it clear that he approached it more as a compendium of heterogeneous, archeological, and anthropological documents out of which he then could fabricate in those serene hours when he would read around in the translation of Lowth’s text his own view onto the beautiful land and its surroundings, which has been praised by so many peoples for thousands of years. In that respect, it becomes obvious why the Luther Bible would not have been the right text. And indeed, historically, during the mid-century, the Luther Bible was by far not the only, uncontested translation of the sacred text, and it was not yet the document of a national heritage, which it only became toward the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of a sacred text, or the treasured source of a cultural heritage, the Bible of the mid-eighteenth century, and the one Goethe chooses to make central to that book of his autobiography, was a richly commented Bible, full of philological, archeological, and historical

GOETHE

(153)

scholarship, more like a heterogeneous palimpsest than a unified literary document. It was this Bible that provided him with the opportunity to speculate about the nature and evolution of religious belief.10 Goethe’s narrative about the Old Testament patriarchs in book 4 of his autobiography can be considered a well-thought-out contribution toward those Enlightenment debates on religion that argued over the role and function of the Bible or sacred texts in general and over the acceptability of claims that exceeded the grasp of human reason. A key distinction in those debates was the one between natural and revealed religion. In the early eighteenth century that distinction primarily designated the difference between religions that emerged naturally amidst human civilizations and those religions that relied on the authority of a sacred, divinely inspired text. In the later eighteenth century, beginning with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s writings on theology and culminating in Hegel’s view of the world-historical function of religion, the status of revealed religions changes and is no longer primarily tied to claims of revelation. By then it is frequently called “positive religion” and characterized by its ability to provide a unity and identity to a people, such as in the case of the Israelites who conceived of themselves as the chosen people, subject to one common God, one common lawgiver.11 Whereas the Lessing of “The Education of the Human Race” as well as Hegel conceive of the role of revealed religions (especially Judaism and Christianity) as crucial elements in mankind’s ethical development, Goethe’s account is not tied to this kind of a teleological scheme. Nevertheless, Goethe’s distinction between natural and revealed religion clearly belongs to the later eighteenth-century approaches in the sense that he does not simply condemn revealed religion in the vein of deist criticism, nor does he launch an attempt at rationally or theologically justifying the nature of revealed or positive religion. Instead, as I shall show, his approach combines psychological, anthropological, and media-theoretical approaches when he considers the difference between revealed and natural religion as ultimately resting on the distinction between religious belief in an emphatic sense and a mere conviction or certainty. Goethe’s narrative commences with the expulsion from paradise, man’s loss of a resting place due to a desire for knowledge, which leads to instability and an increase in faculties as well as errors. The great flood and the destruction of the tower of Babel are narrated as the result of angry, annoyed Elohim. This phase marks for Goethe the stage of natural

(154)

GOETHE

religion. Throughout this part, the term for the divinity is the plural noun. The status of religion changes once primitive humanity begins to differentiate between agriculture, hunting, and herding cultures. According to Goethe, it is the insecure, nomadic lifestyle of the herders that requires a different relationship to the divinity, seeking a more stable, secure reassurance. The belief in a special kind of providence, the trust in a god who provides in a particular fashion to a select group of human beings, families or tribes, is what according to Goethe then makes for the transition to the revealed religion of the Israelites, who find this relationship modeled in the belief of their patriarchs. Thus Abraham stands out in terms of his unwavering trust in God’s promises and blind obedience to God’s commands to banish the mother of his first son or sacrifice his second son. In this context it is quite interesting how the narrative about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and God’s intervention at the last minute is radically dedramatized in Goethe’s narrative. It is presented in a neutral, extremely brief statement, which is preceded by a long anthropological excursus on the provenance of sacrificial rites. According to Goethe, practices involving human sacrifice can be traced back to primitive martial customs of revenge; they are not originally or primarily part of religious ceremonies. It is within this narrative about Abraham that the narrator interrupts himself and calls attention to the transition from a natural to a revealed religion: If a natural, universal religion was to emerge and a particular, revealed religion develop from it, then probably the lands most suitable for that were the ones which have engaged our imagination up to now, with their customs and type of people. At any rate, nowhere else in the world do we find the emergence of anything similarly favorable and promising. Even natural religion, assuming that it arises earlier in the human spirit, must be predicated on considerable delicacy of sentiment, for it involves the belief in a universal Providence directing the whole world order. A particular religion, that is, one revealed by the gods to this or that nation, is associated with belief in a particular Providence promised by the Divine Being to certain favored men, families, tribes, and nations. This religion hardly seems to develop from within human beings. It requires transmittal, tradition, and surety from time immemorial. (PT 109, translation modified; SW XIV 148–49)

GOETHE

(155)

Natural religion in this passage is the trust in a general providential order, whereas revealed religion makes specific claims of how a particular set of humans, families, tribes, or peoples is favored. According to Goethe, the general belief in providence is generated by the human psyche on its own. It seems to be almost analogous to an optimistic, confident outlook, which is fostered in opportune, serene circumstances. The belief in the specific destiny of a specific people or tribe however, cannot, according to Goethe, be generated by the human psyche alone. It needs an external source and authority. A similar distinction between natural and revealed religion can already be found in the immensely popular mid-eighteenthcentury Zedlers Universallexikon, albeit in Zedler’s case this distinction is undertaken from a decidedly Christian perspective. According to Zedler natural religion is only sufficient for a prelapsarian world. Fallen man needs an assurance of mercy, love, and forgiveness that issues from a source that is beyond man’s own mental powers.12 Goethe seems to share this critical take vis-à-vis natural religion. However, according to Goethe, natural religion does not become insufficient with the Fall but rather with a certain cultural differentiation. And while Zedler advocates the necessity of revealed religion in its specific Christian instantiation, Goethe does not define revealed religion in terms of the divine intervention, promise, or law. Rather he keeps his formulation very vague and characterizes “revealed religion” as the effect of a fortuitous and highly complex textual, genealogical, and legal corpus, which draws its authority not from a supernatural source but from its textual complexity, its pragmatic tradition, and its antiquity: “This religion hardly seems to develop from within human beings. It requires transmittal, tradition, and surety from time immemorial.” (“Diese scheint sich schwer aus dem Innern des Menschen zu entwickeln. Sie verlangt Überlieferung, Herkommen, Bürgschaft aus uralter Zeit.”) To a certain extent then natural religion can be indeed praised or criticized as a purely human product, a projection of human hopes and fears. There is no teleological development in which religion holds a providential place, but there is a point in the development of different cultures when natural religion looses its efficacy or value, when it no longer satisfies the psychological need of providing a source of trust and reassurance, and there is a point as well when the belief in revealed religion fails to fulfill its function. On the one had, the obsolescence of revealed religion is not part of a larger teleological frame narrative, such as, for instance

(156)

GOETHE

for Lessing in his “Education of the Human Race,” where Christianity provides a more universal and more self-directed form of ethics than Judaism and where Christianity, at the present point in time in which the writer is situated, is to be superseded by a newer kind of a purely formal ethics. On the other hand, Goethe makes the firm point that once the belief in a positive religion has been lost, this loss is irretrievable. It marks a point of no return. In that sense, Goethe’s position demands that another domain of cultural production take up the function where religion has become insufficient. In contrast to Hegel’s grand teleological narrative, where religion is superseded by art, and art by philosophy, for Goethe for art to come in where religion no longer can fulfill its function is a task of the present, not of the past. Moreover, this function somehow has to do with how art instead of religion can address a general disposition toward the world, toward an order of nature, especially the capacity to engender trust in the future. In that sense, the artist—once positive religion has been exhausted—somehow has to mediate the disposition toward the future, which means he has to take up the function of a prophet. And indeed, as I will discuss in the following section, prophetic figures serve as models for how Goethe comes to explore the role and function of the poet. This is how Goethe describes the distinction between natural and revealed religion and the irretrievable loss that occurs once doubt has destroyed one’s belief in a positive religion. The universal, natural religion really requires no faith, since no one can escape the conviction that a great productive, regulating, and guiding Essence is concealed, as it were, behind nature, so as to come within our grasp. Even if a person sometimes lets loose of this thread that guides him through life, he can immediately take it up again anywhere. The situation is quite different with that kind of religion which proclaims to us that this great Essence has definite preferences and will espouse the cause of a single person, tribe, nation, or territory. This kind of religion is based on faith, which must be unshakable if it is not to be destroyed immediately and totally. The slightest doubt is fatal to such a religion. One can return to a conviction, but not to faith. This is the reason for the constant testing and the delaying in fulfilling repeated promises: they brilliantly highlight the capacity of those forefathers for faith. (PT 112, translation modified; SW XIV 153)

GOETHE

(157)

Though religious belief might be irretrievably lost, and thus positive religion might become utterly hollow, this does not mean that the central document of revealed religion, the Bible, has become utterly obsolete. After all, Goethe spends a good portion of book 4 retelling the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and argues that the Pentateuch held an important function for the young Goethe, although, as we have seen, its function was not to provide him with a source of religious instruction. This is how Goethe justifies for his readers his retelling of the Bible in that book: Someone might wish to ask why I am retelling these stories in such detail, when they are so universally known and have been repeated and analyzed so often. This person would perhaps accept the answer that I know no other way of demonstrating my ability to concentrate my mind and feelings on one subject and let it quietly affect me, despite my haphazard life and fragmentary education. It is also my only way of describing the peace that enveloped me, however wild and strange the happenings outside. Whenever my constantly active imagination (of which that fairy tale can serve as evidence) led me hither and thither, and whenever the classical mixture of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to confuse me, I would gladly flee for refuge to those oriental religions. I would steep myself in the first book of Moses, and there, amidst the widespread tribes of herdsmen, find myself both in the greatest solitude and the greatest company. (PT 113; SW XIV 155)

This retelling, according to the narrator, represents the only means by which he can demonstrate to his readers how during his boyhood he did not get entirely confused and lost in the dispersed life he was leading. Reading and contemplating that part of the Bible offered him a place of rest from fragmented learning, but it also protected him from being confused by his own lively imagination responding to the heterogeneity of the many different tales, ranging from fable to history, mythology, and religion. It was in the Pentateuch that he found a way of focusing and collecting his self, a site for contemplation, for a spiritual exercise maintaining his integrity and individuality. At this point it is important to note, however, that this was not a spiritual exercise in any kind of religious edification, it was not a meditation on God. There is nothing mystical about it whatsoever. Moreover, it takes as its point of departure a compendium of historical,

(158)

GOETHE

anthropological, archeological, and philological scholarship that becomes the site of calming speculation about archaic, simpler forms of human life and civilization. And—as the mature Goethe demonstrates to his readers in the retelling—about the nature of religion in the context of mankind’s evolutionary potential. The thoughts generated by the contemplation of the Pentateuch belong not to theology at all but rather to philosophical anthropology. The adolescent boy seeks a place to be both alone and in good company, a productive kind of solitude to think about the nature of human civilization and religion. Thus, even when religious belief in the one caring God and Providence has been lost—and this, Goethe already makes clear in book 1 of his autobiography, happened when the then only six-year-old boy thought about the earthquake in Lisbon—parts of the Bible can remain powerful resources for the growing boy, in fact it is this recourse to the Bible that allows him to hold on to his individuality and integrity against the centrifugal forces of his education as well as literary fashions. It is this kind of contemplative retreat to the Pentateuch that arms him with an understanding of religion that ultimately will not allow him to remain content with what then was the literary fashion, namely the mere retelling of dramatic episodes from the Bible. EX P ER I EN C E , T H E P RO D U C T I O N O F P R ES EN C E , A N D T H E F U N C T I O N O F A RT

Books 10 and 11, the two books in the exact middle of Dichtung und Wahrheit, narrate Goethe’s stay in Strasbourg during his legal studies, his travels in Alsace and its surroundings, his relationship to the French language and to French literature in the context of his law professor’s attempt to have him augment his legal training in Strasbourg and steer him toward a future career in diplomacy, his friendship with Herder, and his involvement with Friederike Brion and her family in Sesenheim in Alsace. Book 11 concludes with his decision to leave Alsace, to end his relationship with Friederike, and briefly focuses in the last paragraph on Goethe’s visit to the then famous classical sculpture collection in Mannheim. Even to readers who are only slightly familiar with Goethe’s biography it is well known that this phase of his life comprises the first stage of his breakthrough as a poet. It was then that he composed some of his first truly innovative lyric poems and it was that phase that immediately preceded his composition of his epistolary novel Werther.

GOETHE

(159)

Although the literary works composed during or shortly after that phase of Goethe’s life were presented and received as expressions of lived experience—indeed, the major innovative feature of these works consists in their evocation of an until then unheard of mode of natural and authentic speech—the narrative of Goethe’s autobiography dealing with this period does not primarily provide an account of intimate, private details and psychologically nuanced observations of his emotional involvement with Friederike, his discovery of the beauty of the Strasbourg Cathedral, or his immersion in nature. In other words, by the time he writes his autobiography Goethe deliberately abstains from precisely that approach, which was subsequently practiced by literary historians who tried to match up factoids from the author’s private life with details in his literary works. Books 10 and 11 refrain from delivering the materials for exact correspondences between art and life. Instead, these books provide a sustained reflection on the historical conditions for the possibility of the young man’s emergence as a radically innovative artist, whose innovation consists neither in how his art expresses his own experience nor in how art represents life in more general terms, but rather in the way in which art intervenes in the life of its audience.13 As to how these books provide a self-portrait of the author, there is another remarkable feature. Goethe makes the point repeatedly that he did not have any of the compositions from that time printed. To the great disappointment of his father, he even avoided the publication and printing of his dissertation on the relationship between the state and religion. There is no manuscript left of his dissertation. In the summary of his dissertation in book 11 he makes it clear that he recommended the separation between an official creed and the religious business and beliefs of private citizens. It is interesting that in this context of elaborating the function of art Goethe provides a model for containing the influence of religion. For his argument from his dissertation about the relationship between church and state encourages religious uniformity and a trend toward secularization by preventing both fervent, evangelical practices and revivals and the church’s exercise of statelike powers. Apart from not publishing his dissertation, he further makes the point that he did not publish any of his other works. The exact turning point between the two parts of Dichtung und Wahrheit, the end of book 10 and the beginning of book 11, also focuses on the medium of writing and publication. Book 10 ends with a narrative of

(160)

GOETHE

how he concludes a visit in Sesenheim by entertaining his hosts with the narration of a fairy tale of his, “Die neue Melusine.” In contrast to his dissertation, Goethe chooses not to summarize this story for readers of his autobiography, but he narrates how he took great pleasure in his ability to captivate the imagination of his audience. Goethe comments that the reader who would encounter that fairy tale elsewhere in print should not be puzzled by his assertions of this text’s strong impact, but rather bear in mind the grave difference between the live performance of a text and its written dissemination: “Someone at a future time may read this fairy tale in print and doubt whether it could have produced such an effect; but let him then consider that a human being is really only required to be effective in the present. Writing is a misuse of language, and solitary silent reading is a sad surrogate for discourse. A human being’s personality is what affects his fellow man most, youth what most strongly affects youth; and effects produced thus are the purest ones. It is these that invigorate the world and prevent it from dying out either morally or physically” (PT 330; SW XIV 486). This pronouncement about the superiority of a live performance as the only authentic use of speech as opposed to the medium of writing makes an appeal to the reader’s concept of what it means to be human. According to the biographical narrator, to be human consists in being effective through one’s actual presence, through one’s personality, which has an impact on other people. Youth exerts the strongest influence on youth, an influence the narrator credits with the larger force of moral and physical renewal. If this pronouncement stems from the authority of the mature Goethe, however, one might wonder whether and how the young law student would have gained that insight, an insight that would have to be of great importance to an emerging poet and artist. And indeed the narration about the young Goethe’s first encounter with the pastor’s family in Sesenheim delivers what could be described as the experiential background to that kind of insight, for it explores at great length the youth’s learning process as he experiments with two distinct disguises as two kinds of live performance. The young man, who had heard much about the hospitality and amiability of the Brion family, decided he would not visit them attired as the law student from a well-off Frankfurt family that he really was, but instead chose the disguise of a poor, somewhat disheveled theology student. Then, on his second visit, eager to be seen in a more appealing exterior, he asked the innkeeper’s son from a neighboring village of Sesenheim, an attractive

GOETHE

(161)

young man of similar stature who was actually familiar with the Brion family, to lend him his clothes and allow Goethe to impersonate him by letting him deliver a cake to the family, which the pastor was to receive in the context of an upcoming baptism. It might be helpful to compare and contrast this portrait of the young Goethe’s masquerade with Wilhelm Meister’s approach to acting, i.e., to compare the self-portrait of the young Goethe with the one of his protagonist from his bildungsroman. Whereas Wilhelm Meister chooses his roles based on projections of what he would like to be in order to act out his very own narcissistic fantasies, the young Goethe enjoys an artful disguise in order to look, move, and talk like another person, be it a type or even a specific personality. In fact, though there might have been some form of vanity in wanting to test how strangers will react to him looking less attractive and more humble—a foible the narrator Goethe compares with the antics of wandering Greek gods—ultimately, especially when it comes to assuming the disguise of the attractive innkeeper’s son George, the masquerade is not at all about a narcissistically informed desire of self-expression, but rather—as soon as the pastor’s wife sees through the young Goethe’s disguise and promises to cooperate—it becomes an engaging, quite enchanting collective play that makes everybody more perceptive and more focused on the here and now. It leads to a heightened awareness of one’s own as well as all others’ affective investments and perceptual schemata and the actual, lived emotional and perceptual reality in the presence of the moment. In other words, it prepares the conditions for the possibility of experience, if we understand by experience the encounter or perception of something that differs from what was expected. We can thus see that whereas the first disguise, the mask of the poor theology student, allows the young Goethe to glimpse the impact of his personality on strangers, in the second disguise, where the young Goethe embodies a distinct and different personality and orchestrates how various members of the Brion household negotiate the discovery that the person looking like George is actually the same who appeared in the costume of a theology student the previous day, the focus is no longer on how his own personality is received. By the second day, and this forms the conclusion of book 10 and the transition toward the young Goethe’s affirmation of his talent to entertain a live audience with his fabulations, the young Goethe’s masquerade offers the occasion to learn firsthand about the effects of illusion and disillusionment as the powerful production of presence.

(162)

GOETHE

Whereas book 10 ends with the narrative of how the young Goethe withdraws with the young people to an alcove and narrates “Die neue Melusine,” book 11 begins with a reference to this successful narrative performance and the Brion daughters’ express desire that he would write the story down for them so that they could read it aloud among their circle of friends. Though Goethe would have liked to oblige them, it was his friend Weyland who relieved him of this obligation by pointing out the rationale for his audience’s lively, almost exaggerated reaction to this narrative about a mismatched couple. Apparently the young women of the Brion family understood Goethe’s tale as a witty roman à clef full of references to an actual couple of their acquaintance. It was this circumstance that ultimately prevented Goethe from giving in to the wish of the young women and writing down his fairy tale at that time. Again, somewhat similar to the conclusion of book 10, Goethe’s autobiographical narrative seems to foreground a privileging of an oral performance over the written text. Through the focus on the young Goethe’s narrative performance, the guiding question for the development of the young artist is shifted away from a potential concern with the content, style, and form of particular texts to the overall impact of the artist’s presence. The impact of his personality is one that requires a live audience. For if the medium of writing constitutes an abuse of language and silent reading in isolation is a sorry surrogate for speech, then the artist distinguishes himself not primarily through a message, through what he says, but through how he is able to use the medium of language. Thus over the course of books 10 and 11 the artistic use of language that is to be effective on an audience becomes more directly defined as the intervention in the audience’s way of relating reality and fiction, art and life. This becomes clear in the rationale for Goethe’s refusal to write down the story for the Brion daughters. In that instance he intervenes in their desire to confuse or equate life with art to the extent that he withholds from them a text that would allow them to read it as the mere comical portrait of a couple of their acquaintance. Ultimately, his refusal is not that different from the effects of the masquerade, which was also a way of refusing identification of an imaginary perception with reality. If then the innovative potential that the protagonist becomes aware of in books 10 and 11 consists in his use of language, how he intervenes in the relationship between illusion and reality, and not just in any one particular poetic or literary product, he has to realize that he needs to break with the existing paradigms of poetic and literary production. This break

GOETHE

(163)

with tradition is first initiated through the crucial encounter with Johann Gottfried Herder, only five years older, who had come to Strasbourg for an eye operation. The two men quickly become friends, though Goethe is at times taken aback by Herder’s outspoken criticism, which does not shy away from mocking his young friend. But Goethe credits Herder with enabling him to gain a critical distance toward the contemporary literary production in the German language, as well as with introducing him to Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, a piece of fiction that greatly influences both the young Goethe’s perception of the Brion family in Sesenheim as well as the young Goethe’s approach to how fiction should be read and what degree of identification with fiction is desirable. For the composition of this part of his autobiography, Goethe even changes the actual chronology; he predates his acquaintance with Herder and familiarity with Goldsmith’s novel in order to allow him to depict his perception of the Brion family in light of the fictional characters from Goldsmith’s novel. Herder’s influence on the young Goethe is mainly characterized as a thorough disillusionment, robbing him both of his respect for German literary production as well as his confidence in his own capacities: “He had torn away the curtain that hid from me the poverty of German literature. He had cruelly destroyed a great many of my prejudices. Only a few notable stars were left in the national sky, for he treated all the others like so many transitory meteors. Indeed the very hopes and dreams I had for myself had been so badly spoiled by him that I began to despair of my own capabilities” (PT 336; SW XIV 493). And yet Herder’s condemnation of contemporary literary practices is contrasted with Goethe’s narrative about Sesenheim, which highlights his masquerade and acting experiments, as well as the effect of his storytelling and reading aloud of The Vicar of Wakefield. Moreover, when Goethe realizes that he does not want to remain in Alsace, that he does not intend to continue his legal studies in Strasbourg after his dissertation, when he takes account of his relationship to the French language and French literature, he reaches the conclusion that a radical break with tradition is needed at times—that French literature and culture suffer from having an unbroken line of tradition. In fact, toward the end of book 11, Goethe engages in a long reflection on the achievements and shortcomings of eighteenth-century French literature. These reflections provide the counterpoint and response to

(164)

GOETHE

concerns with literary authorship that were introduced as the guiding topics of books 10 and 11. Thus, whereas the opening pages of book 10 bemoan the fact that in contemporary German culture poets and writers receive little respect, when he turns to French culture he reflects on the powerful influence of Voltaire. Yet the philosophes, and especially Voltaire’s polemics, struck the young Goethe and his friends as an unfortunate form of demagoguery: A public that hears nothing but the opinions of old men too easily becomes precocious, and nothing is more unsatisfactory than a mature opinion when it is adopted by an immature mind. For us young men, with our German love of nature and truth and our consciousness that honesty toward ourselves and others was the best guide in life and learning, Voltaire’s biased dishonesty and his defamation of many worthy persons became an increasing vexation, and every day we became more confirmed in our aversion to him. In order to injure the so-called “preachers,” he had never tired of disparaging religion and the sacred books on which it is based, and I often felt uncomfortable about this. But now, when I heard that he had tried to discredit the tradition of a Deluge by denying the existence of petrified shells and calling such things mere tricks of nature, he completely lost my confidence. (PT 360; SW XIV 529)

In the eyes of the young Goethe and his friends, Voltaire looses his authority by being too ideologically driven, even distorting natural history to support his anticlerical agenda. It is noteworthy that Voltaire is primarily evaluated in view of his impact on an audience as well as in terms of his character and personality; it is not an issue of Voltaire as the author of specific works. In contrast to Voltaire, Goethe gives credit to Denis Diderot and Rousseau both for their contributions to the political changes in France as well as their innovative influence on the arts. Diderot especially is credited for his reform of the theater. And it is in this context, in view of what Goethe can credit as the most important innovations in French literature and culture, that he can return to his concern with one of the key roles of literature and the arts, that of intervening in the relationship between what is real and what is ideal, as well as between what is imagined, what is fiction, what is poetic, and what constitutes reality. He criticizes Diderot

GOETHE

(165)

for having reduced the theater to providing the illusion of one common reality instead of the illusion of a higher reality: “The supreme task of every kind of art is to use semblance to give the illusion of a higher reality. But it is erroneous to strive for a semblance so real that it amounts to mere everyday reality” (PT 362; SW XIV 532). Whereas Diderot’s revolutionary reform of the theater, the drawing in of the fourth wall, risks, according to Goethe, the erasure of the distinction between art and life by reducing even art to commonly perceived reality, Rousseau’s Pygmalion shows in its hero an artist who is unable to live with the difference between the best that art can produce and the mundane demands of life: And besides, I want to mention a small but epoch-making work, Rousseau’s Pygmalion. Much could be said about it, because this curious production is another that alternates between nature and art and misguidedly tries to reduce the latter to the former. We see an artist who has achieved perfection and yet is not satisfied with having given external form to his ideal and thus having lent it a higher life. No! It must also be dragged down into his earthly life. Through a most commonplace sensual action he wants to destroy the highest thing that thought and deed can produce. (PT 363; SW XIV 533–34)

Clearly, throughout these two books, 10 and 11, the task of the artist and what it means to be an author is defined in terms of the ability to produce an artifact that is not utterly alien to the reality of the audience, it has to allow for sufficient similarity to invite a certain degree of identification, but it also needs to remain distinct on account of being superior and different from nature, life, and common reality. Especially through the encounter with the Brions, these two books emphasize that what is at stake is the artist’s impact on an audience, an impact that is not portrayed as a didactic or moral achievement, not merely in terms of entertainment but also as an intervention in how the audience conceives of itself and its reality. B E YO N D T H E P RO P H E T S : D EU S S I V E N AT U R A

In the preceding sections on Goethe’s autobiography, I hope to have shown how Goethe portrays his childhood, youth, and early adulthood in view of how the young person develops a sense of his own poetic

(166)

GOETHE

ambition and creative potential within a very specific historical context, without being determined by that context. He takes advantage of the resources of his family, his city, his education, and his surroundings and selectively assimilates and transforms them. Yet, the most important cultural resources he finds in the domain of religion, in the Bible and a range of religious tales and practices, which allow him to reflect on the nature of belief and the role of religion in distinction to the role and function of art. He realizes the importance of taking a distance toward the available literary prototypes and fashions of his time, even of breaking entirely with certain traditions. Most important, he does not conceive of himself primarily as a writer but rather as somebody who can exert a decisive influence through his presence. We have seen how he portrays himself as a storyteller and actor who does not try to enchant his audience through projections of his own wishes and desires but rather in how he allows them to see their own reality differently, refracted through the veil of fiction, enhanced by their capacity to identify with ideals, which they know to be different from reality. Already Rousseau—as he reflects on his own position as an author— assigns a prominent position to Voltaire. According to the Confessions, it is through reading works by Voltaire that Rousseau’s attention to stylistic elegance and his own desire to write is stimulated. And it is Voltaire’s ridicule of his critique of civilization that both upsets him and contributes to his fame. Above all, it is Voltaire’s relationship to the Prussian king that offers Rousseau a countermodel for his own ideal of authorial sovereignty. Clearly, Voltaire is considered one of the most influential and powerful authors of the Enlightenment, and it is with regard to him that Rousseau and Goethe define their relationship toward power as well as their concept of authorial influence. For the young Goethe and his peers, according to Goethe’s autobiography, Voltaire’s powerful authority is deeply compromised. This is due not just to Voltaire’s overly zealous attacks on religion but also to the fact that Voltaire does not shy away from denying that the occurrence of buried seashells suggests that now dry parts of the earth must have been formerly covered by oceans. Voltaire’s hatred of religion cannot allow for the acknowledgment of this natural phenomenon because it would support the belief in the biblical tale of the great flood. Thus, according to Goethe, Voltaire’s authority is utterly discredited by his disrespect for both religion and the order of nature. By contrast, Goethe’s combined respect for religion and nature will become the crucial

GOETHE

(167)

foundation for an ethics of authorial independence in the decisive three books of his autobiography that deal with how Goethe comes to form his own position toward an author’s relationship with power. In what follows, in my concluding section on Dichtung und Wahrheit, I shall focus on these three books (14 to 16) and show how Goethe traces his discovery of an ethics of authorial autonomy that, in contrast to Rousseau’s model of authorial sovereignty, allows for an engagement with the world without being subjected to its demands and compromises. Books 14 to 16 cover that phase of Goethe’s early adulthood when he had already become famous as the author of Werther. He had completed his studies; it was certain that he could write well and support himself through the publication of his works. He had to decide in what direction he was going to develop his career and how he would earn his livelihood. Goethe was then extremely productive (he was composing poetry but also working on plays such as Goetz and Faust), and he had many contacts both with other young playwrights such as Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, who were perceived as forming together with him part of the literary movement that became known as the Storm and Stress, but also with more established culturally influential figures, ranging from Johann Kaspar Lavater, the Swiss pastor and promoter of the science of physiognomy, to the educational innovator Johann Bernhard Basedow, and the established writer Christoph Martin Wieland. It was then that he received a visit by a representative from the Weimar court on a mission to inquire if he was interested in a position. Although Goethe’s father had strongly supported his son’s legal training, the kind of study that would make him exceptionally well suited for an affiliation with a princely administration, Goethe père was greatly opposed to the idea of his son serving at any court. In his view, the life of a courtier was not desirable for a proud citizen of Frankfurt, a city that was not subordinate to any principality but placed directly under the rule of the emperor. Again, as we have observed before, it is telling which of his literary works Goethe mentions and how much attention is given to them. The literary productions that receive the most attention in those three books are in book 14 the unfinished and now lost play about Mohamed, of which the famous poem “Mahomeds Gesang” has survived, in book 15 his plan to write an epic based on the legend about the Wandering Jew, and the controversial reception of his ode “Prometheus.” These literary works,

(168)

GOETHE

however, do not figure primarily in Goethe’s narrative as literary texts and artifacts, rather they serve as stand-ins for the figure of the prophet, the disbeliever, and the lonely artist who works in defiance of the gods to serve humanity and thus mark stations in the young artist’s coming to terms with the specific nature of his role in the world. I shall trace how Goethe interweaves the biographical narrative of these three books with references to Mohamed and Christ, the wandering Jew and Prometheus in order to reflect on the issues and problems the cultural innovator encounters once he is exposed to a larger audience, how he manages to negotiate the different demands of spirituality, on the one hand, and the world with its instrumental rationality, on the other. Ultimately, according to Goethe’s account, it is his appropriation of Spinoza’s radically thisworldly understanding of God as the equivalent of nature that allows him to imagine his attitude toward his own creative work such that it is not compromised by the demands of a paying audience, that it does not have to pander to any literary market, but rather that he can allow it to thrive as a quasi-natural force; however, it also is Spinoza’s ethics that allows him to accept the prospect of a paying career at court, where he will do his service, where he will rationally engage with the world instead of withdrawing from it into a secluded, private realm of spirituality. Again, as I have shown in my analysis in the previous sections, the argument of Dichtung und Wahrheit proceeds by way of Goethe’s selection and combination of narrative episodes, which are then held together through distinct foci that, however, in most cases are not directly thematized. Books 14, 15, 16, which autobiographically deal with Goethe as a successful writer and part of the Storm and Stress movement who contemplates what to do with his career and how to earn his money, are introduced through a series of character portraits. Goethe does not engage at all with the programmatic aspect of the Storm and Stress movement, the reform of German drama, or the rebellion against neoclassicist ideals. Quite to the contrary, he describes his friends and peers quite critically. Goethe does not mention that the concern with the increased prosecution and execution of unwed women accused of infanticide was a much explored and discussed social and political issue among the entire group of these young writers and beyond that gave rise to diverse literary productions.14 Instead, he accuses his friend Wagner of having plagiarized his own plans for treating the Faust legend. Obviously, if he wants to portray himself as the original genius qua cultural innovator, he cannot allow for

GOETHE

(169)

a depiction of his own literary activity as part of a trend, of a collective concern. Indeed, in the same book we can find Goethe’s critique of the cathedral of Cologne as a work of architecture, which betrays only too blatantly the traces of a collective enterprise. Goethe shows how his peers, the other Storm and Stress playwrights, are ultimately limited by their own character traits, talents, and weaknesses. Lenz, for instance, is caught up in an obsession with detail, guilt, and self-destructive self-observations, which ultimately culminates in his madness, Klinger is somewhat limited by his Rousseauvian natural talent and good nature, which also makes him an adherent of the French philosopher and susceptible to bitterness toward those who are more fortunate and not entirely self-made like him. The issue of Goethe’s own character and talent is not yet addressed at this point. Instead, it emerges through a network of comparisons and contrasts with various religious figures both contemporary and historical as well as one nonreligious figure, the ambitious pedagogical reformer and institution builder Basedow. The central figure in all of these comparisons is the slightly older Lavater, who by then had become well known for his fervent character studies based on the science of physiognomy. The figure of Lavater allows Goethe to treat several aspects of how a talented, well-known man can use his talents, but also go astray, for instance, when he sharply criticizes him for his proselytizing zeal toward Moses Mendelssohn. Goethe nevertheless makes the point that he liked Lavater because of his pleasant, good-natured, and gentle character as opposed to Basedow, who was a less pleasant travel companion, relentlessly lecturing about the flaws of Christian doctrine, whereas for Goethe doctrinal issues were mere epiphenomena of certain theological trends and schools and by far not the essence of religion. As both slightly older figures try to win Goethe over to their respective beliefs and agendas, Goethe comments on his position by quoting some ironic verses in which he compares himself to Jesus joining some of his disciples on the way to Emmaus: “As though along Emmaus road / We stormed with paces keen / On either side the prophets strode / With worldling me between” (PT 456; SW IXV 676). In Luke 24:13–53 the adherents of Jesus on their way to Emmaus are joined by a stranger whom they tell about their grief over Jesus’s death and disappointed messianic hopes only to be scolded by the stranger who reveals himself as the resurrected Christ: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25).

(170)

GOETHE

In Goethe’s verses the term prophet also obtains a negative connotation. It implies narrow-mindedness and misplaced zeal when he calls both his two travel companions prophets and precedes the quotation of his verses with a mention of how, seated with them in an inn at Koblenz, they attached themselves to other guests at their table and took up proselytizing. Lavater could not help but instruct a country parson in the mysteries of the Revelation of John; Basedow obstinately, but in vain, tried to prove to a dance instructor that baptism had become an obsolete custom. But, and this is the implication of calling both Lavater and Basedow a prophet and of comparing himself with the resurrected but not ascended Jesus, Goethe neither condemns religion nor the achievements of the prophets per se. Indeed, he completes the remainder of the book by focusing exactly on the tension alluded to with his verses: Jesus as the “child of the world” and the demands that the world makes on the other two prophets, on Lavater and Basedow. He becomes the witness to how each one of the two compromised their beliefs by getting too much involved in worldly dealings, especially as they engaged in various forms of fund-raising: I, who was wasting my time and talents to no purpose, soon could not fail to be struck by the fact that both men, each in his own way, while busily teaching, instructing, convincing, were keeping in reserve certain hidden goals which they were very intent on furthering. Lavater’s methods were gentle and clever, Basedows’s vehement, outrageous, even awkward. But both of them believed so firmly in their favorite pursuits and undertakings, and in the excellence of their procedure, that one had to consider them honest men, and love and respect them. . . . The celestial and eternal are always lowered into the body of earthly aims and subjected to the fate of transitory things. I regarded the careers of both men from this point of view, and Lavater and Basedow seemed to me to merit pity as much as honor, for I believed I foresaw that they might find themselves compelled to sacrifice higher goals to lower ones. (PT 462; SW XIV 684–85)

Goethe emphasizes his own “aimlessness” and freedom in contrast to the two men, who are completely committed to the practice of their talent and the realization of their goals; thus they do not shy away from instrumentalizing others, sacrificing the means to the end. On the other

GOETHE

(171)

hand, he obviously respects them more than his Storm and Stress peers, who merely act out their own characters and are not involved in more far-reaching goals of cultural innovation. Only the latter is the domain of the genius or the prophet, and it is in view of these questions that he approaches the project of writing a play based on the life of Mohamed. Goethe concludes book 14 by telling his reader more about the issues he was working through with respect to this historical figure, whom he could never consider a deceiver but in whom he could study how good intentions would lead to misery and destruction, even violence and corruption. In his summary of the play, Mohamed looses the purity of his faith when he starts to proselytize and conquer on a grand scale, and he only returns to his true faith in a process of renewal once he realizes that he was poisoned in revenge for an execution he had initiated. Already with regard to Mohamed, Goethe treats the figure of the prophet and cultural innovator beyond the Christian religion. In the same book that concludes with his work on the figure of Mohamed he also describes his first intensive encounter with the ethics of Spinoza, which provides him with an attractive, important way of thinking about divinity and the self; in Spinoza’s words, which he quotes: “Wer Gott recht liebt, muß nicht verlangen, daß Gott ihn wieder liebe” (681; “He who loves God rightly must not require God to love him in return” [459]). He considers Spinoza’s ethics most committed to a way of being non-self-serving, which he adopts for himself and illustrates by invoking the motto of the joyously frivolous and this-worldly character Philine from his novel Wilhelm Meister: “If I love you, what concern is that of yours?” This comprises both a model of sovereignty and this-worldliness and a commitment to the world and others that extends far beyond self-interested rationality. In its affirmation of love, passion, and desire, it affirms an affective, sensual self as well as a willingness to take risks and embrace the full range of human experience. What Goethe narrates as the first serious encounter with Spinoza, initiated through his friendship with Nicolai, is then picked up again and expanded on in book 16, the beginning of the last quarter of this autobiography, which he had abandoned after book 15 for a few years. In book 16 Spinoza’s ethics and metaphysics provide him with the definite answer to his model of authorship, which allows him to be committed to his talent without compromising his art. In the intervening narrated episodes, especially in book 15, Goethe treats his increasing distance toward Christianity.

(172)

GOETHE

In book 15 Goethe describes in great detail the affectionate relationship he had with the Moravian Pietist Susanne von Klettenberg. As opposed to Lavater, she did not attempt to convert him but accepted him quite lovingly as her pagan friend. His status as a pagan became especially clear during that phase when he was closest to the Moravian community. For it was the Moravians who pointed out to Goethe that he was separated from them on the grounds of his belief in the fundamental goodness of the human being, i.e., his refusal to accept the doctrine of original sin, which amounted to the heresy of Pelagianism. Goethe was not in the least offended or bothered by this, but decided to take both an ultimately historical position toward organized Christianity, a perspective that illustrated the transitory nature of such doctrinal issues and legitimated him in fabricating his own version of Christianity if he so desired. But he also makes a point of comparing Lavater’s and Susanne von Klettenberg’s religiosity by arguing that each person’s spirituality ultimately is merely the response to and expression of their gender, their character disposition, and their ability to desire and to relate to alterity. In other words, their religiosity, as impressive and pleasant as it might seem, turns out to be primarily a reflection or doubling of their general disposition, of their being in the world, a deficiency of religiosity or spirituality that Goethe has diagnosed before, as we have seen in his critique of the beautiful soul’s otherworldliness in Wilhlem Meisters Lehrjahre. The position of the pagan or the disbeliever is explored especially with regard to the figure of Prometheus, which resulted in another one of Goethe’s great odes of that period, and whom he describes in book 15 as a figure that is not primarily one of rebellion against the gods but far more one who is on equal terms with them and who goes about his business of serving the human race entirely on his own. But there is another figure, parallel to Prometheus, that did not result in a finished literary product, but merely in a plan for one, which Goethe partially summarizes in the same book. This is the legendary figure of the Wandering Jew, who had not believed in the claims of Christ to be the Messiah. It was with the aid of this figure that Goethe claims he was going to explore the points of church history and the history of religion that concerned him. For him the Wandering Jew, modeled after a shoemaker from Dresden whom he had known, was to represent a good-natured this-worldly person who tried to dissuade Jesus from gathering disciples around him, warning him about the political fallout due to his influence over crowds and the kind

GOETHE

(173)

of audiences he would generate. Incapable of believing in Jesus’s otherworldly, spiritual claims, he is without sympathy, even full of reproach toward him as he is on his way to his crucifixion. Goethe breaks off the narrative of his planned epic about the Wandering Jew and switches to his treatment of Prometheus only to return to the earlier narrative in book 16, when he mentions that he got back his interest in Spinoza, that he studied him in all seriousness as the proponent of an ethics of renunciation, disregarding all the defamations of this philosopher. He claims that the impact of Spinoza on him was of great consequence for his future life, that whereas he first tried to come to terms with Spinoza’s philosophy by having the Wandering Jew visit Spinoza in his narrative about that legendary figure, he ended up abandoning the narrative and integrating Spinoza’s philosophy into his own life. By again mentioning the Wandering Jew in the beginning of book 16, he harks back to the concern over the dangers involved if an influential figure begins to depend on various audiences. When he explains his decision to accept the offer from the court at Weimar, which would provide him with a regular income, the brief reference to the Wandering Jew allows him to motivate this decision also as a decision that makes him independent from the audiences of his poetic works. In the same context, Goethe mentions how much the thought of selling his works would feel to him like selling his own offspring, a transgression against nature. He then proceeds to narrate how a certain Himburg had printed and sold a collection of Goethe’s works without the author’s knowledge and authorization and then proudly offered to send him some porcelain from Berlin should he so desire. Goethe was outraged by this and recalled how Jewish families on the occasion of their weddings were obliged to buy a certain quantity of porcelain only to boost the sales volume of the royal factory. In the same context in which Goethe explains how he conceives of his own career, how he envisages combining his artistic talent with a way of earning his money such that he is not obliged to sell his works and cater to a market, he explicates Spinoza’s famous dictum deus sive natura as follows: “Nature operates according to eternal, necessary laws, which are so divine that the Divinity itself cannot alter them. Unconsciously, all human beings are in perfect agreement about this. Just consider how any natural phenomenon astounds and actually horrifies us if it hints at understanding, reason, or merely free will” (PT 524; SW XIV 731).

(174)

GOETHE

Nature’s might is the same as that of God; there is no otherworldly authority but only a this-worldly one, and that is the force of nature exhibited through its order and arrangement, felt even prerationally by our spontaneous reactions to those phenomena that seem to contradict the order of natural beings, when, for instance, an animal appears to act rationally or, even more, when a plant seems to exhibit feelings, such as the sudden reaction of the mimosa to touch. Goethe’s concept of himself as an author and a cultural innovator, then, evolved as a way of fitting in with regard to his understanding of Spinoza: I had gotten to the point of viewing my indwelling poetic talent altogether as nature, especially since I had been directed to look upon external nature as its subject matter. Of course, a specific occasion could move me to exercise this poetic gift for a particular purpose, but it was at its most joyous and opulent when it burst forth involuntarily, nay, against my will. . . . It was very pleasant for me to think that my lovely natural gift, like something holy, might continue being expended disinterestedly while I was demanding real payment from people for actual services. This observation saved me from the bitterness I might have started to feel when I was forced to see how this most desired and admired talent was being treated in Germany as though it were outside the law and at anyone’s mercy. For it was not only in Berlin that pirated editions were considered permissible. (PT 526–27; SW XIV 732–35)

All throughout the last quarter of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Spinoza serves Goethe as the reference point around which he can gather the complex net of references and reflections on how he became an author as a discourse innovator, as a figure who would intervene and change his contemporary culture’s perception and experience, especially as it concerns the relationship between art and life and reality and illusion. We have seen how Goethe makes sure to distinguish his portrait of an emphatically sovereign author from a merely adept writer and stylist who conforms to the artistic standards of his time. In this autobiography Goethe traces how he becomes an author who does not depend on contemporary fashions, trends, and traditions. However, he is keenly aware of his own historical situation as he comes to learn how to intervene in the historically situated perception of reality of his contemporaries. His capacity for innovation

GOETHE

(175)

is not part of his upbringing, but it breaks with tradition creatively and amounts to an originality that can only be compared to the forces that produce change in nature itself. In the final narrative quarter of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe’s artistic talent is portrayed as the gift of a nature that is conceived, along the lines of Spinoza, as a this-worldly productive power, rather than the product of his education or the trends of his time. We have seen how Goethe arrives at this concept of his own artistic talent by focusing on various aspects of his relationship to religion, both natural religion and revealed or positive religion, to the figure of the prophet, as one eminent model of a radical cultural innovator, and finally by reflecting on the role of religion in articulating both his position on the function of art he envisages as appropriate for his historical era and the future to come.

CO N C LU S I O N

I

n part 2, focusing on the relationship between confessional discourse, the genre of autobiography, and the mise-en-scène of authorship, I have examined the intricate relationship between the transformation of religious practices and concepts of religion, on the one hand, and their impact on the emergence of an autonomous sphere of secular literary practices, on the other hand. We could see how the practices of narrating and publishing first-person narratives of the events culminating in an individual’s conversion or spiritual awakening—though very popular and widely spread—did not pave the way for a secular practice of soul searching and autobiographical writing; religious accounts were far too standardized and formulaic to achieve that. However, they must have contributed to bolstering the overall appreciation of an individual’s lived experience, belief, and judgment, independent of worldly values and opinions. For this latter aspect of valorizing an individual’s experience and of relying on one’s own spiritual resources rather than worldly judgment constitutes a crucial element both in Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography, where her ability to disregard the opinion and values of her peers serves as a badge of honor and a stepping-stone to establishing her spiritual authority in her role as an author of devotional literature, as it also becomes as a central element in Rousseau’s assertion of his authority as an author in the narrative of his Confessions. And yet this one aspect of a more or less clear trajectory of a transposition from a religious practice to a worldly one does not do justice to the far more complex relationship between the two spheres.

(178)

CONCLUSION

There is first the pedagogical domain elaborating a model of subjectivity that has to be, at least to a certain degree, generalizable. In that regard we noted how Goethe and Rousseau attribute an important influence to religion, especially to the kind of religious practices that emerged with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century piety, which decisively contributed to the valorization of individual, lived experience as the ground of certainty and a source of an individual’s independence from her or his surrounding social pressures. But we have also seen that both authors do not merely transfer these practices into their works. Instead, they critically reflect on the uses of these religious genres as they also distinguish between the overall pedagogical value of confessional genres, on the one hand, and the advantages and disadvantages of the confessional mode when it comes to the assertion of their very own authorial role, on the other hand. Thus in the Émile Rousseau seized the official genre of the credo and the profession of faith and transformed it into a personalized individual confession that forms the centerpiece of the intimate exchange between friends. Clearly, with that Rousseau’s Émile offers a secular template of a new speech situation that is to take over the functions of the confession as well as the profession of faith. Goethe’s bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister actually picks up on this new template when he introduces a new character, friend, and potential love interest of his protagonist, Therese, who, exactly along those lines proposed in the Émile, takes Wilhelm on a walk in order to tell him her life’s story, as the story of how she discovered her current focus, values, and view of life. Goethe’s bildungsroman also offers a critical examination of the ends and limits of the spiritual autobiography by presenting the reader of the novel with a document entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” which the external reader is supposed to read along with the protagonist. With that first-person narrative, both external reader and Wilhelm get to witness all the nuanced techniques of selfobservation and carefully groomed interiority that were the product of the new piety and its writing, recording, and communication techniques, but also the ultimate limitations of this kind of emphatic and ultimately otherworldly, pathologically self-absorbed model of subject formation. Both authors thus promote a secularizing trend that is also prevalent in their own autobiographies. Although Rousseau does not pay much attention to religion as an important resource for his emergence as an author, he nevertheless invokes Augustine’s Confessions in more than the title of his own autobiography.

CONCLUSION

(179)

For he radically transplants Augustine’s autobiographical model into a secular context as he makes his own becoming an author, the publication of his prize-winning essay propelling him into the position of celebrity author, the equivalent of Augustine’s life-changing conversion to Christianity. Thus Rousseau’s autobiography provides a detailed account of the author’s victimization as a public persona resulting in his utter withdrawal from the cruelty and whims of any kind of live audience, reserving his oeuvre for the lasting effects in print, with its ideal, albeit absent but nevertheless infinite readership. And yet—and this may have been the most surprising aspect of the discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions—turning away from all contact with live audiences is not Rousseau’s immediate reaction to the trials of finding himself confronted with his own celebrity status and the intrigues and disappointments of the philosophes and salon culture. For there is a significant phase during which Rousseau develops an image of his utter independence and sovereign power ruling over a live audience, comparing himself to various actual sovereigns ranging from Louis XIV and King Stanislas of Poland to Louis XV, a phase that focuses on a model of the sovereign author as it seems to be particularly relevant in its medial aspects when it comes to the figure of the composer of an opera, since in that case, more than any other, the issue of live performance dominates the author’s relationship to his oeuvre. Goethe’s model of authorship also insists on the importance of live audiences. For his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit works with a model of authorship that measures the effective artist and author by the impact of his personality on his contemporaries. Moreover, his autobiography, which is presented as the biography of his becoming a highly innovative original author, presents himself as a persona who can critically reflect on his own historical situation without being absorbed by or reduced to it. In this context he cannot be reduced to be the product of his education and upbringing, nor can he be dependent on literary models, precursors, or—even worse—current aesthetic programs or fashions. Instead, Goethe carefully builds a complex narrative within which he emerges as a discourse innovator.

PART III IMAGINED COMMUNITIES and the MOBILIZ ATION of a CRITICAL PUBLIC

A

ccording to Jürgen Habermas, during the eighteenth century the “bourgeois public sphere” emerges in contrast to what he calls a “representational public sphere” (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit). Whereas in the latter those in power would communicate to a passive audience of subjects, in the new bourgeois public sphere communication takes place outside the reach of state and governmental institutions, for instance, in coffee houses, taverns, and theaters. The new public sphere was propagated by the effects of a flourishing print market and the exponential growth in the availability of moral weeklies and sentimental fiction. In its forms of communication it takes its cues from the new sentimental genres of the epistolary novel and bourgeois tragedy; interlocutors are imagined as friends and members of a nuclear family rather than as representatives of a particular estate within a social hierarchy. In that sense the bourgeois public sphere values intimacy and equality; it is open and inclusive. Like Habermas, I am interested in the emergence of a new concept of the public as well as in the actual practices and institutions that promoted it. However, I do not assume that explicit reflection on the public sphere is necessarily part of the same domain as the practices promoting this new, more inclusive, more egalitarian and potentially critical public. In fact, as I shall show, at least initially it is in the context of a conscious involvement with the reaches and claims of government and the state that we can find the first programmatic reflections on

(182)

PA R T I I I

the nature of the public. I shall do so by focusing on the reflection on the emergence of the public sphere in Germany between 1750 and 1800. In his entry “Öffentlichkeit” (the public, public sphere) from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (History of Fundamental Political Concepts), Lucian Hölscher treats the emergence of a public that is no longer the mere passive audience of a top-down communication, but one that sees itself as actively involved in shaping matters of taste and exchanging views and opinions by tracing the meaning of the term Publikum, which in German still today—like the English term public—also carries the plain, neutral meaning of “audience.” Hölscher makes the point that even once this term has acquired its newly added dimension, referring primarily to “an educated readership,” its older uses continue to be valid throughout the eighteenth century, namely referring to the potential readership of a specific municipality or otherwise circumscribed administrative or juridical territory for which particular decrees, laws, and regulation are made available in print.1 This medial aspect will concern my analysis throughout this chapter. Whereas Habermas consciously excludes from his considerations those instances where the state and polity are involved, Hölscher notes the importance of the Latin term publicum, the substantive of publicus (pertaining to the state and to the people). It is in that traditional sense that the term public (Publicum) refers to the commonwealth or polity of a city or land. The res publica that concerns all citizens, moreover, brings into play an entirely different meaning of the German Bürger and bürgerlich, namely “citizen” and “civic” rather than “bourgeois.” The public of citizens rather than a bourgeois public sphere is not primarily an economic or class issue, but it is constituted through the common interest in the well-being of the commonwealth. Here we are dealing with a concept of the public that has been attributed to antiquity, be it the Greek polis or the Roman republic, where free citizens debate and decide together how to govern the commonwealth in a common public space under the open sky. This phantasm of a glorious open debate among equals in support of the common good had its anachronistic elements for the mid-eighteenth-century observer, as most writers who invoked it were aware of. However, it is exactly this rather glorified, idealizing version that addresses the questions of inclusiveness and the overcoming of social hierarchies, both decisive elements leading toward a new concept of the public. Moreover, as we shall see, invoking this republican ideal of a public calls attention to the

PA R T I I I

(183)

role of media and media technologies in its insistence on the oral culture of the ancients in contrast to the public of print culture. In part 3 I will trace the emergence of the concept of an active, emancipated public by looking at the transition from the traditional model of a top-down communication to one that conceives of the public as capable of critical judgments, actively involved in the shaping of public opinion. I shall ask when, how, and with regard to what kind of specific settings and examples this new model of an open, more egalitarian public was made into a normative ideal by examining the explicit analysis or programmatic articulation of what a public is or should be, i.e., by calling attention to what could be considered “metatexts” in the eighteenth-century constructions of a new public sphere. Apart from these meta-texts, I shall also consider actual practices within the domain of communication and pay attention to interventions in the form and format of public debate as they demand new kinds of participation, attention, and self-understanding of the public. In brief, I shall study the question: When and how does “the public” become a normative ideal in the Enlightenment? When and how is the concept addressed? Which practices contributed to the development of new models of the public sphere? In what follows I shall show that beginning with the transformation of the older concept of the public we can observe two very distinct trajectories. First there is the trajectory in which the public is conceived as a distinct unit, an imagined community that is united in view of a common interest, the concern for the commonwealth that transcends factions and individual interests, and through that concern creates equality even within a hierarchical, nondemocratic setting in the context of absolutist rule. In the second trajectory, the public is imagined as open to one and all, although this ideal openness will always be limited in terms of the specifics of language, accessibility, and the concrete modalities of circulation of the texts in question. Whereas the former model sets up the public as a normative ideal, it is primarily in the latter model that we can find an ongoing reflection on the textual and medial aspects of the public. Apart from Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” most of the texts I shall be considering have received relatively little attention. I have chosen these texts because they draw attention to how the conceptualization of the public emerges in contexts that have been overlooked. Most scholarly discussions of the emergence of the “bourgeois public sphere” tend to ignore issues of governmental authority and the reaches of censorship as they

(184)

PA R T I I I

portray the “rise of the modern public” primarily as a creature of the print markets and the self-reflexive circulation of news, fashion, and entertainment discourses. By contrast, the texts I shall draw attention to involve the domains of patriotism, religion, and the republic of letters. In the recent literature on the history and emergence of an Enlightenment public sphere, one study pays particular attention to the authors who are also of primary interest in my approach to the subject matter. Benjamin Redekop presents his Enlightenment and Community as a way of doing justice to the particular circumstances of a “German” public, to the fact that there is no unified nation but rather a great number of individual principalities, which leads him to seek in the conscious construction of imagined communities a decisive element in the German approach to the public sphere.2 While my own argument is informed by Redekop’s study, it also crucially departs from it in two ways. First, I disagree with some of the individual readings of specific texts by these authors. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I differ in my overall approach to the construction of an Enlightenment public within a German context. Although I agree that it is necessary to consider the fragmentation of Germany and pay close attention to the context of the Seven Years’ War in order to understand the first emergence of an emphatic notion of the public, I contend that the concept of a critical Enlightenment public will be utterly compromised if it ends up being reduced to some kind of “imagined community,” i.e., a unit with a definite membership like this or that audience, the nation, a distinct people, etc. In order to prevent this distortion, I have not restricted my choice of texts to the same that Redekop privileges in order to study what is specific to the German concept of the public. I shall also pay attention to Kant’s programmatic “What Is Enlightenment?” and the important context of the much wider transformation of the republic of letters. Moreover, I shall show that a critique of a unified, homogenized public as a decisive element in the emergence of an emphatic Enlightenment concept of the public can already be found in some of the publicist practices during the Seven Years’ War. Most importantly, I hope to trace the different takes on the role of religion with regard to the construction of a new concept of the public. My argument is divided into three sections. In the first (chapter 10), “Patriotic Invocations of the Public,” I shall show that, already in the context of the Seven Years’ War, we can situate an awareness of the public as

PA R T I I I

(185)

a discursive construct calling for innovation and modernization. In this context the creation of a modern public is part of a patriotic agenda, an imagined community of people united in support of a common cause and in their ability to transcend self-interest. I shall argue that the ultimately moralist underpinnings of this concept of the public, the claim that its invocation can mobilize nonselfish behavior, provide this concept of a modern public of patriots with its normative charge. The main focus of this chapter, however, will be on tracing some of the arguments and debates between two advocates for the construction of an imagined community of patriots, the legally trained high-level administrator Friedrich Carl von Moser and the very young, ambitious scholar and publicist Thomas Abbt. What renders their dispute most interesting for my larger argument is their very different understanding of the role of religion in the construction of a united public, on the one hand, and their very different understanding of civic virtue, on the other hand. In the very same context of the Seven Years’ War, however, we also already find a critique of the same concept of a modern patriotic public and the practices it calls for. This critique of a unified patriotic public, moreover, proceeds by way of an intervention in a mode of communication by way of disturbing and interrupting exactly the appeal to this kind of construction of an imagined community. With these strategies it offers another model of a public, a heterogeneous one that is open in terms of membership as well as toward the future, and above all a critical public. In the second section (chapter 11), “Real and Virtual Audiences in Herder’s Concept of the Modern Public,” I will examine the two versions of Herder’s essay answering the question “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” Its first version from 1765 can be read as a direct response to the attempts to conceive of a modern patriotic public during the Seven Years’ War, shifting the moralist focus of this model from its martial implications to that of an imagined community based on the participation in the public sector committed to support all segments of the population, including the weak, sick, young, and elderly. Its revised and much expanded second version from 1795/96, published as the fiftyseventh letter of his Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Promotion of Humanity), provides an extensive reflection on the function of real time and space in the construction of different kinds of publics with regard to the different domains of politics, religion, and the arts. Whereas at first glance this essay seems primarily to be promoting print culture and

(186)

PA R T I I I

the isolated, silent reader as the model scenario of the competent, critical audience member of humanity at large, a closer examination of the essay reveals a fascinating, sustained analysis of the interrelationship of oral/ aural forms of communication with written forms and of the real with the virtual sphere when it comes to constructions of different kinds of publics. Herder’s advocacy of the public of literature as the ideal public for a humanist agenda does not only expose the explicit program behind the scenario of the individual reader as the prototype of the member of the public, it also shows us how this agenda is directly and consciously intertwined with a distinct model of secularization, a displacement of religion by art when it comes to the construction of a critical audience. Indeed, according to Herder, as I shall show, it is first art in the form of live theatrical performances, then literature as any kind of fiction that promotes the kind of self-awareness that is constitutive of the critical public. The third section (chapter 12), “Mobilizing a Critical Public,” focuses on some of the writing and publication strategies that invoked and expanded existing conventions of the traditional republic of letters, making deliberate use of the vernacular, and consciously provoked and called attention to questions of authority and censorship. First I shall analyze Kant’s programmatic essay “What Is Enlightenment?” in the context of the academy competitions as a reflection on the expansion of the conventions of the republic of letters. Then I shall turn to Lessing’s socalled theological writings. Already in chapter 10, in the discussion of the role of the patriotic debates during the Seven Years’ War for the construction of a modern public, I shall turn to Lessing’s intervention in an effort to show that through his particular writing and publication strategies he postulates a radically different public from the corporate model he is criticizing. In this last chapter Lessing’s writings on religion will be analyzed as active interventions in the position of authority claimed by theologians in matters of belief. Lessing’s treatment of religion in general can be characterized as a radical provocation of the established academic hierarchies, as a way of taking the academic battles among the learned to a much broader, general population.

10 PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C

T H E CO N T EX T O F T H E S EV EN Y E A R S ’ WA R

Whereas the standard historical discussions on the emergence of the concepts of patriotism and fatherland in Germany tend to argue that an aggressive nationalism did not arise before the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia in 1806,1 a careful study by Hans-Martin Blitz shows that the opposition between enlightened cosmopolitanism and a rabid, especially Prussian patriotism and nationalism, underlying the dominant thesis about the emergence of a patriotic nationalism, which more or less explicitly makes the emergence of a patriotic nationalism into an issue of a “progressive” liberation from an occupational force, is historically too simplistic.2 Already during the Seven Years’ War there was the attempt on the side of Prussia, the actual aggressor who had invaded Saxony, to mobilize the population through pamphlets and sermons to identify with the war effort and see the Prussian king as rightfully defending their fatherland against an all-powerful recently formed Catholic alliance of Saxony with Austria. In that phase of the war the fabrication of camps based on religious distinctions, pitching Protestants against Catholics, as well as the figure of the king were used to create a unity in support of a Prussian patriotism.3 In the pamphlets describing actual battles and victories a third uniting focus became the image of a dehumanized, alien, dangerous enemy, especially France and, even worse, Russia. At the same time, that is, relatively early in the war, some writers, especially the officer and poet Ewald von Kleist (1715–1759) and the canon and

(188)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), tried to acquire fame by producing patriotic poetry. Gleim, for instance, had hoped to become the German-speaking equivalent of Voltaire by writing the history of that war. Thus he collected detailed reports from the front, especially from his friend Ewald von Kleist. However, he did not turn these materials into a historical account, but instead wrote what then became the very popular “Songs of a Grenadier,” which were published with a preface by G. E. Lessing. Gleim’s “Songs of a Grenadier” created a common, enthusiastically patriotic soldier figure, which united all strata of the population. This figure, however, was a pure fiction. For the actual troops were partly recruited by force and against their will, partly mercenaries from all kinds of backgrounds and lands; certainly there were only very few patriots among them such as the poet Ewald von Kleist.4 The official Prussian propaganda as well as the voluntary poetic production of a patriotic military heroic ideal in light of imagery from classical antiquity, the glorification of the king and the vilification, even dehumanization of an enemy figure created all kinds of patriotic fictions and myths promoting primarily a Prussian territory, but possibly also just a local province as the fatherland. However, when, two years into the war, in August 1759, Ewald von Kleist died of his wounds from the battle near Kunersdorf, his fellow poets and writers were suddenly made aware of some of the actual realities of the war and—at least temporarily—ceased some of their patriotic promotion of the honors of dying for the sake of one’s fatherland. And, as the war progressed, the poets’ initial enthusiasm waned not only out of a desire for peace but also out of the eventual realization that their hopes of being recognized and rewarded by the Prussian king for their patriotic efforts were utterly futile; for the latter basically ignored them as he remained dedicated to his belief in French as the only acceptable polite, educated, and culturally relevant language.5 Blitz demonstrates that there was a wide range of intensity and investment on the sides of the poets that were engaged with the production of this kind of patriotism. In this respect, G. E. Lessing holds the most prominent position. Thus it is noteworthy that Lessing launched, in 1759, the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature) with a preface that motivated the publication of this literary review journal by referring to a dear friend who, wounded while serving in the ongoing military campaign, bored, and out of a certain “military disgust with all political news,” had asked to be kept abreast of new publications and debates in the realm of belles lettres. The “letters” that constitute

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(189)

the individual installments of the journal hence pose as letters that had been originally addressed to this wounded friend. The focus and debate in that serial publication is offered as a conscious realm of circulating and discussing news that is different from the ongoing campaign and politics.6 The fact that Lessing wrote a preface for Gleim’s “Grenadier Songs” must not be misinterpreted as an endorsement of Gleim’s kind of patriotism. Rather, Lessing must have been motivated by market concerns, since he was the only one among that group of poets and writers solely depending on the income generated by his publications.7 More importantly, Lessing, apart from publishing Gleim’s “Grenadier Songs” and vehemently criticizing one of Gleim’s odes for its rabid promotion of hatred toward the enemy, requesting that his friend make serious changes, then also chose to publish this problematic ode in the fifteenth letter of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend.8 In that letter he does not reproduce the entire ode, rather he quotes it in segments and introduces it with a brief narrative, alerting the reader that the grenadier had been wounded in battle. In between quotes, the editor then calls the reader’s attention to a passage that is omitted. The editor suggests that this omitted passage exhibited the way battlefront wounds must have affected the judgment of the grenadier and allowed him to be carried away with an expression of furious anger, unfit for print and wider circulation.9 Through this strategy Lessing actively calls for a public that is no longer the emotionally and ideologically homogenized unit that all of these appeals to the fatherland and to patriotism tried to invoke but rather the audience of a publication, where each member has to make up her or his own mind and thus judge and think critically about what they are reading and whether it is fit to circulate in what kind of context. This model of a public, as I shall show in much greater detail in the last chapter on Lessing and Kant, has much in common with the traditional practices of the republic of letters. Yet, by relying on the vernacular instead of Latin, this new model of a public extends its potential scope beyond learned scholars. Blitz’s analysis of the patriotism promoted during the Seven Years’ War shows that the reference to fatherland could mean many things to many people ranging from a particular land or territory to the subjects of a king, the imagined community of all Protestants, or all Christians, or the states that form part of the Holy Roman Empire. The latter version, the most abstract, based on the legal constitutional definition of the empire, was that promoted by one of the most vocal critics of the Prussian propaganda, the constitutional scholar, diplomat, and administrator Friedrich

(190)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

Carl von Moser (1723–1798). And yet, as Blitz shows in the last part of his study, that traditional, abstract, constitutionalist model based on the attempt to construct a collective identity inspired by a “national spirit” as it would fit the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire eventually became problematic for even its initially most ardent advocate. First Thomas Abbt, but then later Friedrich Carl von Moser also invoked a “national spirit” in order to demand the protection of certain freedoms from being totally subjected to arbitrary rules and regulations, without however criticizing the principles of monarchic rule. As Blitz points out, these criticisms must be understood as the demands of an educated part of the population that wants to be involved in reforms serving the common good. They must not be confused with revolutionary demands.10 By the 1780s even Moser felt the need to publish his Patriotisches Archiv, a collection of lives and statements and essays demonstrating an engagement in the common good and a commitment to a larger German unit transcending the many fragments of the empire. Indeed, it seems that the commitment to patriotic ideals became especially strong during the 1780s. It was then that a good number of German writers ranging from Klopstock to Herder expressed their concern with German language–based cultural institutions and it was also then, especially after his death in 1786, that Prussia saw a veritable cult around the figure of Frederick II, who was immortalized by all kinds of plans for publicly displayed monuments.11 Whereas Blitz analyzes with great success the different discursive genres and strategies that were involved in creating the imagined community of patriots during and after the Seven Years’ War, he gives relatively little attention to the self-reflective and critical texts from that early phase of a primarily moralist patriotism. Yet, as I will show in the following chapter, Moser’s very early text from before the war deserves a closer look because it provides a critical analysis of the utter instability of this imagined community as a discursive construct by looking at the pragmatic, rhetorical strategies involved in the appeals to a public. T H E P ER S P E C T I V E O F A LE G A LLY T R A I N ED H I G H - LEV EL A D M I N I S T R AT O R

Von Moser’s essay entitled “Das Publikum” from 1755 was one of the first German publications to address the concept of “the public.” Its author was then living in Frankfurt/Main and served as a high-level constitutional

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(191)

specialist in the legal and diplomatic representation of Hesse Darmstadt and Hesse Kassel. From there he continued to rise to political prominence as an expert administrator and jurist in the services of the Austrian Empire. He was eventually appointed minister of the imperial dukedom of Falkenstein and put in charge of reorganizing the ruined budget of that principality. He also founded the first faculty of economics at the University of Giessen. While he lived in Frankfurt he was part of the Pietist circles around Susanne von Klettenberg. Apart from his religious poetry, those of his writings that are addressed to a more general audience fall into the category of moralist reflections on what it takes to be a fair administrator in government services. On the one hand, he was a staunch advocate of responsible, dutiful government and administration; on the other hand, he was intensely aware of the limitations of the human capacity for self-improvement, of the potential for corruption of those in power as well as their potential for deceiving their subjects in appeals to “the public.” Thus he applauded institutional reforms involving the educational system as capable of promoting enlightenment, but he was also quite skeptical when he considered the means by which a general public could be manipulated. This is how he muses about the prospects for general enlightenment: How much this quickly accelerating Enlightenment of our times, especially as it concerns the improvement of education and teaching of the general population in several German provinces by way of improving the institutions of primary and middle schools, as it concerns the more liberal and less constrained formation and thinking of the clergy, and most of all as it concerns the more gentle comportment of the rulers who have been alerted by warning examples, how much all of this will have an effect on the common man, and how much of the light he should have for his needs that will gradually reach him, all of this we shall hope for and expect from the new century to come. The spirit of the times—if one can indicate with this expression the ideas among people, the circulation, expansion and refinement of concepts—has also its striking effects on the understanding of obedience. Even if the actual beliefs of the kings remain always basically the same and even if they continue to make their consciousness of their power in deeds and actions felt as strongly as they can, they nevertheless will also accommodate their words to the assumptions and beliefs of their subjects.12

(192)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

Obviously, Moser does not hold an uncritically glorified opinion of the “public,” quite to the contrary, as his quoted musing makes clear: the terms and words that are being circulated might change and become more refined, but this refinement might just as well become a means by which a king would dupe his subjects in more sophisticated ways. I am preceding my discussion of Moser’s well-known essay “Das Publikum” with citation of the concluding paragraphs of his essay “On Obedience” because occasionally Moser’s essay has been misunderstood as the glorification of the public.13 Contrary to such readings, I propose to see Moser’s essay as a critical examination of the means by which “the public” has come to be invoked. In fact, his essay on “the public” does anything but reify this entity. Instead, it approaches the public as a discursive construct. The initial definition of the public as “the most important person in the world” has to be understood as an investigation of the pragmatic aspects, the different kind of speech situations, in which this “person” is invoked and in fact constructed as a most contradictory chimera: The most important person in the world and at the same time the greatest martyr of all times is the public. The monarch appeals to its judgment, the scholar requests protection from it, the merchant is its tutor, the just man appeals to its understanding and the hypocrite hides behind its weakness. No child is talked to as much as the public, and no old man has ever become so childish that one would have felt obliged to warn as much as one has done with the public. The tyrant opposes the reproaches of his conscience with the applause of the public, the oppressed and persecuted sigh for its sympathy, the man of the world hungers for its praise and only the Christian is capable of approaching it with a true and undisguised noble indifference tinged by respect.14

As we can see, in this opening statement Moser characterizes “the public” as the changing audience that is invoked and created by specific speech acts, as an audience that is supposed to legitimate whatever is being stated, acted, or announced. On the one hand, there are appeals to this “public” as an agent of a critical and fair judgment that is supposed to have an independent position, that is, to provide an objective evaluation of the actions of the speaker. On the other hand, it is an audience or addressee that is being patronized, educated, advised, or warned. In either case this

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(193)

“public” is the creation of specific speech acts by whoever has the privilege of appealing to a larger anonymous group of listeners or readers. But Moser does not leave his critique with this general ironic characterization of “the public” as the projection of any speaker who is in the position to address a multitude that extends beyond the people personally known. This audience seems to also have a double character: in principle this entity should be all of mankind; in practice it is always composed of very specific groups. All of humanity, or, where one wants to be more specific, the inhabitants of each state taken together constitute one public. They are addressed by the words: the polity, the common good, the common welfare, the common wellbeing, etc. The entirety of the citizenry would be united in view of the common good. However, this underlying ideal does not hold in practice, because it ignores the fact that there are always groupspecific interests as well as specific competences that divide a population of a state. In that sense, there is no common unit that would constitute the public of a specific state. Only a small group seems to be sufficiently interested, intelligent, and educated, or at least in terms of their social standing and power sufficiently privileged, to be able to judge the reasons for a specific cause, whether their judgment be adequate or not. (55)

Thus Moser makes it clear that there is a decisive and concrete discrepancy between the claims of addressing the public, invoking its critical ability to judge on behalf of a common good or the general welfare and the concrete divisions in any existing state, which allow only very few privileged and educated citizens to assume that role. There is another interesting aspect to the rhetorical invocation of the public that Moser points out, which involves a temporal distinction and implies the possibility that the audience respond, be actively engaged with the sender of the message or proclamation or the agents of certain deeds. According to Moser, rulers generally tend to appeal to the legitimating judgment of posterity, especially if their actions are detrimental to their contemporaries. However, when they want to legitimate and announce a war, they tend to appeal to the world of their contemporaries. Whenever they present something to be judged by an “impartial public,” they actually want the automatic approval of their audience, and whoever dares to

(194)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

interject anything is excluded for being partial. And yet, Moser adds, contrary to the assumption of the rulers, there are always in actuality better and more critical judges of the decisions and actions of the rulers. These would be people with sufficient experience and knowledge, but distance from the ongoing actions as well, like him. Certainly Moser could be characterized as a hard-nosed jurist who does not sentimentalize human nature, nor trust in progress apart from institutional, legal reforms, i.e., specific legislation and specific institutions that would serve the common good, where he challenges any automatic appeal to the “common good” as if this were something intuitively known and agreed upon. Thus Moser appears as a Pietist Hobbesian who thoroughly mistrusts human nature as self-interested and power hungry. The only recourse, apart from the external authority of a Christian conscience and ethics, is proper procedure, fair bureaucracy, and rational legislation that keep rulers and subjects in check.15 Thus he cynically formulates his take on natural law in the following words: “The wolf devours the sheep because he is a wolf; and the sheep puts up with it because he is a sheep. This is the nature and the law of nations of all rulers and all subjects” (59). But this characterization does not sufficiently capture what is new and important about Moser’s essay. In spite of his rather dyspeptic moralism, which appears especially strong in his meditations on governmental daily business, which he entitled Reliquien, he is strongly aware of a growing attention to the common good, a common public, the divisions among it as well as the demagoguery involved in appeals to it. Most of all, Moser’s essay presents a set of analytical tools to analyze the various speech situations in which a specific kind of public is hailed, invoked, and constructed: whether we assume all of mankind or a special interest group, whether we allow for an active audience that can actually react, or whether we assume merely an utterly open-ended neutral and vague set of the witnesses that make up the world of posterity. Finally, as we shall see, Moser, fueled by his brand of Christian skepticism when it comes to the basic anthropological assumptions at stake, has put his finger on the key concern: there has to be a fundamental human faculty to transcend self-interest. This is what is at stake if there is to be any attempt at constructing a larger community, a community that extends beyond those united in a common interest, and a community that is nevertheless of a secular makeup. Moser, not only a Pietist but in this respect an orthodox Christian, believes in

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(195)

man’s fallen nature and thus cannot easily allow for that human faculty. It is this fundamental doctrinal issue as well as his understanding of the role of religion and the church that sets him apart from those among his contemporaries, such as Thomas Abbt and Herder, who have addressed modes of constructing a public. From another perspective, all of these moralist patriots at that time held a certain commitment to enlightened absolutism in common. By way of concluding this section on Friedrich Carl von Moser, I should like to point out one aspect of the reception of his work that has influenced much of the historical scholarship on the emergence of patriotism in Germany. Beginning with Gerhard Kaiser’s study, von Moser has been described as an advocate of a united German nation that is based on the fiery feeling of the pious Christian.16 Kaiser’s influential but misconstrued take on Moser is still noticeable, even in the otherwise carefully researched study by Blitz. Thus Blitz refers to Moser’s treatise Von dem deutschen National-Geist and asserts that Moser’s vision of national unity mobilizes Pietist feeling in his model of the nation for which he supposedly uses not only the traditional body politic metaphor but also the image of the unity of believers of the Christian church. In fact, in that one hundred-page treatise, this image occurs only once.17 It is true though that Moser makes use of his Pietist background. However, he does so quite differently. He holds on to a critical image of the human being’s capacity for goodness if left to its own devices. He therefore trusts in procedure and legislation rather than the individual goodness of the prince or collective investment in the common good. Here he is the shrewd jurist, not the pious advocate. He believes, in line with the Pietist tradition, that religious belief is a matter of one’s personal relationship with God; it is not to be codified and legislated by external authorities. Doctrinal matters can be more harmful than good if used to instigate violence and strife. He blames the history of the religious wars in Germany for the divided, fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire and the fact that there is no German unity, something he hopes could and should be overcome both through better legislation and better knowledge of the law as well as through the concept of tolerance that is advocated by the Pietist tradition. Moser offers in his treatise Von dem deutschen National-Geist advice on how this fragmented nature of Germany could be overcome and claims that it is to be achieved primarily through a better knowledge of the

(196)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

constitution, of the individual legislations, of the rights of the different units toward the Empire and vice versa, but also through a better understanding of the differences and commonalities between the different German states. He advocates better education and travel for gifted young men from the lower and poorer estates that are to be trained for service in the government. In brief: Moser outlines a plan for better educating and broadening the cultural horizon of new government technochrats in the bureaucracy of the individual governments of enlightened absolutist states. He also advocates recruiting those individuals who have a strong enough character and conscience to be able to form their judgment and stand up to it, not to be cowed by the power politics at court. In his Patriotisches Archiv he offers a serial publication of documents worth reading by a public interested in the commonwealth. He publishes documents of exemplary lives of princes and rulers; for that he relies primarily on private letters, funeral sermons, and testaments, but in the later volumes also increasingly includes excerpts from essays and smaller treatises on the topic of tolerance, the concept of the public, and standing up for one’s judgment. T H E P ER S P E C T I V E O F T H E A M B I T I O U S YO U N G S C H O L A R A N D P U B LI C I S T

Whereas von Moser was utterly critical of the rulers’ manipulation of the public, especially when it concerned their military interests, Thomas Abbt (1738–1766) saw exactly in this—in the call to die for one’s fatherland— the sublime opportunity for the formation of a public that would be able to transcend not only individual self-interest, but also all particular, special interests that divide the different members of society. Thus he wrote and published his essay “Vom Tode für das Vaterland” (On Dying for the Fatherland) in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, in 1761, at a time when Prussia saw a first wave of patriotic zeal in favor of King Frederick II. The essay made its author famous and in 1765 produced for the young man—albeit not a position at the court of Frederick—a position at the Court of the Margrave Wilhelm of Schaumburg Lippe, a post he gladly accepted over the offer of a professorship at the University of Marburg. The count seemed to have been primarily interested in Abbt’s plans to become a historian. He did not, however, appoint him for political, legal, or administrative advice, for which Abbt’s education in theology,

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(197)

mathematics, and philosophy—in contrast to Friedrich Carl von Moser’s education and experience in legal and diplomatic matters—did not prepare him. In 1761, when the then twenty-three-year-old Abbt wrote and published “Vom Tode für das Vaterland,” he was already a professor of philosophy in Frankfurt/Oder; later that same year he accepted a position as professor of mathematics in Rinteln. In 1763 he took part in the Prussian Academy’s essay competition on the question whether metaphysical truths were subject to the same kind of proofs as mathematical truths, a competition won by his friend Moses Mendelssohn. Abbt was an ardent admirer of Lessing and wrote many reviews and essays on ethics and aesthetics for the journal founded by Lessing and published then by Friedrich Nicolai as Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. While in Rinteln he also published his most famous work Vom Verdienste (On Merit) in 1765, a work that expands the question of what constitutes meritorious actions in support of the common good and what kinds of personal characteristics are required to accomplish these tasks in the civilian sphere, in an attempt to address all segments of a population. At the same time, when Abbt published his pamphlet “Vom Tode” he also published a lengthy and scathing review of Friedrich Carl von Moser’s Beherzigungen in the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. Thomas Abbt pokes fun of Moser’s inelegant style, his clumsy formulations, and is most of all opposed to Moser’s claim that there is no such thing as civic virtue, that virtue does not exist in a secular form. Abbt argues against Moser that, just as there have been good rulers in history who were not Christians, there are civic virtues that stem from the individual’s capacity to act for a common good that transcends individual self-interest.18 Abbt’s own review is followed by an extremely positive review of Abbt’s own essay, quoting at length from his “Vom Tode für das Vaterland.” Clearly, the review of Abbt’s pamphlet in the Briefe in immediate proximity to Abbt’s review of Moser’s work stages a onesided debate over Moser’s claim that there is no secular, political, social virtue, no fundamental human capacity to make great sacrifices for the common good. For in this context it allows Abbt’s argument about patriotic virtue in war to appear as the victorious argument.19 In 1761, while Abbt was engaged with the composition of “Vom Tode,” he was also collaborating with Moses Mendelssohn on the translation of Shaftesbury’s “Sensus Communis: An Essay on Wit and Humour” (1709).

(198)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

In 1762 he stated in the Briefe, in the context of claiming that writers and journals had to make a special effort to appeal to the German “Bürger”: “Once the whole healthy understanding of the citizens finds support, once the true sensus communis, as Shaftesbury calls it, that is the sense for what contributes to the order and well-being of the whole, once this sense is well known: then the feeling for the beautiful will be promoted: for that is nothing else but that sensibility for order without the consideration of usefulness.”20 Abbt attributes to Shaftesbury the discovery of a human faculty that promotes the common good, which nevertheless needs to be made known to the citizens, before it actually becomes effective. In the case of Shaftesbury these are forms of witty conversation rather than scholarly pedantry, for Abbt, the promotion of civic virtue should be the goal of German writers. But Abbt’s Vom Tode involves more than an appeal to man’s capacity to take pleasure in sociability and act on behalf of the common good. It discusses the production of a new social whole— an imagined community—in the process of engaging for the common good, and it is in this context that it departs decisively from Shaftesbury’s understanding of sensus communis.21 Already in the preface to his work, Abbt takes issue with the argument from Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois that only republics would know a true form of patriotism, whereas monarchies were limited by the aristocracy’s adherence to a concept of honor and distinction: “Should it be difficult to show that the sacrifice of our life, which is sometimes demanded by our fatherland, that this sacrifice will be made easier by this motivation and that this motivation will be most effective; indeed that this motivation can be applied to more souls than those moved by the desire for glory common in monarchies; that one would not have to become a foolish enthusiast, which only happens with patriotism in very special circumstances?”22 According to Abbt, monarchies can just as well, maybe even better than republics, bring out a patriotic zeal in their subjects that shows itself in their willingness to die for their fatherland. For, in the case of monarchies, this patriotic zeal and engagement for the common good finds its focus in the figure of the king. This common focus of love and identification, according to Abbt, helps the people of a much larger land unite in view of a common interest. Moreover, what makes the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland such a unique virtue is the fact that it alone can transform mere subjects into citizens, regardless of their position in

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(199)

the social hierarchy and regardless of the actual form of their government, whether republic or monarchy: The division into estates necessary in monarchies might have been the reason that the joint efforts invested in the common good have been dissolved. Each of the estates began to believe that it should contribute only in one specific fashion. And yet, if there is to be one common good (and this can be found in all societies) there has to be also one common political virtue. Seen from this perspective all distinctions between peasant, burgher, soldier and nobleman disappear. All are united and represented under the formerly glorious name of the citizen. Then everybody is a citizen soldier, each soldier a citizen, and each nobleman a soldier and citizen, as you like it. (Abbt, “Vom Tode” 15–16)

Abbt attributes a most powerful and socially transformative force to the willingness to die for one’s fatherland. The commitment to this ultimate sacrifice produces a socially cohesive whole by creating a community of equals united in view of one common purpose, a community composed of citizen soldiers. This one lofty virtue and imagined community trumps and suspends the functional differentiation between individual estates, which tends to suggest to every estate that each specific function is all the members of one estate have to contribute to the common whole, thus separating the farmer from the burgher, and the soldier from the nobleman. In war everybody becomes a citizen soldier defending the common fatherland. It is noteworthy that Abbt in this essay is far from discussing the specifics of the interaction across ranks in the military. Quite to the contrary, he is engaged with the lofty praise and invocation of patriotic zeal as it is invoked by Thucydides, providing for his readers the illusion of listening to Pericles’ funeral oration, which Abbt quotes at great length. In other words, Abbt is engaged with the construction of an imagined community in view of one purpose and one virtue, one ideal that transcends both individual self-interest as well as the functional divisions within a social hierarchy. Abbt points out that the willingness to die for one’s fatherland, this ultimate act of self-sacrifice that demonstrates and inspires an attitude that transcends self-interested behavior, can only be matched by religious values and religious zeal. Although he argues that this virtue can exist in

(200)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

civilizations, such as those of classical antiquity, that were not particularly religious, or where it was propagated independently from religious practices and ideals, in modern times, where there is no public forum to awaken such a spirit, the pulpit might indeed serve as an effective medium to promote this ideal. Thus Abbt recommends that pastors make it their business to admonish their parishioners that patriotic self-sacrifice should be their concern: “Would it defile the servant of religion if he became the tool to disseminate this voice; and should he neglect his office if, after having said a thousand times ‘Repent!’ if once he would call out: ‘Be happy to die for your fatherland!’?” (4). Obviously, Abbt does not shy away from instrumentalizing religion and its institutions. Lacking a polis, a public forum with its public-minded culture, the pulpit should serve as the medium to generate and support the commitment to the common good. This call to religious authorities for their assistance in the promotion of the required patriotic zeal roused Friedrich Carl von Moser’s utter indignation. In his Reliquien he criticizes Abbt as somebody who would not shy away from riling up the population and inciting the outbreak of civil war.23 Moser’s scathing criticism of Abbt’s proposal to use religion as a means of promoting his patriotic virtue and recruiting soldiers also reveals another aspect in Abbt’s concept of patriotism versus his own, namely the tension between the very local, more or less arbitrary, states, which did not promote any sense of community among their inhabitants, on the one hand, and Moser’s corporate sense of the German Empire as the site of a German patriotism. Beyond that, Moser’s criticism calls our attention to the fact that although the Seven Years’ War roused a certain degree of patriotic, pro-Prussian, pro-Frederician zeal, by far not all writers and public voices were in support of this war or its propaganda.24 In his criticism of Abbt he calls attention to the brutal, forceful recruitment methods that were used during the Seven Years’ War, something, he sarcastically argues, that would not have been necessary if there had already been the more tightly woven alliance between the church and the military that Abbt’s pamphlet advocates. Thus Moser points out the cost of this kind of an alliance: instead of promoting the creation of a unified community that cooperates in the service of the common good, this alliance would have produced sectarian warfare. Abbt calls for the assistance of religious authorities in the same context when he wonders if enough is being done in modern times to support the

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(201)

patriotic zeal of the people. He notes the stark contrast with the ancients and challenges his modern contemporaries to be equally receptive to “the voice of the fatherland” as the Greeks and Romans were: “Should the voice of the fatherland which resounded so powerfully in the gatherings of the Greeks and Romans in old times, which resounded in the ears of the dying, and which made the fallen patriots smile even when confronted with the fear of death, should this voice have lost its strength among us, or should we, deprived of nobler sentiment altogether, have become incapable of being moved by it?” (4). Already this contrast between the ancients and the moderns implies a decisive difference in the venues and media available to that “voice of the fatherland,” a distinction that, as I shall show, will become the guiding distinction for Herder’s essays on the nature of a modern public. The question at stake seems to have become how for modern times, where there is no longer the civic culture of public gathering of the ancients, an equivalent can be found. Could religion and religious institutions serve as this medium or should this be left to the poets and writers? Who could and should create the imagined community of one unified fatherland? In 1766, shortly after having taken up this prominent post, Abbt suddenly died of a medical complication at the age of twenty-eight. Although he did not die on the battlefield, he instantly became a publicly mourned hero. A marble memorial in his honor was erected in the margrave’s chapel, and many writers, philosophers, and poets commemorated him and his work. Among them the young Herder published an excited eulogy/portrait of Abbt in 1768, where he describes him as one of his most important intellectual influences. What sets Abbt apart from all other writers, according to Herder, is his willingness and ability to write not just for a specialized audience, such as a scholarly audience or a highly cultivated and sophisticated courtly audience, but for a common audience of ordinary men and women. It is Abbt’s investment in that kind of public both in his accessible, personable, and metaphorical writing style as well as in his thematic choices, primarily in his essay on “Dying for One’s Fatherland” and his more involved, longer examination “On Merit,” as well as in his historical studies, that makes him for Herder such an extraordinary model and ideal of an author. For Herder, Abbt is not primarily an advocate of Prussian military patriotism and enlightened absolutism but an advocate of a public spirit that was constituted by the people united in support of the common good, a community spirit

(202)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

derived from something utterly different than self-interested rational action. Clearly, for Herder the young Abbt became a figure to identify with, to emulate, and, as we shall see, this also involves Abbt’s rise to fame and power through his appointment by the margrave. We could consider his position symptomatic, embodying the professional hopes for well-educated young men from the middling classes striving for a career in the administration of the governments of the more or less enlightened princes. The idea of a united public in the service of the common good that Abbt attributes to Shaftesbury, which according to Abbt is able to overcome the divisions between the estates, seems to have held an enormous appeal for that generation of young men. One reason for its attractiveness might very well lie in the erasure of one’s own traditional background and standing within the social hierarchy once one can speak to and for that common good and appeal to the public. In the following chapter I shall focus on Herder’s further engagement with Thomas Abbt and the question of what would and should constitute a modern public and we shall see more of the appeal of that speaking position for a certain ambitious young man’s career projects. However, we shall also see a growing awareness of the implications of Abbt’s model of a public that is unified and homogenized under one patriotic umbrella. In the case of Friedrich Carl von Moser we have observed an entirely different approach to the public. For him there is no doubt about the rhetorical, discursive constructed nature of any kind of public. Moreover, he does not believe in a fundamental capacity to overcome selfinterest and serve the common good. Quite to the contrary, it is the religious man with a conscience who is able to be a critical judge of those in power, to resist political intrigue, and to stand up for what is right. Whereas Abbt would not shy away from making use of the pulpit, from recruiting religious leaders into becoming spokesmen for the common good, for inciting love of the fatherland, Moser sees in that unification of politics and religion only the risk of civil war. Instead of advocating the conjunction of church and fatherland, Moser advocates the Pietist concept of tolerance, one that refrains from dogmatic, confessional codification and puts the emphasis on the individual’s relationship toward God, on lived experience and deeds. In lieu of trust in man’s capacity for goodness, for overcoming self-interest for the sake of the commonwealth, Moser trusts in good legislation and a good understanding of

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

(203)

legal practices. Whereas for Abbt—quite differently from Lessing—the public is primarily conceived of as an audience to be influenced and united in view of a common interest, whether through the call to arms or in view of common interests in the arts and literature, such as those promoted by the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, for Moser the public is potentially a critical public, one that can make up its own mind and judge those in power in the government in view of the fairness and wisdom of their decisions. However, in the case of Moser, this kind of critical public will always be restricted to the very few who are educated, experienced, and impartial enough to make up their own minds. This focus on the conceptualization of the public in the context of the Seven Years’ War has brought to light different perspectives on the constructions of the public against the background of a new phase of German patriotism. Through Moser’s reflection on the nature of the public, we have seen an understanding of the public as a discursive construct riddled with certain paradoxes. If understood as an audience that is constituted through its invocation, it is addressed both as a confidant and familiar entity as well as a stranger, an impartial judge. Thus already in Moser’s analysis of “the public” it becomes clear that to a certain extent any normative concept of the public needs to extend to strangers, to be open beyond the well-defined group of a specific audience and, in that sense, cannot be identical with one specific imagined community. In Abbt’s appeal to the unification of all through the willingness to die for the fatherland we could see the attempt to shore up an imagined community of patriots that are united through one common nonselfish interest that would overcome the barriers among estates and transcend social hierarchies by uniting all as “citizen soldiers.” Here we can witness a distinctly different notion of bürgerlich as not “bourgeois” but rather “civic,” harkening back to classical antiquity and its republican ethos, albeit here in the context of Frederician absolutism. It is certainly rooted in Abbt’s specific adaptation of Shaftesbury’s sensus communis that we can localize the new normative aspect of the concept of the public. Yet it remains problematic as to who could actually invoke this common interest, this willingness to die for the common good. In Moser’s criticism of Abbt’s willingness to instrumentalize religion and to have this call to civic duty issued from the pulpit, we could see the problems of using religious authority and mobilizing a sectarian public, which then could easily become an incitement to sectarian warfare

(204)

PAT R I O T I C I N V O C AT I O N S O F T H E P U B L I C

rather than one united community. In Lessing’s intervention in the patriotic discourse during the Seven Years’ War, we could see the clearest critique of the patriotic concept of a public. According to Lessing, the public cannot be identical with the imagined community of patriots, supporting the cause of the Prussian war effort, but rather the public becomes a social space created by the circulation of discourse in the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend.

11 R E A L A N D V I RT UA L AU D I EN C ES I N H ER D ER ’ S CO N C EP T O F T H E M O D ER N P U B LI C

H

erder has often and quite wrongly been associated with the emergence of an intensely irrational, religiously tinged form of patriotism, although critics of this portrait of Herder’s relationship to the rise of German nationalism have again and again asserted that Herder’s “nationalism” must be understood exclusively with regard to the importance of the vernacular and the attempt to call for a renewed attention to German language–based cultural productions. In this chapter I shall not be primarily focused on Herder’s concept of the nation, but rather his concept of the public, which has received far less attention. I shall do so by studying the two versions of his essay addressing the question “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” from 1765 and 1796. In the first version of Herder’s essay on the public we may note marked differences vis-à-vis Abbt’s concept of the public; we see how Herder removes the constitution of an imagined community from its martial context and makes it instead an issue of the public sector, of those institutions that are to serve all members of a society equally. It is in this context that Herder focuses on the role of live audiences and the importance of common space. However, in the second, much expanded version, Herder, chastened by the aftermath of the French Revolution, rethinks when real live audiences gathering in public spaces are productive for the development of a modern public, and when not. In that second version the issue becomes whether public gatherings foster conformism or critical thinking. He shows that the answer depends on the pragmatics of the speech situation, on whether the audience members are to be hailed as

(206)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

obedient participants or whether the audience can maintain a mental reservation and individual members can decide on their own what message they hear. And it is in this context, when Herder conceives of the public in contrast to crowds manipulated by politicians or by religious leaders, that Herder turns to the importance of the arts: the secularizing achievement of theater, and the critical potential of fictional literature disseminated by way of the print medium. Herder’s essay from 1764 comparing “our” modern public and fatherland to that of the ancients should be considered his response to Abbt’s question as to what kind of venue among the moderns could take up the role of the ancient forum and voice the call of the fatherland to public service, to create a public and a community that would transcend social hierarchies and self-interest. Although the young Herder who wrote this essay had just arrived in Riga as the assistant preacher and teacher for the German-speaking Lutheran community of that Baltic city, he does not issue his call for a means to transcend particular interests from the pulpit. Instead, he makes it the occasion of calling attention to the public space and institution of Riga’s new courthouse. And although Herder mentions Abbt’s essay and points out that even today one may occasionally find this kind of patriotic zeal, he does not at all make the willingness to die for one’s fatherland the central uniting force. In fact, in 1764, the then just twenty-year-old Herder had moved from Königsberg to Riga in order to evade the possibility of military service in his native Prussia.1 Whereas for Abbt the different estates of society are brought together under one common cause, the ultimate sacrifice, the willingness to die for the fatherland as in ancient Greece, for Herder the situation in modern times is utterly different. In a relatively autonomous city like Riga, which was a seaport that formed part of the Hanseatic League, and belonged to the Russian Empire since the victory of Peter the Great over Sweden, patriotic freedom means, according to Herder, something very different from what it meant for the ancient Greeks. It means the freedom to pursue one’s happiness in private life and to be successful in one’s trade. Moreover, patriotic zeal means less the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland than an altruistic engagement in the common good. Herder particularly observes this kind of altruism in the civic spirit of judges and other officials but also in the enlightened monarch Catherine. To a certain extent the young Herder seems to want to project and include himself among the ranks of those civic-minded officials who serve the

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(207)

common good and appeal to the audience of these public institutions. In that respect he resembles a functionary of the colonial administration, exactly that kind of figure who, according to Benedict Anderson, was crucial in defining the kind of imaginary community that was formative for the first phase of nationalism, the Latin American independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.2 Though Herder’s essay appeared in print in a small publication celebrating the new building, Herder writes as if his text were the written record of a speech delivered at the ceremonial opening of the new courthouse in Riga. Through the invocation of this festive speech act he turns his readers into witnesses of the inauguration of a whole new understanding of what it means to be a modern public: This temple will be consecrated as the home of what is most sacred, the refuge for the distressed, the sanctuary for prayers and services. This school will be a nursery for wisdom, virtue, and religion, the workshop for the wise and the philanthropists, the armory for the state. Under this roof of charity meritorious old men will breathe calmly: here even misery shall find joy; here poor and rich shall smile. This court of law shall provide asylum for the oppressed, a refuge for weeping innocence, a seat of justice and an image of the supreme judge. —In view of the importance of such a mission one wonders who would not be overcome with a holy shudder!3

Herder enumerates an entire series of public institutions, the courthouse just one of them, that care for the poor, the weak, for youth and old age, i.e., institutions that dispense pastoral care. Through this move the young preacher and teacher can fit into the ranks of those who are relevant and active for the public. Historically, the actual courthouse in Riga, apart from its function as courthouse, however, also served as town or guildhall, a function Herder does not mention. Thus the Germanspeaking aldermen, key actors in the self-governance of this Hanseatic city, who were recruited primarily from the local patricians, are not considered. A focus on the patricians charged with the governance of the city would have led Herder to invoke an altogether different concept of the public, the ancient one of those wealthy and free to conduct the affairs of the community.4 Moreover, just as this ancient concept of the public is not taken into consideration, so also a more modern, more familiar one, the one

(208)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

associated with the nation-state, is not addressed. For in this first version of Herder’s essay we are not dealing with an imagined community based on a shared language. Instead of history, language, culture, or religion, what Herder considers a modern Publikum consists of a population that has the right to make use of institutions of public welfare and institutions ensuring the preservation of the common good. Only after the long panegyric on the institutions of public welfare does Herder come around to address the question about the difference between a modern and an ancient public and their respective types of patriotism. He notes that whereas the ancient public was actively involved in governance, a public of a democracy that met to decide and debate all matters of common relevance in the open, modern monarchies are being governed and administrated by specialists. Herder does not appear nostalgic for the public of antiquity but points out that, for the ancients, there were plenty of occasions for abuse, swaying the people with the force of rhetoric and instrumentalizing the power of religion. T H E RO LE O F L A N G UAG E A N D R ELI G I O N I N S H A P I N G T H E P U B LI C

It is only in the later essay that Herder pays attention to how language provides an important element in the creation of an imagined community, exactly as Benedict Anderson has claimed to be the case for the second phase of nationalisms. But—and this is what makes the second version of Herder’s essay so interesting—the focus on a common spoken language alone does not suffice. Whereas the ancient/modern distinction in the early essay is the one between ancient, more simply administered and governed democracies and modern, more complex monarchies, the ancient/modern distinction for the essay from 1795 becomes a mediatechnological one. According to Herder, the introduction of print technology means the creation of an altogether new kind of public, a public that will ultimately have free access to information, an end to the powers of censorship, but also a public that will not be manipulated by the force of rhetoric and the power of assembled crowds. It is thanks to print that the individual reader can withdraw and make up her or his own mind. Print culture provides the means to escape the pressure of assembled crowds and the power of rhetoric.

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(209)

This is how Herder characterizes the revolutionary benefits of print technology ushering in a point of no return: We cannot take back what has happened; print technology exists; it is not only a great economic resource for trade and labor, but it also is a trumpet for language, as far as its products can reach. All monarchs of this world, if they unite their forces and step in front of each print shop, would not be able to destroy this poor family of the letter box, this asylum and telegraph of human thoughts. And besides, who would want to destroy it? For it has produced next to some evil also so much good. Moreover, due to its innocent but strong nature, it still will be the cause of more good in the future. The orator drowns me out; the writer speaks quietly and gently; I can read him thoughtfully, and it is my fault if I am deceived by his pompous words or if I waste my time with his babble; it is my task to examine him, and it is my prerogative to throw him away.5

Print, according to Herder, is an economically and politically important instrument that trumps the powers of the monarchies of this world; it empowers critical thinking against any kind of censorship. It frees the individual from being overwhelmed by the powers of rhetoric and it challenges the reader’s critical, responsible judgment. And, indeed, Herder ultimately concludes his essay with an argument for imaginative print literature as the most effective and desirable resource for shaping the modern public in view of a common commitment to humanist values. And yet this does not sufficiently capture where the intellectual labor and the theoretical benefits of the essay lie. Although Herder conceives of the solitary, private reader in opposition to a gathered crowd, and he highlights the contrast between the reflective reader and revolutionary crowds or manipulated mobs on the side of the moderns and the public of antiquity, settling public affairs under the Greek sky in the forum, we must not reduce the essay to a pre/post print culture opposition. Nor does the essay oppose a culture of writing/reading to one of oral/aural communication. Instead, the essay deals with different ways in which live audiences matter in the production of an imagined and projected collectivity. Indeed, it is most interesting how Herder elaborates for the second version of the essay his discussion of preprint culture. He differentiates between the culture of the Hebrews, the Greeks, and

(210)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

the Romans, all of them ancient cultures that are still relevant for “us” the Barbarians, i.e., Christians today. This is how Herder defines the public: What is a public? This is a very vague concept, which, if one brackets all of its idiosyncratic uses and abuses, means a common judgment, at least a plurality of voices in the circle in which one speaks, writes or acts. There is a real and an ideal public; the former is the one that surrounds us in the present, which even if it doesn’t let us hear its voice at least would be able to do so; the ideal public is sometimes so dispersed, so far away, that no air wave from that distance or from the proximity can bring us the sound of its thoughts. Yet one imagines both kinds of public as a reasonable, moral being, which participates in our thoughts, in our presentation, our actions, which can appreciate their worth and worthlessness, which can approve or disapprove, which we may in turn teach and correct, whose taste we may form and transform. We encourage, we warn; it is our friend and child, but also our teacher, critic, witness, plaintiff and judge. (302)

Herder’s model of a judging public, which can be entrusted with an important power to decide, is obviously influenced by the institution of the court of law. It furthermore becomes clear that he envisages a public that decides by voting, when in the first part of the essay he describes the voice of the public and uses the word Stimme both in the sense of the Latin vox (voice) but also in the sense of votum (vote). For Herder, this kind of public represents a concrete example of a reales Publikum, a real public capable of speaking and acting. By contrast, Herder imagines the ideales Publikum (the ideal public) as those whom the speaker or writer anticipates or invokes. With the term ideal Herder seems to designate less “the best hypothetical” and more something like “virtual,” relating to ideas rather than ideals. The main difference between these two kinds of publics consists in the fact that a real public can actively react or respond, although it is always subject to the physical limitations of time and space, whereas an ideal public in principle is unlimited and infinitely large. It is the sum total of all possible addressees, readers, or listeners of an utterance. Each utterance hails a potential group of addressees both in the actual formulation

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(211)

(encouragement, warning, prohibition, etc.) and in its actual contextspecific effect upon the audience (which then reacts with obedience, criticism, intimidation, etc.). Herder commences his discussion with a focus on the public of the Hebrews, which allows him to introduce the concept of an imagined community, prior and anterior to an actual public gathering, and to address the question of how language can become the unifying force of a nation. The Hebrew of the laws, psalms, and prayers hails what Herder calls “a genetic individual” beyond all existing borders, even in the diaspora. This is a public that is being admonished, commanded, encouraged, that is the subject of injunctions and promises beyond generational boundaries. For this kind of public the individual is always also the representative of the whole, and vice versa. But this unity of individual and whole is achieved at a great cost. As Herder points out, the religious rites, laws, commands, and promises are all endowed with divine authority and the status of sacred scripture. They do not allow for the addressee to distinguish between hearing the message, the command, the promise and applying, following, or believing the message, command, or promise. In other words, there is no way to separate the hearing from the obeying of the command and to say with Goethe’s Faust: “Die Botschaft hör ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube” (“The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak”). The contemporaneous German-speaking public, according to Herder, represents the diametrical opposite to the public of the Hebrews. For those speakers use their language very differently. Those from a higher social standing often prefer to speak to each other in Italian or French and would use the vernacular only when addressing their servants. Though Herder introduces the Hebrews in order to criticize the fragmented nature of contemporary German culture, he does so not to suggest they adopt that contrasting model. Instead he introduces in the same paragraph quite another model, one of a living language in which all actively participate: “My voice, as weak as it may be, still moves the waves of the ethereal ocean. Among the millions speaking and reading German, there will be some who can hear and understand me, were it only as many as Persius claims for his audience, aut duo aut nemo; even those two, whether praising or criticizing, will propagate those waves. In the public of language even the nobody has ears; he learns from or through me, and continues to speak. And this public continues to expand as long as the language lasts, even with all its changes, until it ceases to be understandable” (304).

(212)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

In contrast to the fixed language of Holy Scripture, the living, constantly changing vernacular is compared to an ocean that can integrate every individual speaker who can modify this entity and who is modified by this entity. Each speaker does not only find an audience or listeners but also leaves traces in the medium, traces that will be picked up and continue to be transformed by others. The contrast between the interactive plasticity of this medium and the mosaic stone tablets could not be stronger. The political thrust of this image is clearly one directed toward the participation of each and everyone in the formation of the unit. However, there is also a problem that becomes obvious with this image for the spoken vernacular as the grounds for a national unity. For, if it is such a fluid medium, it lacks contours. And this is exactly what is addressed when he turns to the public of the Greeks. LI V E A N D V I RT UA L P U B LI C S O F A RT: THE F UNCTION OF MUSIC AND I M AG I N AT I V E LI T ER AT U R E

Herder’s implicit question when turning from the public of the Hebrews to the public of the Greeks can be made explicit: What are the conditions for the possibility of the imaginary unity, if this unity is not to be achieved through religious commitment to a sacred text? According to Herder, the most important contribution of the Greek model of a public lies in its invention of art as a radical secularizing intervention. However, the Greek public of art needs to be understood not only in contrast to the public of religion, as in the case of the Hebrews, but also in contrast to the public of politics and philosophy. For Herder’s remarks about politics and philosophy make the normative assumptions of his model of the public especially clear. Thus he points out that the political public of the Greeks does not even deserve to be mentioned, for this public is entirely dominated by the power of rhetoric and incapable of critical judgment. Just as detrimental would be a public of philosophy. This would be a philosophical school, an imaginary community, marked by adherence to a common ideology, which would amount to the perversion of the entire philosophical enterprise. Herder reminds his readers that “still today we more or less agree with the Greek position towards a philosophical public; for whoever wants to be and become a philosopher has to do so on his own. The teacher confronts the student with the truth that he has to acquire on his

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(213)

own terms; for wisdom, like virtue and genius, cannot be obtained from others. . . . As long as there is human reason and will, there will be a hidden, quiet public of philosophy; but one should not expect to see this on the marketplace or in a school” (314). The decisive formulation of this passage lies in the thought that the public of philosophy must not become visible; it must be found neither in a marketplace nor in a school. On the one hand, Herder means by this that philosophy must not depend on the demands and tastes of its public. Moreover, through the distinction between a visible and an invisible public of philosophy, Herder makes the point that the practice of philosophy should not become a spectacle or group enterprise. Apparently he fears that, once the practitioners of philosophy identify themselves as part of a common enterprise, independent critical thought gives way to the pressures of the group and the desire for conformity. Herder’s objection to the formation of philosophical schools provides a helpful foil for understanding his approach to the public of Greek art. For it is against this background that art becomes the only domain that allows for a visible public, a public physically present to itself. The audience of a religious event has the status of participants and in that sense is entirely different from the audience of a spectacle, of those who listen to a concert or observe the performance of a play. Only in the case of art—and this seems to be the great achievement of art—do we have, on the one hand, the depragmatization of a live event and, on the other hand, and as a result of the former, the possibility of an imaginative, playful self-reflexivity, i.e., of an imagined community that is conscious of its imaginary component. As we have seen in the section on the public of the Hebrews, the power of religion is grounded in the identity of locution and perlocution as it is transmitted and practiced in the words of Holy Scripture. These two aspects of the speech act can be decoupled if the speech takes place in a situation that is free of any pressures to act and decide. For then the audience has the opportunity to hear a commandment without obeying, a promise without believing, an admonition without heeding the advice. This is the case when the attention of the public is shifted from the content to the form, from the “what” to the “how” of the speech or representation. But how should we imagine that this shift of attention was introduced? How should a speech not only be perceived in view of its immediate impact but also criticized and enjoyed in view of its artistic, rhetorical,

(214)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

technical choices? This is how Herder characterizes the inauguration of the domain of art: Poetry accompanied by music created and formed a Greek public in a more refined language and a more refined manner of thinking. The mythical names of Orpheus, Linus, and Musäus are with regard to their actual impact not mythical names: the form of their divine and human shapes, the melody of their verses and words of wisdom, the rhythmical progression of their sensations and images left an impression in the ear, the memory of the listeners, and went from mouth to mouth, finally even into the writings and habits of a later posterity. . . . The Homeric hymns, songs and choral performances of all kinds, music and poetry competitions graced and enhanced each gathering of the people, each public game, each festive transaction of religion or the state. This is how a Greek public for poetry, soon also for prose emerged. . . . This is how Greek theater came into being. For the latter with all of its diverse components presupposed the existence of a public, and this is how a Greek public was entertained. (307)

According to Herder the audience of art was formed when music and poetry became part of religious or state ceremonies. The use of music signals, decisively, a live performance in front of a gathered crowd. Furthermore, in the decisive formulation “poetry accompanied by music” Herder harks back to the typical eighteenth-century account of the development of language and the arts and sciences, such as Condillac’s Essai sur l ’origine des connaissances humaines. According to this account, the deployment of music, dance, and pantomime during religious or state ceremonies— meant to make the event more persuasive and more memorable—had the unintended side effect of opening up through this media-specific division of labor a new space for the imagination of the audience, one that allowed for the focus on the means and techniques of representation and performance and alerted the audience to a realm of a linguistically or artistically produced reality, a fabricated reality that might be counterfactual or merely made up.6 In other words, the use of artistic media during a religious ceremony allowed the gathered audience to imagine themselves also as observers of a virtual reality parallel to their actual reality. A critical public of art is created that knows how to appreciate and enjoy the

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(215)

success of the selection and performance of the spectacle, with its different sensuous components. The possibility of distinguishing form from content introduces a certain depragmatization of the speech and performance situation and thus creates the condition for the emergence of the domain of art. Herder argues that the arts only come to blossom once there is an audience for them, and this he sees happening in Greece. Moreover, he sees the Greek arts, whether epic poetry, lyrical poetry, or, of course, Greek theater, as always part of live performance, part of the active public life of Greek culture. Yet Herder does not recommend a return to this. Instead he trusts in the possibility of the literary arts to create an ideal, i.e., virtual, audience that has both a self-reflexive and a unifying dimension to it. And this possibility exists as soon as the domain of art has been created and has given rise to imaginative literature. For different literary genres, according to Herder, have the inherent ability to hail an imagined community. This is how Herder puts it: A hymn according to its genre requires a gathered crowd. The poet who does not see his audience will take heaven and earth, forests and rocks for listeners and witnesses. The voice of a lyrical poet hails and creates an audience. The singer, even the historian of great events, demands to gather a circle of men, women, youths and children around him, in whose ears and soul his accounts are to resound. They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach. Only that scene that the epic poet describes such that it comes to life for the eyes of his listeners, such that even in the soul of the acting characters everything is made visible to their focused interest, is a true epic scene. (309)

In this description of how different poetic genres, according to their respective imagined speech situations, create an imagined audience, more than the rhetorical figure of energeia is at stake. First of all Herder points out the ability of poetic speech to create an audience where there is no real, actually gathered, public. Then he turns to the epic poet who manages to let a verbal representation come to life in the imagination of his audience. It is important that this scenario of an audience created and hailed by the speech of the poet does not invoke an individual listener

(216)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

or audience member, but an entire circle of listeners. This audience is not united as a group of connoisseurs; rather they are a unified people/Volk, not in the sense of an ethnic group but in the sense of a transgenerational group that is not divided by occupation, estate, or class barriers, for what unites them is their common humanity, and this humanity becomes graspable in the joint understanding of the power of human language that consists in actively constructing and shaping reality. (“They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach.”)7 In that sense the public of art and literature is a public that never merely stands for just one nation, but instead metonymically for humanity at large. We have seen how Herder makes a live performance, the public ceremony accompanied by music, the necessary condition for creating a public of art, for creating and separating off the domain of the different arts. But then, once the arts have come into existence, he argues, they can also survive without an actual, real, live audience. Then the literary arts, the arts of imaginative literature, live on for an ideal or virtual audience, which only becomes larger once there is print technology. In contrast to the public of the stage, the public of literature is an “ideal public,” the community of thinking human beings. The public of literature is transnational—it is capable of providing a critical counterweight to all possible state constitutions. In contrast to the secret societies of the Enlightenment, it is a public that is in general open to all (and sundry). For Herder the public of literature is a public that is exclusively committed to the ideals of humanity. It is decidedly not tied to one language or one nation. At this point it is possible to summarize the key features of Herder’s concept of a public. First, it is striking that all his considerations of a public are gained in view of the real and imagined community created in different kinds of speech situations, whether they are bound to time and space or mediated by writing and print and hence possibly independent from the actual presence of the speakers and addressees. What Herder excludes from his discussion is a public that is engaged in an uncensored, potentially polemical deliberation over issues, exactly the kind of public that one would find in Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” essay or in Lessing’s carefully staged theological debates, which I shall consider in the following chapter. This kind of public, at least in the eighteenth century, is a public modeled on the practices of the republic of letters. For Herder a

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

(217)

critical public is not the one modeled on conflict, debate, and deliberation, but one where each member is capable of taking a distance and reflecting on what is being said or shown, as it is also a public that does not use its own crowds to enforce any kind of conformism. But in contrast to much that has been said about Herder’s influence on nineteenth-century nationalisms, Herder’s public is also ultimately—in view of what he envisages for Germany—not exclusively a linguistically based imagined community. One must keep apart his concept of different kinds of publics from his concept of the people or folk (Volk) and from his concept of nation (Nation).8 We have seen how Herder insists on the decoupling of religion from the state and from language. And there is nowhere the assumption of an ethnic identity at the base of the nation; if anything, he makes it clear in the passage on the fatherland that it is pride in the constitution of a nation and responsibility toward the future that should define this community.9 Although the imagined community of literature and art Herder envisages for Germany is one that needs a more thorough commitment to a unified common vernacular, it will have to trust and build on the shared values of humanity in the public of literature, which will always have to include literature from other times and cultures, i.e., literatures in translation.10 Finally it is important to note that the post–French Revolution Herder of the 1795 version of the essay does not advocate a vague universalism.11 He points out that, while we might think we can speak as representatives of humanity at large, all speakers are limited by how they can concretely imagine their audiences. An all-too-generalizing claim will reveal the very limited parochial knowledge of the speaker: “Based on the experiences of one’s own country and city one might be tempted to speak for all of Christianity, Europe, the World, posterity, imagining those entities always as a mystical person or gathering, an enlightened or to be enlightened collectivity. In order to escape from this confusion-producing misunderstanding it is necessary to determine exactly the horizon, and to distinguish in view of each public different times and different peoples” (303). The reminder of how imagined communities are always also extrapolations of real communities brings us back to the earlier version of Herder’s essay. It is in the context of commemorating the inauguration of the new courthouse of Riga that Herder insists on the power of public institutions to bring together a very mixed group of people in one concrete physical public space. We would have the public of all the people entitled to the

(218)

R E A L A N D V I R T UA L AU D I EN C E S

benefits of public institutions, a notion of the public that should not be forgotten, as Tony Judt makes clear when he spells out the consequences of the diminishing public sector in today’s Western democracies.12 In the second version of the essay the concern with a common, uniting interest is shifted to a focus on the contours and shape of different publics, the identity and self-understanding as publics are constituted differently, whether through total subjection to a divine authority, in the case of religion, or through ideological conformism, in the case of dominant philosophical schools, or, finally, the public of literature and art. Concrete space in which a live audience can gather matters for Herder’s second essay as far as what kind of stage it provides for the audience to generate an image of itself, be that one of a homogenized or heterogeneous group of people, one of mere unreflecting participants, or critical listeners and observers. The way in which Herder draws attention to both the importance of real time and space and virtual reality when it comes to the political dimension of the construction of imagined communities is probably more relevant to a reader of the twenty-first century than to the reader of the mid-twentieth century when Habermas’s Public Sphere made its first appearance. The Arab Spring depended on the interrelationship of social media and the gathering of real people in real spaces. It offers an important recent example of why the political implications of modern media technologies—whether print or electronic in the age of the Internet— cannot be derived from the essentialist approach of a technological determinism. The pragmatics of distinct cultural domains such as religion or the arts must be considered as well, especially (if we agree with Herder’s analysis) because they provide a basis for analyzing different media and understanding the real and virtual dimensions of a public’s self-image.

12 M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C

The critical public sphere analyzed in this part of my study has little in common with the category of “public opinion.” Understood in the mideighteenth century as a relatively conservative category, as a consensus about common values and morality, by the end of the century public opinion became an increasingly important factor in political decisions, a critical instance to be reckoned with, that might require a certain degree of governmental transparency and disclosure.1 These aspects of a public sphere and public opinion that involve a collective and basically tacit attitude, be it consensual or be it factitious, partisan, or political, in reaction to the press, newspapers and pamphlets, an (imagined) readership, which, at best, can “vote” with its feet by buying or reading a publication or not, will be bracketed for the purposes of the following sections. Instead, I shall focus on a contentious and individualistic model of a critical reader, a reader who can challenge the authority of a publication in terms of a rebuttal or a correction. To put it simply: the model I am interested in involves an audience whose members are critical and active to the extent that they can respond to and challenge what they read, an audience that shares the same time and space as the written texts to which it can potentially reply in public.2 In that sense we are dealing with a “live” audience that is modeled on the debate among equals as it has been practiced throughout early modern times in the scholarly community. In this spirit I have chosen three eighteenth-century texts for closer reexamination in order to make a case that not only allows us to see one aspect of a historically distant

(220)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

period differently but also provides an occasion to rethink issues we are concerned with in our own academic disputes here and now. In what follows I shall trace the programmatic conceptualization of a public sphere as a writing and publication practice that is open to, even provokes a reply from, its readers and hence implies a model of a live audience. This, however, does not mean that this audience model has to be imagined as a return to an exclusively oral/aural culture. Quite to the contrary: throughout history these aspects of oral/aural culture have formed all kinds of alliances with written and print culture. Throughout early modern times the scholarly community relied on writing and print in its communications. Moreover, the second half of the eighteenth century, the period that is of my primary concern, witnesses both a sharp increase in printed materials as well as in the general literacy rate. This latter set of circumstances has led most studies to relate the emergence of the public sphere during the eighteenth century primarily or even exclusively to some aspect of print culture. What tends to be overlooked in those studies however, is how the oral/aural component figures in the emergence of an emphatically critical public sphere, namely the interventionist aspect of an audience that can “talk back” and challenge the authority of the written or printed text.3 I shall show how Lessing’s and Kant’s conceptualization of a critical public works with two kinds of implied audiences that complement each other, which we have seen analyzed in Herder’s essay on the nature of the ancient and the modern public: an “ideal audience” modeled on the readership of a printed text, which means a primarily anonymous audience that is independent of the restrictions of time and place, and a “real audience” that is modeled on the crowd that would attend a public performance or the debate between scholars, whether the latter is carried out orally or, more commonly, by way of letters. Late into the eighteenth century the res publica literaria, the commonwealth of learning, referred to everybody who participated in the world of scholarship, science, and learning by way of publishing, by being in touch with each other, by exchanging letters and visiting each other. It comprised a mixed group of professions, including librarians, archivists, university professors, theologians, and historians holding public office as well as independent, private scholars, medical doctors, and naturalists. While most of these people lived in actual monarchies, in their imagined community they conceived of themselves as inhabitants of an international, cosmopolitan republic, held together by its lingua franca Latin.

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(221)

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the republic of letters begins to undergo major changes until it finally dissolves or is eventually replaced by the English-speaking “scientific community.” The main challenge to the traditional republic of letters comes from its gradual acceptance of the vernacular as the language of scholarly communication and publication. For the switch to the vernacular extended the potential membership to previously excluded parties such as women and the less educated. On the one hand, the abolition of Latin quickly called for other criteria of exclusion and of evaluating the status of a publication (such as its scholarly validity, its market value, popularity, or its originality). On the other hand, the switch from Latin to the vernacular also introduced other linguistic barriers, namely the ones of national languages, which made the scholarly community much less cosmopolitan. Such changes were not introduced all at once. They occurred at different speeds, in different locales, at different times, and in the context of different institutional settings. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, universities, whose mission consisted primarily in teaching, were more or less dependent on the ruling government, more or less subject to censorship of religious and governmental authorities.4 At the same time, especially in the eighteenth century, there were also numerous academies and learned societies, which had their own set of relationships to the princely courts and cities. They were generally independent from the university, with its hierarchy of faculties and its disciplinary structure. To some extent these academies were comparable to today’s “interdisciplinary” institutes. They were dedicated to research and learning, they varied in the degree of exclusivity of how they selected their members, offering places to gather and discuss, but generally had no salaried positions.5 Finally, there were also an increasing number and range of journal publications covering a wide spectrum of interests and foci, including moral weeklies, fashion and luxury publications, arts and theater reviews. What this overview of the changing and varied landscape of the institutions, venues, and associations of higher learning during the seventeenth and eighteenth century should make clear is participation in these institutions and their publications varied enormously not only in terms of the language of publication, the required knowledge and expertise, but of course also in terms of the specific editorial and submission policies, their particular specialization and mission. The point I want to make with this brief sketch of this aspect of the institutional and publication context is simple: by the second half of the

(222)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

eighteenth century there is a changing, relatively deregulated situation for becoming an author and presenting oneself as a scholar and member of the republic of learning, a situation that in some ways might be actually comparable to the changes happening today, from the introduction of the Internet and Internet publishing to the establishment of many interdisciplinary institutes and the changing editorial and submission policies of learned journals. In what follows I will show that the relatively deregulated, open boundary between the group that constitutes an audience or readership and the group that publishes positions, findings, opinions, and theories as polemicists, reviewers, scholars, or scientists constitutes the crucial background for Kant’s and Lessing’s model of a critical public that would further the cause of the Enlightenment. In the case of Kant, with which I begin my analysis, it is primarily the open boundary as it is modeled on the changing nature of the republic of letters, more specifically the format of the academic essay competition. In the case of Lessing, a much wider context and spectrum of publications comes into play. For Lessing inhabited and transformed various public spheres: the journalistic world of art and theater reviews in Berlin, the world of the theater, as director of one of the repertory stages (i.e. the Nationaltheater in Hamburg), and the world of the philologist, scholar, and editor/publisher as the Duke of Saxony’s chief librarian in Wolffenbüttel. Lessing, as we shall see, also engages with the model of learned disputes among scholars, but with far more polemical edge and vehemence than Kant. Whereas Kant’s model of a public sphere as expressed in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” could be also characterized as an essay on institution making, the two texts by Lessing on which I focus capture some of the essential aspects of his writings on religion and theology. In the eighteenth century it is the discourse on religion, the attacks and defenses of doctrinal points, and the debates over the authority of Scripture that constitute the most fertile, because most incendiary, ground for public debate, an aspect that most studies involved with histories, theories, and models of the public sphere have overlooked so far.6 WA S I S T AU F K L Ä R U N G ?

In 1784 the Berlin Academy awarded its prize to Kant’s essay in response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” In his answer Kant chooses not to address the problem of what he calls “our self-imposed tutelage”

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(223)

by proposing a pedagogical program. This refusal to seek recourse in a scenario of education is highly significant and surprising given the general pedagogical bent of the era. It also makes perfect sense, of course, for no teacher figure can wean us from our dependence on authority; in other words, no teacher figure can undertake the task of Enlightenment in this emphatic sense.7 Instead of pedagogy, Kant envisions a system in which all reliance on authority figures has already been replaced by the process of rational debate. However, this abolition of all authority figures is not the result of a drastic, violent revolution, but instead the effect of a suspension of all forms of censorship on the part of the state. The state’s cessation of censorship is to be achieved through a guarantee of institutional stability, which ensures that all change will be gradual. Public officials, professionals, and administrators will not criticize and change what they are called to do as long as they are speaking from within their office. This safeguard could also be described as a system of self-censorship: anybody who wants to participate in open, rational debate can do so provided he or she does not speak or write from his position as an official or professional, relying on his institutional authority. Kant calls this speaking as a “private” person: By “public use of one’s own reason,” however, I mean the use of it someone makes as a scholar in view of the entire public of the reading world. I call “private” the use someone is permitted to make of his reason in a certain civic post or office entrusted to him. Now, some undertakings that affect the interests of the polity necessitate a certain mechanism by virtue of which some members of the polity need only conduct themselves in a passive way in order for the government to direct them, by means of an artificial unanimity, toward public purposes or at least to prevent them from foiling these purposes. Here, then, it is indeed impermissible to reason; one must obey instead.8

Kant uses private to describe something entirely different from what is commonly understood by the term (the realm of intimacy, family or unofficial business). Kant’s use of it is still shaped by its Latin etymology: it means “deprived” (the way someone holding the military rank of “private soldier” is deprived of certain rights), describing someone to whom certain ways of expressing his opinion can be legitimately denied. For Kant, someone in a “private” speaking position is deprived of the right to speak his or her mind. Instead, he or she is obliged to speak as a professional

(224)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

bound by loyalty to a specific institutional mission: the pastor who speaks from the pulpit and the public hygiene commissioner who gives advice on immunization matters, for instance, speak as private persons. Kant’s significant turn away from the pedagogical paradigm of his time is marked by his seeking the solution to the problem of man’s self-imposed tutelage exclusively in the free debate of a public sphere. He conceives of the speaking role of the participant in this public sphere in traditional terms, describing him as a Gelehrter (scholar) who has recourse to rational faculties in order to address the totality of a reading audience, i.e., who does not merely seek to recruit this or that local audience: “By ‘public use of one’s own reason,’ however, I mean the use of it someone makes as a scholar in view of the entire public of the reading world.” Significantly, Kant does not specify any subject area or special qualifications of the Gelehrter, such as the knowledge of ancient languages and the ability to communicate in Latin; instead the term stands for somebody who has qualified himself by publishing. The “entire public of the reading world ” must clearly be understood as distinct from the audience of oral speech, a public that is limited in that it shares the same space and time with its speaker or what Herder calls the reales Publikum (real audience). Kant, by contrast, defines the participants of his public sphere as speakers who address what Herder calls an ideales Publikum, or what we might call a virtual audience, to the extent that all possible potential readers are included.9 The scholar (Gelehrter) in Kant’s text is quite simply an “author.” The only other qualification required of aspiring participants in the public sphere is designated by a curious double negative: they must not speak from the officially restricted position of a “private” person.10 Why, we might ask, does Kant choose not to characterize this speaker as someone who speaks as a human being in a fundamental sense, who adopts the positions of a critic of civilization, imagining a natural human being, or of an unprejudiced observer? Are these not the typical speaker positions one would adopt when undertaking the project of Enlightenment? The contrast with these well-established speaking positions illustrates what Kant gains by his somewhat awkward double negative of the nonrestricted, the nonprivate: he designates the position of those who are to participate in public debate with a deliberate blank that can be filled in a variety of ways while steering clear of the restrictions of a specific institution or office. This openness permits Kant to optimize the inclusivity of his public sphere. Its participants need no special qualification or permission; quite

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(225)

to the contrary, they are distinguished by not being explicitly authorized or charged in their speaking position. This qualification, which consists in not being qualified, is one feature the members of Kant’s Enlightenment public sphere share with the modern public intellectual. Of course, the abdication of one’s speaking position as a “private” person as the precondition to participation in public debate implies that the aspiring author must not only make up her or his own mind but also give up the authority that comes with investiture in the “private,” institutionally sanctioned office. For the audience of this kind of public discourse, this means that any position needs to be examined precisely because it does not come with a stamp of preapproval. Public debate in a Kantian sense thus means a free, open, uncensored exchange in a sphere isolated against the pressures of decision making and immediate action. Speakers/authors and the audience occupy positions that are, at least in principle, exchangeable; no one holds privileged authority; no one is entitled to teach others—or everyone is entitled to adopt the position of instructor; in other words, as long as the participants do not speak from an official position, the ensuing public debate will be of the widest common interest and appeal. To understand the significance of Kant’s essay we need to look more closely at its historical context. Kant’s prize-winning essay captures an important Enlightenment model of the public sphere rooted in the historical reality of a specific social segment: the highly educated state officials trained in law, the medical doctors, the Protestant ministers, the schoolteachers and university professors, who had to respect certain limitations when speaking within the institutional limits of their profession. Now it was this very same group whose members had sufficient learning to participate as scholars and authors in debates addressing such questions as: “What is Enlightenment?”—“Was man, left to his own devices, without divine assistance, capable of inventing language, or must we assume that human language was a divine gift?”—“What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by Natural Law?”—“Which influence ought the government exercise on science and the liberal arts? And which influence ought the sciences and the liberal arts exercise on the government?”—“Ought the government to be permitted to deceive the people for the latter’s own good?” These are only some of the most famous questions formulated and announced as essay competitions by eighteenth-century academies ranging from Dijon and Berne to Berlin. To a certain extent, especially if one looks at the kind of questions and

(226)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

the kind of people who participated in these academy competitions, they seem not much different from the traditional debates within the republic of letters. And yet in the ways they provide an interface between the egalitarian and exclusive debate among equals and an anonymous print audience of readers, such competitions demarcate a decisive moment in which the medium of print and the vernacular are mobilized to confront the traditional republic of letters with the kind of change that will ultimately mean its dissolution, a dissolution that occurs once the issue of quality control is entrusted to the literary market. The republic of letters is at this threshold, but it has not yet crossed it.11 The format of the essay competition is distinguished by the fact that it constrains an anonymous, potentially unlimited print audience into an equally anonymous but limited group of readers of the journals that announce the academy questions and the conditions for manuscript submissions. Such competitions serve not only to initiate a debate but also to situate it in real time and introduce pragmatic pressure by setting a deadline and announcing that the best manuscript will be published. This format automatically infuses the issue under debate with a certain aspect of relevance and urgency. Kant’s public sphere presupposes the medium of print to the extent that it is based on the model of free exchange between enlightened authors who circulate and debate their positions among each other (which they could also do via oral communication or private letters), but simultaneously aims at a more general reading public that is not overly restricted either spatially or temporally (in Herder’s words, an “ideal audience”). The historical case of the academy competitions shows us a fascinating way of combining the medium of print with an aspect of orality. Both the concrete question and the specific deadline of the competition interpellate a “live audience” of potential authors. The format thus calls attention to the threshold separating an anonymous readership from those who are known as authors of prizewinning contributions. It is relevant in this context that the manuscripts sent in for the essay competitions are anonymous to the jury until the winner has been determined. (Instead of the author’s name, the jury merely gets to see a motto that serves as an encoded identifier.) This means that authorship is, at least in principle, accessible to anybody who submits a manuscript. We might characterize Kant’s model of the public sphere as based on a particular historical transformation of the republic of letters in the age of printed journals: for a while, the expansion of print and the adoption of

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(227)

the vernacular among scholars and philosophers open this republic to a wider, more general audience.12 This historical phase of opening up what have been until then fairly exclusive debates among scholars to a wider audience is not restricted to the culture of academies and learned societies. It is a phenomenon that has also left traces in the history of philosophy as a discipline. In the wake of Christian Thomasius’s programmatic use of the vernacular, philosophy sought to reach out to a wider audience. The popular philosopher Christian Wolff even coined the German word Weltweisheit (worldly wisdom) as an alternative to “philosophy,” which would mark the attempt to free the discipline from its dogmatic enclosure in the university setting as well as the tutelage exercised over it by the religious authorities. Yet philosophy did not last long in this dual role of “worldly wisdom” and “popular philosophy.” Although Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1776) and the two subsequent Critiques did not abandon the ambition to be accessible to a general readership, they placed such high demands on the audience’s capacity for abstract thought that their “real” audience at least became again quite limited. Still, Kant also managed to appeal to an “ideal” audience, which continues to read this “classic” of philosophical thought. After a relatively short phase of exotericism, philosophy once again became a much more exclusive enterprise and a terminologically highly codified academic discipline. And even during the time when popular philosophy flourished, the term Weltweiser, or philosopher, did not carry the provocative or programmatic weight its French equivalent, philosophe, had in the same period.13 The concrete historical example of the essay competitions illustrates that the great advantage of the format—its openness to a larger public and the appeal to any reader to become a contributing, active author— comes at a price with regard to possible critical, interventionist aspects of these debates. The actual choice and phrasing of the questions was the prerogative of powerful academy members and sometimes had to be negotiated with government officials. Usually these questions were framed as issues of broad general interest pertaining to the domain of philosophical anthropology or the philosophy of language or culture. The questions posed by the academy of Göttingen can be considered an exception in that they sought fairly concrete advice in legal, economic, and governmental issues, obviously assuming that “someone out there,” quite possibly a perfectly unknown someone, a layperson, might have the

(228)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

best answer. In this sense the Göttingen academy betrayed an astonishing trust and openness toward the nonexpert, general public for advice in concerns that today would be instantly relegated to the authority of the expert, whose advice is hardly ever subjected to critique by nonexperts.14 However, even in the case of the Göttingen academy, the decisive element is the fact that the question is already predefined. An even more critical position would be achieved if the author had the opportunity to raise and frame the issue in the first place. Obviously, this is not the case with the academy competitions. Yet if we return to Kant’s very own essay in response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” we can trace a concern with intervening in current discursive practices—a reflection on constructions of the public sphere with the goal of changing them. Kant’s initial definition of the public sphere as a debate among nonprofessionals and nonofficials, unrestrained by any form of censorship and marked by its exemption from pragmatic pressure, describes it as a unique situation. Only one master in the world, whose name or title Kant deliberately does not mention, says: “reason as much and about what you wish; but obey!”15 Only toward the end of his essay, exactly where Kant addresses the modalities of the impact these debates have, does he mention the Prussian prince (Fürst) by name and title as the ruler who must equally submit to reason and is thus obliged to respect the directions established by this kind of free, rational debate. Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” provides a uniquely systematic account of a public sphere conceived along strictly egalitarian, nonauthoritarian principles. The interventionist power of the public critic—if we turn to the example provided by Kant’s own essay—resides in the way he radically reframes and readdresses an issue of common concern. He severs Enlightenment from pedagogy and makes it dependent exclusively on the possibility of uncensored reasoning. He does not create the institutional reforms he demands, but instead describes realities as though they had already been implemented and appeals to the Prussian prince to subscribe to their efficacy. In what follows I shall trace exactly this problematic of the public critic’s interventionist role in more detail. Lessing, like Kant, is committed to the project of Enlightenment as a persistent challenge to all authority and to the refusal to arrogate to himself the position of a teacher. He addresses the problem of the scholar’s or public speaker’s intervention by taking up the traditional value-coded opposition between “mere” verbal

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(229)

reasoning and significant action. The two texts by Lessing at the center of my analysis present religion as the domain in which action has been valued more highly than mere reflection and talk. Debates over religion in the eighteenth century offer a fertile medium for attempts to stir up and intervene in constructions of the public sphere as well as for reflection on the role and moral makeup, and hence authority, of the speaker or writer. G ELEH RT E S T R EI T I G K EI T EN / L E A RN E D B AT T L E S

“Victories determine the outcome of wars. But they are very ambiguous proofs of a just cause; or rather they are no such thing at all. Learned battles are just as much a kind of warfare as the little zuzus are a kind of dog. What difference does it make whether the battle is over a territory or an opinion; whether it is fought at the cost of blood or ink?”16 These are the opening lines of an unpublished 1750 manuscript in Lessing’s hand. Its title, “Über die Herrnhuter,” is somewhat misleading: the Pietist community founded in 1720 by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Herrnhut is addressed only toward the end of this short text, whereas the preceding pages engage, in far more general fashion, in a rather polemical argument about “the use and abuse” of man’s rational faculties. The analogy between little lapdogs and scholarly debates seems to reject the activity of reasoning as a frivolous, ultimately dispensable luxury. Ought one then to consider the engagement in scholarly debate a pure waste of time and turn to more practical, ethically relevant activities?17 As I shall show, this kind of conclusion is not what Lessing advocates. Indeed, throughout the text he debunks the very construction of such an alternative, as if it were possible to ignore the realm of verbal reasoning and focus exclusively on the realm of universally valid truths and the domain of ethically relevant action. Despite all the vanity, aggression, and frivolity they may involve, rational inquiry and learned debate cannot be left behind. However, we need to cultivate critical perspectives toward learned debates while engaging in them. Instead of providing instructions for the development and cultivation of a critical perspective, Lessing confronts his readers with a text that remains entirely opaque unless one enters into a critical dialogue with it. Already in this early manuscript of Lessing’s we find a characteristic strategy of this Enlightenment author. He stages the argument of his text in such a way that his readers are provoked into exercising their capacity for critical

(230)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

reasoning. And it is here that I situate the decisive difference between a pedagogical role and Lessing’s critical performance, which rejects precisely this pedagogical role. The statement, for instance, that “man was created for action and not for idle reasoning” (“Der Mensch war zum Tun und nicht zum Vernünfteln geboren”) has frequently been quoted as if it provided a summary of Lessing’s position on the tension between reason and action. A more careful analysis of how Lessing presents this statement, however, reveals that it does not permit this kind of appropriation. Instead, the apodictic tone suggesting a claim to universal truth offers Lessing an occasion to demonstrate the necessity of critical engagement. “Man was created for action and not for idle reasoning. But exactly because he was not created for the latter does he prefer it to the former. His evil nature always leads him to undertake what he ought not to do, and his daring, what he cannot do. He, man, should allow himself to be constrained?” (Lessing, Werke, 1:936). Beginning with a statement of what man is supposed to do and what his limits are, this short paragraph ends only two sentences later in free indirect speech, stating that same human being’s defiant challenge against any imposition of constraints. By the end of the paragraph, provided the reader engages each of the four sentences critically, the first sentence will have lost the appeal of a universally valid dictum and stand revealed as an authoritarian statement with a complex history. Already the second sentence—“But exactly because  .  .  .”—appears to introduce a false conclusion, an illogical non sequitur: how can a creature that has been assigned a firm purpose in life choose to disregard its own limitations within the overall teleological plan? The sheer fact of transgression calls the validity of the initial assumption in question and turns what first seemed to be a statement about purposes and limitations set by nature or the creator into a statement about man-made injunctions and prohibitions that merely employ the rhetoric of teleology to create a semblance of authority. The suspicion that this is indeed the thrust of Lessing’s critical performance is heightened by the lexical choice of the moralistic term Bosheit (evil nature). With this term Lessing switches the text’s tonal and discursive register. An apparently objective, value-free discourse of philosophical anthropology and psychology is suddenly revealed to be value coded, arising from a traditional interpretation of the Fall that negotiates the theological problem of defending a divine order of creation in its infinite goodness while acknowledging man’s fallen state. Without attribution and actual quotations, Lessing evokes this account of the origin of

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(231)

evil not only to discredit and criticize the arbitrary imposition of a moral code through a definition of man but also because it provides a provocative and productive definition of man. In this sense, it gives an account of the origin of freedom by conceiving man as capable of turning away from divine love and the well-ordered garden of paradise, which—were it not for its moralizing investment—would not be all that different from a philosophical anthropology that conceives man as the creature of selffashioning, capable of overcoming any limitation. There is no doubt that Lessing is a firm advocate for the active use of reason. What arouses Lessing’s criticism, even scorn, is not the activity of reasoning per se but rather the way this activity has been cultivated in the history of philosophy: its professionalization, the formation of rival schools, and its ever increasing specialization. Lessing concludes his overview of the history of philosophy with a desperate image of contemporary philosophy—its practitioners offer mathematical descriptions of the remotest astronomical problems but remain silent on moral issues: “Thus they fill the head, and the heart remains empty. They lead the mind into the most remote skies while the soul (Gemüt), with its passions, is ranked even beneath the beasts” (Lessing, Werke, 1:938). Contemporary philosophy, according to Lessing, has become an entirely self-absorbed activity of hyperspecialists; it is cognitively inaccessible to the layperson and seems not to care about its impact, whence its inability to recruit a general audience. For an entire paragraph, Lessing asks his reader to imagine a radically different kind of philosopher, one who would not be subject to disciplinary constraints and the interest of schools but instead focus all his efforts on teaching the pursuit of happiness through virtue: He would teach us to forgo wealth, even to flee it. He would teach us to be unrelenting toward ourselves and lenient toward others. He would teach us to respect merit even when it is overpowered by misfortune and ignominy and to defend it against brutish power. He would teach us to perceive the vivid voice of nature in our hearts. He would teach us not only to believe in God but—what is most important—to love him. He would teach us, finally, to face death without fear, and to prove by a dignified departure from this stage that we are convinced that wisdom would not ask us to put down our mask if we had not played our role to the end. (Lessing, Werke, 1:942)

(232)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

Lessing continues with the thought-experiment and asks his reader to imagine that this kind of philosopher “would have none of that knowledge that is the less useful the more it boasts itself. He would be an expert neither in history nor in the languages. . . . Nonetheless would this man lay claim to the title of a philosopher (Weltweiser). Nonetheless would he have the courage to contest the same claim asserted by people on whom public offices have conferred the right to this dazzling sobriquet” (Lessing, Werke, 1:943). We might initially be tempted to argue that Lessing does, after all, appear to introduce a teacher figure as an example for the new, publicly effective philosopher. Yet this kind of teacher does not teach any specific content or doctrine but rather techniques for living, techniques of the self, that strengthen the autonomy of the individual. Moreover, this kind of teacher, who not incidentally seems to be modeled in many ways on a secular understanding of Jesus, figures within the argument primarily to mark a critical counter-model to the deformations of disciplinary philosophy. In this respect it is also important to note how Lessing distinguishes this man of worldly wisdom (Weltweiser) from both the traditional scholar and the speaker who is authorized by his specific institutional function or office. Lessing concludes his thought-experiment with bitter sarcasm: “Thank God that such a bold friend of the laity has not yet arisen and probably will not arise in our times: for the gentlemen who have so much to do with the reality of things will see to it that this fantasy of mine will never be realized” (Lessing, Werke, 1:944). According to Lessing, Enlightenment is the business of laypeople in a double sense. The new kind of philosopher must not be a member of the clergy, certainly not a theologian, for as such he would not be free in his rational inquiry but bound by the interests of the church and religion. It is for this reason that Lessing insists that this new kind of philosopher would claim the title of Weltweiser, which emphasizes the secular aspect of the pursuit of wisdom. But he would also be a layman in the sense of somebody who is not an expert in any particular area. This opens philosophical discourse to a general audience, threatening the status of specialists. Throughout his career, Lessing pursued a critical practice that is already clearly recognizable in the argumentative style of this early piece. Instead of telling people what to do or what to think, Lessing undertook to foster the practice of critical habits. And he did so not just by virtue of the manner in which he presented a certain argument, as we have seen in the

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(233)

early manuscript “Über die Herrnhuter,” but also, later on in his career, by structurally intervening in a public discourse, by radically reframing how certain issues can be addressed, and, even more drastically, by influencing who can address which kinds of topics. Indeed, Lessing’s active intervention in the nature of the public sphere through publication strategies, carefully staged speaking positions, and rhetorical and lexical registers, as well as the projection and “staging” of the speaking situation, shaped his entire career as an independent writer, playwright, scholar, critic, editor, librarian, and commentator. Even if not all the texts that Lessing published while serving as chief librarian in Wolfenbüttel were concerned with religion, these writings certainly elicited the most lively and even vehement reactions from his audience. In the world of eighteenth-century print culture, the topic of religion was quite hot.18 Lessing’s publication of a series of carefully selected passages as “Fragments of an Unnamed Author” (“Fragmente eines Ungenannten”) caused a wide debate. Participants in this debate included theologians, pastors, and laymen, and its format was highly varied, involving the publication of scholarly counterarguments and defenses, anonymous pamphlets distributed in the streets, and pastoral admonitions from the pulpit.19 Lessing had obtained the provocative, unpublished manuscript from his friend Elise Reimarus, the daughter of its author, the well-known and respected Hamburg Orientalist, mathematician, and natural philosopher Samuel Reimarus. He published it in parts under the misleading label of “findings” from the ducal library. Eventually, when the debate over these publications had reached an unprecedented degree of aggression, the manuscript was confiscated. Lessing also lost his exemption from censorship. For fear that his own involvement in the battle over these fragments would likewise be subject to publishing restrictions, Lessing attempted to move the place of publication of another attack on his main opponent, the Hamburg pastor Melchior Goeze, beyond the Duke’s reach to Berlin. This move challenged the Duke of Saxony to assert his authority and “tolerate” Lessing’s publishing activities under the condition that they would take place in his own Saxon territory, i.e., in Wolfenbüttel. To the Duke, this became a matter of asserting his authority and saving face visà-vis the imperial authorities who had their own censorship regulations.20 Embittered over having been muzzled and over the nastiness in the fight with Goeze, who had somehow managed to usurp his attention, Lessing

(234)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

was thwarted in his hopes for a broader debate that would also involve the representatives of “progressive” rationalist theology. In this spirit he wrote to his brother Karl that he was forced to return to his other pulpit, the theater.21 When he did so, he wrote what was to become his most famous play, the drama about religious tolerance Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise). Lessing never came out stating his religious beliefs. Generations of Lessing scholars and admirers have nonetheless attempted to establish the nature of Lessing’s relationship to Christianity, or whether he might even have become a covert Spinozist late in life.22 Lessing’s discretion about his religious beliefs, however, makes perfect sense. Public confessions of one’s beliefs do not help promote religious tolerance. Far better is a critical, historicizing attitude to all forms of religion—especially those that base their doctrinal claims on the authority of divine inspiration. It is this last approach that can be found throughout Lessing’s writings on religion. Lessing’s position, of course, was hardly unique in the eighteenth century. Interestingly, it even gained a certain amount of acceptance within the Enlightenment-friendly wing of the Lutheran church. The so-called Neologians found ways to downplay the dogmatic claims that the writers of the gospels were divinely inspired or that Jesus was literally the Son of God.23 In other words, the positions Lessing brought into play through the debate over the fragments were neither unheard-of nor all that radical even within the Lutheran Church. They were, however—and this seems to be the far more important aspect of Lessing’s intervention—positions reserved for specialists within the church who were engaged in exclusive and learned debates.24 Lessing’s affront, then, consisted not in making statements that were against the core doctrine propounded by the orthodox wing of the Lutheran Church, but rather in his dragging out a debate that ought to be internal to the institution of ecclesiastical authority into a common public sphere where readers were invited to exercise their own power of reasoning and make up their own minds. It was in order to lay claim to this space for debate and critical thought that Lessing “staged” the debate over the fragments.25 On the one hand, Lessing’s goal was the secularization of the terrain of the debate: to ensure that this discussion would not be conducted under the institutional authority of the church. On the other hand, Lessing’s publication of the fragments gives a certain shape and focus to this discourse about religion by questioning the authority of the written word in

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(235)

a more principled and fundamental fashion that went beyond Reimarus’s specific scholarly arguments. These had merely amounted to a demonstration that there was no way of proving the divine inspiration of the evangelists, the resurrection, or the status of Jesus as the Son of God— arguments that would eventually initiate historical research into the life of Jesus.26 For Lessing, by contrast, their publication not only offered a perfect opportunity to launch a public debate beyond the controls of the church; they also provided him with an occasion to challenge Luther’s principle of sola scriptura both by casting doubt on the absolute authority of the New Testament and by calling attention to an ethical sphere, such as the one inhabited by Jesus and his disciples, that existed independently of its written codifications. In this sense Lessing’s publishing activities permitted him to “stage” a fundamental discussion over the mediation and tradition of ethics and the media of religion that found its culmination in his publication of the “Testament of John.” I N T H E B E G I N N I N G WA S T H E WO R D

In the history of Christian theology, the beginning of the Gospel of John has come to be established as a key biblical passage containing a paradigm of how to read the Bible and understand the nature of Jesus. Two issues are at stake: the status of the “word” and the status of the “flesh.” Turning away from Manichaeism, Augustine adopts a belief he later comes to reject as a form of Platonism. This false conversion leads him to read the Bible merely allegorically, i.e., in the spirit, focusing exclusively on “In the beginning was the Word” and refusing to read to the end of the passage: “and the Word became flesh.” This criticism prepares what, by contrast, will constitute Augustine’s true conversion, which will consist in picking up the Bible and applying the content of what he reads directly to his own life: for it is only thus that belief is truly redemptive, in this literal application of the historical truth of the Bible made possible by the miracle of the incarnation.27 In Protestant Christianity the beginning of the Gospel of John also serves as synecdoche for the salvific authority and status of Scripture, as it involves a specific model of reading. Beyond theology, in the domain of secular literature, we can also find an acute awareness of the key role played by this passage. Most prominently, there is Goethe’s Faust. The frustrated scholar escapes from the prison of his study with the aid of the devil

(236)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

Mephistopheles, who, it should be noted, first appears to Faust at the very moment when the latter attempts a “liberal” translation of the beginning of the Gospel of John through a series of substitutions for logos: word— thought—force—deed. In other words, Goethe stages the appearance of the devil as the result of an incantation that takes the shape of a mistranslation of John.28 Lessing’s “Testament of John” must be seen in the same context, as another secularizing appropriation of the Gospel of John. The short text, which Lessing published under the title “Das Testament Johannis,” appeared in the following sequence of publications: Lessing had initially published a fragment by Reimarus that treated the writers of the gospels as mere human historians. This publication was countered by the theologian Schumann, who mobilized the traditional theological “proof of the spirit and the force” in order to demonstrate the divine inspiration of the gospels. Lessing responded to Schumann with two texts. He first addressed Schumann’s objections directly, arguing that this supposed “proof ” rested on a fundamental category mistake, a confusion of accidental truths of history with necessary truths of reason. Then he announced the “Testament Johannis,” a text that, according to Lessing, would be able to reunite all those who had been divided over the interpretation of the Gospel of John. Still, the short text must be read not only as a peace offering but also, as I will show in the following analysis, as a provocation and catalyst that would serve to heighten disagreements and let latent differences rise to the surface.29 Lessing’s “Das Testament Johannis” consists of a dialogue between characters Lessing calls simply He and I. Asked about the mysterious “Testament of John,” I explains to Him that the reference is to John’s last will, as reported by St. Jerome in an apocryphal anecdote. The frail old apostle issued to his parishioners the simple injunction: “Children, love one another!” The anecdote appears in Latin at the end of Lessing’s text and is retold within the dialogue. He is bothered by the fact that this story is not part of the official canon. His objection, however, is anticipated and countered by another Latin quote from St. Jerome, printed directly under the title (“Das Testament Johannis”), which refers to John as the favorite disciple of Jesus, the one closest to the source. On the one hand, this reference can be considered an attack on the exclusivity of the canon, an argument for other, possibly even more authentic traditions and means of transmission. On the other hand, Lessing demonstrates by way of the untranslated Latin texts the historicity and possible opaqueness to which

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(237)

any form of linguistic transmission and tradition is subject. This is why we cannot just read Lessing’s text as an argument for altruism and Christian love as the core of Christianity on which we could easily agree.30 Of course, that does not render the text a pamphlet against Christian love. However, as St. Jerome’s anecdote already suggests, even the simplest, most appealing injunction must not be merely repeated verbatim. For, as we know from Jerome, when St. John did not pass on, after first pronouncing this injunction, but repeated the same words each time he spoke to his parishioners, they became bored and impatient and asked if he had nothing else to say; the apostle answered in the negative. The question, then, that Lessing’s “Testament of John” asks is the following: What is the ultimate efficacy of the most beautiful, simple, and convincing pronouncement? Even the fact that the Latin of the quotations is now a dead language confronts Lessing’s reader with the fact that any linguistic utterance will eventually require interpretation, translation, and adjustment to new specific contexts. And this would seem to apply to even the most basic ethical precepts. Lessing scholars who see in this text yet another proof that Lessing advocated the importance of ethical action in lieu of doctrinal sophistication miss half the point: even if this were the case, even if we could find a common ethical principle capable of universal comprehension and assent, the problem would remain: how is this principle to be translated into action? Just repeating it verbatim will not do the trick; if anything, repetition will weaken its power of persuasion. There is no question that I argues that Christian love is the core of Christianity against His objection that it is worth little without acceptance of Christian doctrine, with its salvific benefits. What is interesting, however, and what seems to be the core of Lessing’s dialogue, is that immediately after telling Him in his own words the apocryphal story about the dying apostle, I introduces the topic of mediation in its relationship to Christianity: Augustine reports that a certain Platonist said that the beginning of the Gospel of John, In the beginning was the word etc., deserved to be put up in golden letters in all churches in the most visible place, so that it would immediately strike anyone’s eyes. He: Indeed! The Platonist was quite right.—O, these Platonists! And Plato himself could certainly not have written anything more sublime than this beginning of the Gospel of John.

(238)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

I: That may well be.—Still, as someone who doesn’t care much for the sublime scribbling of a philosopher, I think that what would be far more deserving to be put up in golden letters in all our churches in the most visible place, so that it would immediately strike anyone’s eyes, is—the Testament of John.31

In this passage I tests Him with regard to his commitment to the core of Christian doctrine by offering Him the opportunity to reenact Augustine’s pseudo-conversion, the fixation on the word in conjunction with a reading in the spirit. He walks into the trap and reveals that what He takes to be the essence of Christian doctrine is actually the mere unfounded belief in the “scribbling” of what He takes to be an authority. In fact, His belief even misses the core Christian doctrine of the incarnation. That His commitment to dogmatic partisanship actually undermines His ability to practice Christian love is proven when he counters his interlocutor’s quote from Mark (9:40), “For he who is not against us is for us,” with one from Matthew (12:30): “He who is not with Me is against Me.” What He takes to be the essence of religion is revealed to be a sectarian, divisive form of self-aggrandizement based on the reification of the written word. According to Lessing, even if we accept the dying apostle’s last will and words as the essence of Christian ethics, this essence cannot be delivered in its pure naked form or by spreading the message everywhere in “golden letters.” It needs to be packaged and performed according to specific local contexts: there is the anecdote, which already calls attention to the problem of mere literal repetition; there is the retelling of this anecdote within the dialogue; but then there is also the entirety of the text including the Latin quotes, which Lessing chose to entitle “The Testament of John.” If we return with this in mind to Lessing’s hope, expressed in the conclusion to his letter to Schumann, that all those who have been divided over the Gospel of John will be reunited by the “Testament of John,” we cannot but realize that such reconciliation would not be achieved by subscription to a single-sentence precept such as “Children, love one another!” It implies, instead, recognition of the need for the ongoing work of mediation. Nothing ought to be set in stone or golden letters; nor should any text be endowed with particular truth value just because it has been attributed to any specific authority. At this point, I can sum up the sort of position Lessing adopts in debates over religion. He does not preach a simple precept, nor does he

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(239)

advocate any particular position; instead, he takes on and orchestrates multiple roles and functions. There is, first, the role of the editor who makes an important manuscript available to a wider public. It was in this role that Lessing obtained exemption from the Duke’s censorship so that he could publish “findings” from his library. As an editor, he offers a selection of texts as documents worthy of examination and discussion. Second, as an extension of this role, he also published editorial comments on some of these texts, comments that show him in the position of the learned scholar who uses his expertise to make the documents more accessible to a general public and encourage their critical, active examination. It is in that role that he projects and models a critical distance toward the printed documents. Third, besides being an editor and commentator, Lessing also appears as an active participant in an ongoing debate. Here he is not the neutral objective commentator and scholar of printed texts, but instead invokes the imaginary orality of a combative debate viewed by a live audience. It is in this role that Lessing expends quite a bit of energy dramatizing and modeling personal affective reactions to both the content and the form of this debate, possibly in the attempt to recruit the sympathy of his audience and invest his critical position with individualized indices of authenticity. The first-person singular of these polemical pieces is very similar to the I of the dialogue in “The Testament of John”: he stands outside the official, institutionally sanctioned space; he distrusts authority; instead, he stakes the quest for truth on the scenario of a personalized exchange, speaking strictly as an individual, not as a representative of any institution. He puts his faith in reciprocal face-to-face dialogue as an (imaginary) oral scenario that is watched and judged by an audience that takes an interest in this display of outspoken audacity.32 For this audience, he uses his considerable erudition to trick his interlocutor into betraying his mistaken, authoritarian belief and prejudice. He does not aim to “teach” his immediate interlocutor but rather to present a drama to the external audience. Lessing never deploys the first-person singular to promote a personal, private agenda of self-aggrandizement or of betraying intimate details of a confessional nature; still, with his audacity, polemic, and display of affects, he puts himself on the line in a way that exposes him to potential injury. It almost seems as though he provokes such injury by forcing the polemic with Goeze exactly to the point where the Duke would attempt to shut him down by withdrawing his exemption from censorship.

(240)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

Lessing intervened in a public debate over religion by changing the conditions of what could be debated by whom and, in particular, by making arguments critical of scriptural authority available to a broader lay audience. He assumed, moreover, an expansive public persona beyond the restricted role of the traditional scholar through the vehemence and audacity of the personalized exchanges he engaged in, prompting further reactions and inciting partisanship that found its expression in scholarly publications, admonitions from the pulpit, and anonymous pamphlets. Finally, Lessing constructed for himself the position of an independent authority. He did not invoke the institutional backup of an academic discipline, nor did he assume the asymmetrical role of a public teacher with an instructional or pedagogical mission. Instead, he designed a speaking/ writing position that distinguished itself in its reckless audacity as a selfless passion for the ongoing process of critical inquiry. Both Kant and Lessing were engaged in the transformation of the traditional republic of letters. I have traced their endeavors to recruit a broad, general public of independent-minded, critical nonspecialists. In the discussion of the uses and abuses of verbal reasoning and learned debates, Lessing develops strategies of sowing distrust of established authorities and specialists and challenging his readers to think for themselves. As Kant argues, only if verbal reasoning is free from the interference of censorship can it engender a decisive critique and subsequent reform of existing institutions. Structurally, the construction of a general lay audience—an audience of nonspecialists as well as an audience beyond the restrictions of the official church—is crucial for the speaking position of the members of a critical Enlightenment public. Hence Kant’s stipulation that anybody who wants to participate in that public can do so as long as she or he does so without official sanction. Debates about and constructions of a critical public sphere tend to both couple and decouple the medium of print with oral scenarios that invoke a live audience and introduce real time and the pressure of decision making in action. On the one hand, the medium of print is appreciated because it unburdens communication of this pressure and discourages the articulation of personal, subjective concerns, offering instead a means to generate a broad audience for issues of universal concern. In this sense, print projects an “ideal audience” as a critical instance and norm in contrast to partial interests and camp mentalities. On the other hand, print and writing more generally are reproached for fostering dogmatic

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

(241)

thought, orthodoxy, and intolerance along with a blind belief in authority. The introduction of oral components into a debate can accelerate and politicize a discussion and make it appear livelier and more relevant to its specific context. With regard to the specific author function of participants in the critical public sphere, we can conclude that there is, first, a strict separation between the biographical figure of a specific speaker/writer and his official position within a particular institution. Lessing also severs the text from the biographical authorial persona when he publishes parts of Samuel Reimarus’s manuscript as “Fragmente eines Ungenannten” or plays the role of editor or commentator. Only if the speaker/writer in the public sphere does not speak from an officially sanctioned position can he or she assume a truly critical position, and only then can this position be radically questioned and criticized by the audience. But from where, one might ask here, should such a speaker/writer, who is precisely not officially authorized, acquire the authority to speak up? In the particular case of Lessing, we were able to observe a striking procedure of coupling the public speaker to a biographical persona. The latter has none of the features of a confessional subjectivity then on prominent display in the figure of Rousseau: to the contrary, he enjoys a good polemic, is feisty, even combative. By staging personal, affective reactions such as indignation, pride, vulnerability, elation, compassion, or disappointment, Lessing not only personalizes and individualizes specific arguments; the projection of a speaker’s specific personality renders argumentative strategies tangible and facilitates affective involvement on the part of the reading audience. Whether he constructs speaking roles such as those of I and He or writes an erudite letter to a theologian in the quasi-autobiographical authorial persona of “Lessing” himself, Lessing interpellates his audience as a sort of theatrical audience and does not hesitate to cater to its emotions. On the other hand, and this marks the fundamental difference between such strategies and a theatrical model, Lessing does put himself on the line; the debates he engages in harbor a risk of real consequences. In Lessing’s staging of the debate over the Reimarus fragments, we can see him challenging the censorship authorities and hazarding the security of his position with such daring that he gains the authority of an authentic maverick. This public display of a passion for the pursuit of truth, or of an intense interest in a cause of common concern, this kind of partisanship,

(242)

MOBILIZING A CRITICAL PUBLIC

is what distinguishes the Enlightenment public critic from merely outspoken, popular, or even notorious public figures. Kant’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” primarily emphasizes unmarked, unauthorized, egalitarian access to the public sphere. Already for this essay Kant chooses not to specify this speaking position as a form of disinterested, neutral, or objective speaking or writing position. Twelve years later, after the French Revolution, he describes a form of public utterance marked by the display of a passionate interest that is yet utterly unselfish and in this respect truly free. The public display of this kind of passion, a partisanship that risks the loss of a position and the intervention of the censorship authority, serves in Kant’s Contest of Faculties as the only manifest example of the actual realization of freedom in history.33 Again, the authority of the speaker/writer in the critical debate of the Enlightenment, the legitimacy of the participant of the public, is primarily derived from an oral or live component. Rather than some apolitical and abstract rational, logical, or linguistic standard, this authority is exclusively tied to a speaker’s or writer’s willingness to take risks and put himself or herself on the line. We have seen this element enacted in Lessing’s famous struggle over his publication of the “Fragments of an Unnamed Author,” but we can also see this element theorized by a postrevolutionary Kant who had run into trouble with Frederick III’s censorship with his Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason and went on to explain to his king in the preface to the Contest of Faculties the institutional reforms necessary to prevent the faculty of theology from hampering the truth-finding process within the faculty of philosophy.

CO N C LU S I O N

I

n these three chapters about the various concepts of an Enlightenment public sphere, we have seen models for the construction of an imagined community and of a critical public. The models for an imagined community were based on different concepts of an audience that would be summoned by a particular speech situation, be it a live or virtual one, that would transcend hierarchical boundaries in its focus on a common good, ranging from Abbt’s advocacy of dying for the sake of the fatherland to Herder’s notion of a distinctly modern public that would be constituted by its entitlement to the use of public institutions of welfare, on the one hand, and, especially in Herder’s much later revised and expanded version of his essay, a public that would constitute itself in the virtual sphere of imaginative literature as the public of humankind. Beyond the realm of imaginative literature and art, which Herder situates in a distinct breach with the realm of religion, Lessing’s and Kant’s suggestions for encouraging a critical public involve strategies of decoupling a particular text or message from any preestablished source of authority. Authors participating in the discourse of Enlightenment are to publish as individuals, not as spokesmen of an institution or corporation, which means that their readers will have to exercise their critical judgment. Apart from Thomas Abbt’s appeal to patriotic zeal, especially as it is awakened in times of war, the models of an Enlightenment public appear to be based on an anticorporate approach. Audiences and publics are made up out of atomistic individuals. The only domain to foster a stronger communal bond is to be found in the domain of art; and there the communal

(244)

CONCLUSION

bond is not at all the one among connoisseurs, though it might be the one among live audience members of a specific performance. Whereas Herder makes this point when he discusses the modern public of literature, Kant presents this argument in his Critique of Judgment when he discusses taste as a kind of sensus communis. Glancing back at the role of religion, it seems noteworthy that only Thomas Abbt is willing to make unabashed use of the power of religious authorities when it comes to eliciting a patriotic fervor, asking the population to serve its fatherland and enlist in a war fought by its prince. Abbt’s proposal provoked the criticism of Friedrich Carl von Moser, who points out that the construction of any kind of imagined community along the lines of church membership, which would be the case if these calls for patriotic engagement were issued from the pulpit, would produce sectarian warfare, the kind of divisive civil war that Germany had already seen during the Thirty Years’ War. More subtly, and on an entirely different level, we can find Lessing’s criticism of the invocation of a united public, the imagined community of patriots during the Seven Years’ War, in his specific engagement with his fellow poets and writers in the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. Lessing undermines the production of one homogenized imagined community by way of laying open disagreements and differences among “friends,” asking readers of this publication to read carefully and critically what is being published and form their own judgment, to put what they read into its specific context and evaluate its claims. Lessing undermines the unity of a public by giving primacy to the individual, critical reader who does not look up to the authority of the printed text but reads it from a position of both sympathy and critical distance, affirming the necessity of disagreements even between friends. The public in Lessing’s case consists exclusively of an open, anonymous membership of participant readers and writers of a set of texts that are circulating among them. The model of the circulation, as well as of the editing and the manipulation of texts, replaces the one of the interpellation of a specific audience by an authority. In the case of Herder, especially in the revised and much expanded essay on the nature of the modern public in contrast to the public of antiquity, we could also trace a careful reflection on the use and abuse of the construction of an imagined community that would result in a unified public: According to Herder’s argument, the oral/aural situation in which a live audience is convened has the greatest potential for producing

CONCLUSION

(245)

a manipulated crowd or for encouraging “group think.” By contrast, the reader of a printed text is free to make up her or his own mind, to lay aside the document and not pay any further attention to it. And, nevertheless, according to Herder, live audiences are crucial, especially in terms of producing a critical public. For, according to Herder, it is only in live performances that an audience can become aware of itself as a critical mass with its own mind and hence become a critical force. He depicts this situation as the first of the two stages of secularization, of substituting art for the power of religion. In the first stage Herder invokes a scenario of a live performance where the audience becomes aware of itself as an audience rather than as participants, where attention to the formal aspects of the performance undercuts any pragmatic pressure of demanding an unreflected participation rather than an appreciative and critical judgment of different artistic media. Through this shift of attention an audience for theater and art has been created. Once this audience for art exists, any kind of literary product, by way of its invocation of a fictional speech situation, will enable the specific reader, listener, or spectator to extrapolate to the public of literature, which extends to any kind of virtual audience member as part of the human species and is capable of imagining, constructing worlds, and inhabiting spheres of possibility. With Kant and Lessing, we can witness a different aspect of a critical public. For Kant, as for Herder, the critical public also requires a sphere cut off from any pressure to act and decide. In contrast to Herder, who seeks this sphere in the domain of art, however, Kant emphasizes not the collective and spectacular medial aspects, but rather those involving the institutional circumstances that see the Enlightenment critical public as a product of the transformations of the republic of letters, namely that there must be no censorship, no institutionally sanctioned authority, and that everything must be available for open debate. Kant points out that even the religious authorities need to give up their claims when it comes to the debate of their fundamentals as opposed to the exercise of everyday practice. Lessing, like Kant, places the emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to think critically. Moreover, and more radically, with regard to religion, we could see Lessing engaged in an attempt to seize the domain of religious debate and theological speculation away from the control of the specialists and theologians and thrust it into the domain of lay speculation. On the side of Lessing, there seems to be little fear of instigating religious factionalism of the kind Friedrich Carl von Moser

(246)

CONCLUSION

warned against. Yet it also needs to be noted that Lessing both avoids any kind of confessional discourse or profession of faith and never allows for the definitive settlement of any kind of doctrinal issue in his theological writings. Instead, he emphasizes and dramatizes the need for ongoing mediation, debate, and critical thinking.

N O T ES

I N T RO D U C T I O N 1. For the French eighteenth century this work has been greatly influenced by the studies of Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier, Carla Hesse, Keith Baker, Dena Goodman, and Antoine Lilti. For the German eighteenth century, work building on Robert Engelsing, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Jürgen Habermas’s thesis about the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, and also Koselleck’s Criticism and Crisis, and scholarship in response to Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks has been addressing these changes in the realm of publication, literacy, and the print media, on the one hand, and the status of the artist and art, on the other. 2. See Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Reading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 3. See The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially contributions by Peter Hanns Reill (“The Legacy of the ‘Scientific Revolution’: Science and the Enlightenment,” 21–43), James McClellan III (“Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science,” 87–106), and Steven Shapin (“The Image of the Man of Science,” 159–83), as well as Roy Porter’s introduction to this volume. 4. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 5. See Peter Hanns Reill, “Vitalizing Nature and Naturalizing the Humanities,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 361–82, esp. 370. 6. See “Kant and the Critique of Teleological Judgment,” the concluding chapter to James L. Larson’s Interpreting Nature. The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 170–82. 7. Only the members of a younger generation, exemplified by Peter Simon Pallas, Caspar Friedrich Wolff, and Josef Koelthe, were no longer impeded by such metaphysical assumptions as the conviction that nature was a divine creation in their concrete experiments and

( 248 )

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

observations, although they might have very well believed in them, as was the case with Koelthe. This change, according to Larson, then needs to be attributed to the more coherent formalization of observational techniques and methods rather than to the underlying epistemological assumptions. Kant’s contribution then consisted in his insistence that all these teleological models of the order of nature had to be recognized in their value as heuristic devices but not to be confounded with signposts of a divine order. Larson, however, does not address the other half of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the part that deals with aesthetics, with the judgment of taste and genius. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Memory, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. See Roger Chartier’s chapter, “Figures of the Author” in his The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25–69; see also his “Foucault’s Chiasmus: Authorship Between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13–31. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Keith Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 181–211. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 273–74. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counter Publics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90. Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997). Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Talal Asad, “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” in Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21–66. See also Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–80. Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 52–77.

PA RT I 1. See Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Reading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), chapter 1, “The Interests in Disinterestedness” and chapter 2, “The Genius and the Copyright,” 11–54. 2. See ibid., 53–55.

1 . T H E S U R P R I S I N G O R I G I N S O F EN LI G H T EN M EN T A ES T H E T I C S

( 249 )

1. T H E S U R P R I S I N G O R I G I N S O F EN LI G H T EN M EN T A ES T H E T I C S 1. For a more recent argument along those lines see Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–13. 2. In this context it is important to note that Niklaus Largier explains the development of the philosophical subdiscipline of aesthetics, especially Baumgarten’s discourse on the role of sensory perception and Herder’s privileging of the sense of touch, with respect to the reception of late medieval mysticism, particularly in view of the late medieval concept of the “ground of the soul.” These late medieval mystical texts were widely disseminated in the popular devotional literature of Protestant piety. See Largier’s “The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch and Aesthetic Experience,” Modern Language Notes 125 (2010): 536–51. 3. Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 100–26, here 120. 4. For the history of Pietism see Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1990); see also Martin Brecht, ed., Geschichte des Pietismus. Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1993), and Martin Brecht and Klaus Deppermann, eds., Geschichte des Pietismus. Der Pietismus im achzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995). 5. See Johann Anselm Steiger, “Die Meditationes Sacrae im Kontext der Meditationsliteratur des Mittelalters und des 16. Jahrhunderts im Überblick,” in Johann Gerhard, Meditationes Sacrae. Lateinisch-deutsch. Kritisch herausgegeben, kommentiert und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Johann Anselm Steiger, Teilband 2 (Stuttgart: frommannholzboog, 2000), 657–765. 6. Apart from Johann Arndt there were others who made use of emblems in order to instruct the believer how to apply Christian teaching to his or her own life. Among these are the Nuremberg professor, scholar, and pastor Johann Michael Dilherr (1604–1669), the influential Baroque poet Johann Georg Harsdörffer, and the Nuremberg scholar and pedagogue Erasmus Francisci (1627–1694), as well as Christian Scrivener (1629–1693). See Dietmar Peil, Zur ‘angewandten Emblematik’ in Protestantischen Erbauungsbüchern. Dilherr—Arndt—Francisci—Scriver (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1978). 7. Arndt’s Vom wahrem Christentum went through numerous editions and translations from its first publication in 1605. It was first augmented in 1609, to be published as Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Four Books on True Christianity), then five and finally six books. Almost fifty years after its author’s death, three Swedish government officials, a certain Mr. Dunt, Mr. Meyer, and Dr. Fischer, added visual emblems, a picture, a motto, a poem, and a reference to a biblical passage to their edition of True Christianity, which they published in Riga in 1678. Many later editions retained these additional illustrations; though the visual style of the pictures slightly varied, the verses, mottoes, and thematic choices

( 25 0 )

8.

9.

10. 11.

1 . T H E S U R P R I S I N G O R I G I N S O F EN LI G H T EN M EN T A ES T H E T I C S

remained stable. There was one major addition to these illustrations: as of 1696 they also included prose explanations of the pictures. Martin Greschat points out that the Baroque period’s love of emblems, which is often informed by a teleological gaze onto the order of creation, is neither necessarily Christian nor part of orthodox Lutheranism. Although Luther’s commentary on Genesis legitimates an emblematic approach to the world to the extent that Luther interprets the creatures of this world as traces pointing to God and the human being as a microcosm of divine creation, Greschat shows that Arndt’s use of images does not fit into this general teleological approach to nature. See Martin Greschat, “Die Funktion des Emblems in Johann Arnds ‘Wahrem Christentum’,” Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 20 (1968): 154f. Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom Wahren Christenthum (Philadelphia: J. Köhler, 1854), 22. Unless otherwise indicated, I shall be using and citing from this copy of Arndt, owned by Columbia University. All translations from Arndt are my own. Ibid., 25. See Joseph Addison, “Pleasures of the Imagination,” no. 411, Spectator, June 21, 1712. See also Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” part 2, section 1: “The pleasures of the mind being allowed, therefore, superior to those of the body, it follows that whatever can create in any intelligent being a constant flowing series or train of mental enjoyments or pleasures of the mind is more considerable to his happiness than that which can create to him a like constant course or train of sensusal enjoyments or pleasures of the body.” A. A. C. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201. See also Herder’s definition of Besonnenheit (thoughtfulness): If animal sensuousness and the animal’s limitation to a single point were omitted, another creature would have come into being, one whose positive powers expressed themselves in a vaster realm, after a finer organization, with greater light; one which in separation and in freedom does not achieve only knowledge, follow its will, and pursue its work, but which also knows that it achieves its work. This creature is man, and this entire disposition of his nature—in order to escape the confusion resulting from the attribution of independent powers of reason and the like—we shall call reflection. It follows then from precisely these rules of balance, since all such words as sensuousness and instinct, fantasy and reason are after all no more than determinations of one single power wherein opposites cancel each other out, that . . . if man was not to be an instinctual animal, he had to be—by virtue of the more freely working positive power of his soul—a creature of reflection. Herder, “Essay on the Origin of Language,” in On the Origin of Language, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 87–166, here 111–12. For the original, see p. 719 of Herder, “Über den Ursprung der Sprache,” in Werke, vol. 1, Frühe Schriften 1764–1772 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 695–810.

12. See Ingrid Höpel, Emblem und Sinnbild. Vom Kunstbuch zum Erbauungsbuch (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987).

2. D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T

( 251 )

13. Quoted in Elke Müller-Mees, “Die Rolle der Emblematik im Erbauungsbuch aufgezeigt an Johann Arndts ‘4 Büchern vom Wahren Christenthum,’ ” 104, Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Köln, Düsseldorf, 1974. See also Dietmar Peil, “Zur Illustrationsgeschichte von Johann Arndts ‘Vom wahren Christentum’. Mit einer Bibliographie,” in Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens: AGB 18 (1977): 963–1066. Peil quotes the preface of the Riga edition from 1676 (ibid., column 1011). He relies for most of his argument on the analysis of the Arndt illustrations in Müller-Mees’s dissertation. 14. See Müller-Mees’s discussion of this phenomenon. She traces the gradual loss of the emblematic function in the mid-nineteenth century through the addition of interior details, specifically detailed landscapes and human figures (“Die Rolle der Emblematik,” 351–52). 15. Arthur Henkel und Albrecht Schöne, “Fernrohr,” in Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967), 1426. 16. For an analysis of the added poems, their appellative approach to the reader, and their characterization as miniature sermons, see Dietmar Peil, chapter 3 in his Zur ‘angewandten Emblematik,’ 46–62.

2 . D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T 1. See Jerome Stolnitz, “The Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2 (Winter 1961): 131–43. 2. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (New York: Gordian, 1970), 188–89. 3. My argument in many ways runs counter to Dabney Townsend, who also wants to trace the development of aesthetic experience from Shaftesbury to Kant. Townsend understands by aesthetic experience what Kant describes as the antinomy of taste, i.e., the fact that aesthetic judgments are both subjective and they are expressed with objective claims. He situates this development in the rise of eighteenth-century empiricism. Though he acknowledges that Shaftesbury is associated with the Cambridge Platonists, Townsend makes Shaftesbury part of his construction of an empiricist tradition in that Shaftesbury considers taste and aesthetic experience, like moral judgment, something that is improved by exposure and experience and that benefits from public debate. Townsend does not realize that this practical approach, the assumption that practice and its resulting habits improve a disposition, is rooted in Shaftesbury’s commitment to spiritual exercises and has little to do with empiricism as an epistemological position. See Dabney Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (April–June 1987): 287–305. 4. E. C. Wilm, The Theory of Instinct: A Study in the History of Psychology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935) merely summarizes in a chronological order theories of instinct as to whether they fit into a “vitalist” or a “mechanist” paradigm. See also Robert Richard,

( 252 )

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

2. D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T

“Controversies Over Animal Instinct and Intelligence in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 22–30. For a detailed discussion of the positions and metaphysical stakes involved in Condillac’s argument against Descartes’s model of the soulless animal’s automatism and Buffon’s refutation of an animal’s capacity for learning, see François Dagognet, “L’animal selon Condillac,” his introduction to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des animaux (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 15–131. See also David Bates, “Cartesian Robotics,” Representations 124, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 43–68. See Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné (Neufchastel, 1765), 8/28:795–799. See also Elizabeth Anderson’s introduction to Charles-Georges Le Roy, Lettres sur les animaux: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 316:1–78. Anderson points out that in his monograph Le Roy agrees with much of Buffon’s understanding of animal behavior, as Buffon has also adopted some of Le Roy’s detailed description of certain species, and that, after all, the two men had a close relationship and met regularly. See “Instinct” in Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire universel raisonné des conoissances humaines (Yverdon, 1773), 24/58:651 (my translation). See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in Basic Political Writings, ed. and trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 45–120, esp. 62–63. See also David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by J. B. Schneewind (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), esp. 32–34 and 42–50. This fundamental assumption can be found in many of Shaftesbury’s writings, not just in “An Inquiry” but also in “The Moralists” and other texts. See, for instance, the formulation of his general teleologically grounded concept of virtue: We know that every creature has a private good and interest of his own, which nature has compelled him to seek by all the advantages afforded him within the compass of his make. We know that there is in reality a right and a wrong state of every creature, and that his right one is by nature forwarded and by himself affectionately sought. There being therefore in every creature a certain interest or good, there must be also a certain end to which everything in his constitution must naturally refer. To this end, if anything either in his appetites, passion or affections, be not conducing but the contrary, we must of necessity own it ill to him. And in this manner he is ill with respect to himself as he certainly is with respect to others of his kind when any such appetites or passions make him anyway injurious to them. Now if, by the natural constitution of any rational creature, the same irregularities of appetite which make ill to others make him ill also to himself, and if the same regularity of affections which causes him to be good in one sense causes him to be good also in the other, then is that goodness by which he is thus useful to others a real good and advantage to himself. And thus virtue and interest may be found at last to agree. Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 167.

2. D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T

( 253 )

10. In “A Sketch of the life of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, By his Son, The Fourth Earl,” Anthony makes the point of defending his father against accusations that he was writing against the church: “Some sketch of an author’s life is generally pleasing to the curious. A just representation of his character must be agreeable to the candid. And as this short account will give a view of his real opinion of our national church and religion, it may possibly be a means to explain those passages in his writings, which have by some been greatly misapprehended.” See The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Author of the ‘Characteristics,’ ed. Benjamin Rand (New York: Macmillan 1900), 18. In the same edition of Shaftesbury’s letter we can find the publication of his private meditations upon matters of ethical concern, frequently relying on a quote from Marcus Aurelius. Thus Shaftesbury’s own spiritual exercises are far removed from any form of Christian meditation. Instead, they evolve around the Stoic concern with calming the passions and focusing the mind on not being subdued by physical or physiological urges, by fear of pain and dependency on pleasure. They are not meditations on images but examinations of ideas, visions, and prejudices by way of an internal dialogue. 11. Shaftesbury’s trust in the harmonious order of nature rather than belief in a particular religious creed, however, does not mean that he equates virtuous action with an action that is instinctually driven. Whereas instinctual behavior is morally neutral, virtuous behavior must be based on a conscious decision and the desire to do what is good. 12. Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” 173. 13. Ibid., 202–3 (my emphasis). 14. But to proceed from what is esteemed mere goodness and lies within the reach and capacity of all sensible creatures, to that which is called virtue or merit and is allowed to man only: In a creature capable of forming general notions of things, not only the outward beings which offer themselves to the sense are the objects of the affection, but the very actions themselves and the affections of pity, kindness, gratitude and their contraries, being brought into the mind by reflection, become objects. So that, by means of this reflected sense, there arises another kind of affection towards those very affections themselves, which have been already felt and have now become the subject of a new liking or dislike. The case is the same in the mental or moral subjects as in the ordinary bodies or common subjects of sense. The shapes, motions, colours and proportions of these latter being presented to our eye, there necessarily results a beauty or deformity, according to the different measure, arrangement, and disposition of their several parts. So in behaviour and actions, when presented to our understanding, there must be found, of necessity an apparent difference, according to the regularity or irregularity of the subjects. The mind, which is spectator or auditor of other minds, cannot be without its eye and ear so as to discern proportion, distinguish sound and scan each sentiment or thought, which comes before it. It can let nothing escape its censure. It feels the soft and harsh, the agreeable and disagreeable in the affections, and finds a foul and a fair, a harmonious and a dissonant, as really and truly here as in any musical numbers or in the outward forms or representations of sensible things. Nor can it withhold its

( 254 )

2. D I S I N T ER ES T ED I N T ER ES T

admiration and exstasy, its aversion and scorn, any more in what relates to one than to the other of these subjects. So that to deny the common and natural sense of a sublime and beautiful in things will appear an affectation merely to anyone who considers duly of this affair. Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” 172–73.

15. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr writes in the short introduction to the facsimile reprint of Reimarus’s work: “If Reimarus says of the drives that ‘they have been implanted by the creator into each species,’ we can see in this statement his physico-theology. However, if he continues, ‘that all these technical drives aim at the maintenance and well-being of each animal and its species,’ this statement could have just as well been made by a modern biologist, who believes in natural selection. This is why it has been possible to transfer the treasure trove of observations about animal behavior from the physico-theologian almost unchanged into the inventory of ethology.” See Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, haupsächlich über die Kunsttriebe, ed. Jürgen von Kempski, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 1:15 (my translation). 16. Ibid., 187–88, all translations of Reimarus are my own. Le Roy counters Reimarus in his “Lettre II à madame * * * sur les animaux (lettre 10)” by claiming that migratory birds learn their routes from their elders. One should only think of the swallows which annually gather in large numbers before they set out on their collective journey. Clearly, according to Le Roy, these assemblies serve the preparation of this joint venture. See Charles-Georges Le Roy, Lettres sur les animaux, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Elizabeth Anderson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 316:164–67. 17. Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen, 126–27 (my emphasis). 18. In that sense the animal/human distinction by Reimarus is not that different from the one undertaken by Descartes. For Descartes’s model of animal automatism could also be described more adequately as a model of the animal that is comparable to a robot, with a built-in program that is capable of interacting with a changing environment but cannot interrupt this program itself. For an extensive discussion of Descartes’s concept of animal instinctive behavior, or “automatism,” see Bates, “Cartesian Robotics.” David Bates shows that the so-called dualism that has always been attributed to Descartes as well as the understanding of animals’ “soulless” automatism as a mechanism misconstrues a far more complex model of animals’ interaction with their environment, on the one hand, and the human soul’s cognitive powers, on the other hand. 19. For this argument see Kant, “Conjectural Beginning,” in On History, trans. Lewis White Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 53–68. See also Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section 1, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9–20. 20. See “No. 121, Thursday, July 19, 1711” in vol. 1 of The Spectator. A New Edition, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1891), 183–85. 21. See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–166. Also see my Virtue and the Veil of Illusion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 163–79.

3. B E AU T I F U L , N O T I N T ELLI G EN T D ES I G N

( 255 )

22. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, in Basic Political Writings, 27–92, here 47–48. 23. See Immanuel Kant’s argument, in his “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” that when the human being recognizes that it can use animals as means for an end, the human being also recognizes that fellow human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves, in Kant on History, ed. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 53–68, esp. 58.

3. B E AU T I F U L , N O T I N T ELLI G EN T D ES I G N 1. As the work of Hannah Ginsborg has shown, it is not at all so clear how exactly the first part of the Third Critique, generally referred to as Kant’s aesthetics, and the second part, the critique of teleology, belong together. Should we emphasize the subjective nature if we call something beautiful and seek the objective validity of the judgment exclusively in the fact that we implicitly assume universal assent when we express our aesthetic pleasure? Or should we seek in this an indication of the nature of the human being as a natural phenomenon whose perceptual apparatus displays a certain purposive fitness with regard to nature as a whole? This, of course, would have significant consequences for the extent to which we can claim experiential access to nature. I will leave this question about how exactly Kant’s aesthetics interfaces with his critique of teleology to Kant scholars. All that concerns my argument is the fact that there is this possibility of those two readings, that there is exactly no seamless continuity between a presumed teleological order of nature and the realm of human faculties when it comes to an aesthetic judgment. See Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published July 2, 2005, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/. 2. For a discussion of this change in the model of nature, especially with regard to the uses of teleology, see James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. and with and introduction and notes by Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 213. 4. Ibid., 87. For the German original, see Lessing, Werke und Briefe, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 5/2:126. 5. Ibid., 88 (trans.), 126 (original). 6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, part 1, Schriften zur Morphologie, ed. Dorothea Kuhn (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 24:554 (my translation). Körte’s article was published in 1821 in Ballenstedts Archiv für die Urwelt 3, no. 2. 7. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 24:270. 8. “If one, however, considers a tapir, babirusa, pecari, the domesticated swine, one sees how the eye has already moved lower down, and between the eye and the occupit bone we suppose there to be a reasonably sized brain” (ibid., 557). 9. The power to experience pure aesthetic pleasure is something that moves the Goethe of this stage to further reflections in his essay on Winckelmann. There too it is part of a much

( 256 )

3. B E AU T I F U L , N O T I N T ELLI G EN T D ES I G N

larger argument about the nature and direction of change in nature, even in the cosmos, an argument that asks how it is possible to transcend one’s own historical horizon. For Winckelmann, the autodidact who discovered the art of classical antiquity and made it relevant for his own time, becomes for Goethe an example of a genius that was not circumscribed by the reigning ideology of his time. Instead, Winckelmann was able to relate to the art of classical antiquity on its own pagan terms, affirming aesthetic pleasure in its thisworldliness. Just after having made that point, Goethe suddenly departs from his focus on the genius of Winckelmann and embeds this affirmation of a pure, nondidactic kind of aesthetic pleasure in the following boldly grandiose, hyperbolic teleological speculation on a cosmological scale: When healthy human nature unfolds itself in its totality, when the human being can experience itself within the world as within one great, beautiful and worthy whole, when this sense of harmony with the world instills a pure, free delight—then the entire cosmos, if it were capable of subjective feeling, would triumphantly jubilate and admire the summit of its entire becoming and being. For what is the point of all the suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of past and future worlds, if not in the end there is at least one happy human being unconsciously rejoicing in being there. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, part 1, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 19:179.

5 . “ W H ER E N AT U R E G I V ES T H E R U LE T O A RT ” 1. Of course, it can also be seen as a rather heterogeneous, meandering text, bearing the traits of his collaboration with Samuel Richardson. For a discussion of Young’s essay that attempts to integrate the argument about original genius with Young’s homage to Addison, especially that part of the essay that describes Addison’s deathbed scene, see Douglas Lane Patey, “Art and Integrity: Concepts of Self in Alexander Pope and Edward Young,” Modern Philology 83, no. 4 (1986): 364–78. According to Patey, Young’s claim that the artist needs to reject rules and decorum and that he should rely exclusively on his own resources expresses a decidedly modern, anti-traditionalist approach to the self, one no longer grounded in a sense of a greater civic responsibility, like Pope’s model of the self, but instead conceived as an escapist ideal, formed in response to the experience of alienation due to increasing differentiation in the trades and professions. 2. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, facsimile reprint (Leeds: Scholars Press, 1966 [1759]), 12. All future citations will be made parenthetically. 3. See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, “Ravening Curiosity,” in Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998), 305–10. 4. For a detailed argument that traces the indebtedness of Young’s concept of genius to the seventeenth-century ideal of the scientist, see Bernhard Fabian, “Der Naturwissenschaftler als Originalgenie,” in Europäische Aufklärung. Herbert Dieckmann zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hugo Friedrich and Fritz Schalk (Munich: Fink, 1967), 47–68.

6. T H E S T R A S B O U RG CAT H ED R A L

( 257 )

5. Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 2, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 520. 6. Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 291–307, here 299–300. For the original, see Herder, Werke, 2:509–511. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 174. 8. Genius, according to Kant, is the ability to represent aesthetic ideas. An aesthetic idea generates thought, but cannot be reduced to a concept. In that sense it is diametrically opposed to rational concepts. We could say it is a figure of thought as opposed to a distinct concept. If the product of genius consists in the representation of the aesthetic idea, it means that Kant insists on the articulation, the specificity of the form-giving aspect of the product of genius. In contradistinction to Herder, however, Kant’s formulation does not appeal to the organicist whole as the guiding formal principle—the generative aspect as true innovation is one that is situated in an ever changing, generative nature, but here it is dissociated from a teleology of nature, it no longer illustrates, not even in its semblance, a cosmic harmony or an intelligent design. A lot has been written on how, according to Kant, the originality of genius is to be tamed by “taste” and the traditionally approved schemata of representation, a topic that is not of interest to my argument. 9. Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften, 1806–1815, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 19:178. 10. Ibid., 180 (my translation). 11. Ibid., 181.

6 . T H E S T R A S B O U RG CAT H ED R A L 1. Goethe’s “On German Architecture” initially appeared as a single printing in November 1772 without any information on its author or place of publication. The essay first drew attention through Herder’s reprint in the collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Hamburg, 1773). Cited here from Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 18:112. Future references to this volume are made parenthetically. Unless noted, translations are my own. 2. See 1 Corinthians 3:9f. 3. Although Jens Bisky acknowledges the systematic quality of Goethe’s architecture essay, and sees in it an exemplary staging of a secular, aesthetic experience, he does not analyze this early passage in the text. See “Das fühlende Genie” in Jens Bisky, Poesie der Baukunst. Architekturästhetik von Winckelmann bis Broisserée (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2000), 37–44. 4. See Richard Wittman, “The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36, no. 1 2007): 235–59.

( 258 )

6. T H E S T R A S B O U RG CAT H ED R A L

5. On this, see Aleida Assmann, “Die Säkularisierung des Andenkens—Memoria, Fama, Historia,” in Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999), 33–61. 6. See ibid., 45. 7. On the centrality of the exchange of the loving gaze for the poetics of young Goethe, see David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 8. Goethe concludes by summing up his conception of the function of art as the affirmation of the decidedly anthropological dimension of free artistic form. The form of art must follow neither requirements nor rules. Rather, in its autonomy, artistic form represents the affirmative activity of humans in their entirety: Art is creative long before it is beautiful. And yet, such art is true and great, perhaps truer and greater than when it becomes beautiful. For in man there is a creative force which becomes active as soon as his existence is secure. When he is free from worry and fear, this demigod, restless in tranquility, begins to cast about for matter to inspire with his spirit. And thus savages decorate their coconut-fiber mats, their feathers, their bodies, with bizarre patterns, ghastly forms and gaudy colors. And even if this creative activity produces the most arbitrary shapes and designs, they will harmonize despite the apparent lack of proportion. For a single feeling created them as a characteristic whole.

9. 10.

11. 12.

This translation comes from Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Ellen and Ernest H. von Nardroff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–10, here 8. For the original quote, see Goethe, SW 18:116–17. Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom Wahren Christenthum (Philadelphia: J. Kohler, 1854), 733 (my translation). Edifying texts of the seventeenth century are characterized by an exemplary “I,” on the one hand, and, on the other, by a situational description related to a specific personal experience. This combination invokes both a total identification with the narrated “I” and an imaginary realization of the speech situation. See also Wolfgang Brückner, “Thesen zur literarischen Struktur des sogenannten Erbaulichen,” Volkskunde als historische Kulturwissenschaft 11 (2000): 209–18. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (New York: Routledge, 1991). See Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

PA RT 2 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, including the letters to Malesherbes, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters,

7. PIETISM

(259)

and Peter G. Stillman, trans. Christopher Kelly, 13 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England: 1990), 5:5. Hereafter the Confessions will be cited in the text as C with page numbers from this translation followed by page numbers for the Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres completes, 6 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), cited hereafter as OC with volume number. 2. See, for instance, among the more recent examples of these approaches to Rousseau’s autobiography and the practices of confession, Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal” (New York: Routledge, 2010). Taylor emphasizes the negative, constraining, and disciplinary potential of this speech genre before she turns to other genres and media in order to uncover “strategies for transforming the self which contrast with the self-fixing or disciplinary practices of confession” (191). 3. For a Pietist autobiography famous already in the eighteenth century for its insistence on unseemly detail and exhibitionism at the cost of a lack of coherence, see Adam Bernd’s 1738 Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung (Leipzig).

7. P I E T I S M 1. For the history of Pietism see Johannes Wallman, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1990); see also Martin Brecht, ed., Geschichte des Pietismus. Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1993), and Martin Brecht and Klaus Deppermann, ed., Geschichte des Pietismus. Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995). 2. On Spener see Martin Brecht, “Philipp Jakob Spener, sein Programm und dessen Auswirkungen,” in Geschichte des Pietismus 1:281–390. 3. Martin Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” ibid., 1:439–539. 4. See Hans Schneider, “Der radikale Pietismus im 17. Jahrhundert,” ibid., 1:391–438, especially 406–38. 5. Martin Schmidt and Wilhelm Jannasch, Das Zeitalter des Pietismus. Klassiker der Protestantismus (Bremen: Carl Schünemann, 1965), 6:146. Jannasch and Schmidt quote Arnold’s conclusion from a reprint of the 1699 edition. The reprint of the 1729 edition does not contain this formulation but, rather, a similar argument against sectarianism and for a form of separatism that abstains from most ritualized interaction. See Gottfried Arnold, Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie vom Anfang des Neuen Testaments bis auf das Jahr Christi 1688, reprint of the 1729 Frankfurt/Main edition (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967), 1176–80. 6. Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenback, “Die Ansbacher Visionärin und Prophetin Anna Vetter. Zu den sozialen Gehalten ihrer Botschaft,” Zeitschrifi f ür bayerische Kirchengeschichte 45 (1976): 26–32. 7. On Lead and Bourignon see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

( 260 )

7. P I E T I S M

8. For biographical data on Reitz, see Hans-Jürgen Schrader, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in vol. 4 of Johann Henrich Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen. Vollständige Ausgabe der Erstdrucke aller sieben Teile der pietistischen Sammelbiographie (1698–1745) mit einem werkgeschichtlichen Anhang der Varianten und Ergänzungen aus den späteren Auflagen, vols. 1–4, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schrader (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982), 155*–63*. 9. For a detailed and extensive study, see Hans-Jürgen Schrader, Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des radikalen Pietismus. Johann Hernich Reitz’ “Historie der Wiedergebohrnen” und ihre geschichtlicher Kontext (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1989). 10. See ibid., 80. 11. Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, vol. 1, parts 1–3 (1698–1701). The “Vorrede an den christlichen Leser” from part 1 has no pagination; subsequent references to this part of Reitz will be made parenthetically. 12. There had been a few exceptions that he had to delete in later editions because the narrators had relapsed into a sinful life after their documented conversion experience. See Schrader, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” 182*. 13. Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, 4:267. 14. For an analysis of the autobiographies of the “patriarchs” of the movement, see Magdalene Maier-Petersen, Der “Fingerzeig Gottes” und die “Zeichen der Zeit.” Pietistische Religiosität auf dem Weg zu bürgerlicher Identitätsfindung, untersucht an Selbstzeugnissen von Spener, Francke und Oetinger (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1984). 15. For an interesting discussion of Johann Wilhelm Petersen’s presentation of himself in a rather vain attempt to compensate for his lack of a title by borrowing an equivalent to the representational function of the nobility from scholarly achievements, see Gerhart von Grävenitz, “lnnerlichkeit und Öffentlichkeit,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 49 (special issue, 1975): 1–82. For a critical discussion of Grävenitz’s argument, see Schrader, Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des radikalen Pietismus, 31f. For comparison of the two spouses, see, for instance, Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 85. 16. For a discussion of Petersen’s theological trajectory from separatist pietism to chiliastic enthusiasms, the notion of apocasthasis (the radical universalism of grace and redemption) and behmenist mysticism, see Walter Nordmann, “Die Eschatologie des Ehepaares Petersen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir Kirchengeschichte der Provinz Sachsen und des Freistaates Anhalt 26 (1930): 83–198 and 27 (1931): 1–19. See also Martin Schmidt, “Biblischapokalyptische Frömmigkeit im pietistischen Adel. Johanna Eleonora Petersens Auslegung der Johannesapokalypse,” in Martin Brecht, ed., Text-Wort-Glaube, dedicated to Kurt Aland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter: 1980), 344–58. 17. Eleonora Petersen, gebohrener von und zu Merlau, Leben, Eine kurtze Erzehlung (n.p.: 1719), reprinted in Werner Mahrholz, Der deutsche Pietismus: Eine Auswahl von Zeugnissen, Urkunden und Bekenntnissen aus dem 17. 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Furche, 1921) 204–5 (my translations), further references to Petersen’s autobiography in the Mahrholz reprint will be given in parentheses. Petersen first published her autobiography in 1689 as part of

7. PIETISM

18.

19. 20.

21.

( 2 61 )

her collection of devotional literature, the Gespräche des Hertzens mit Gott. In 1719 a new version of her autobiography was printed in conjuction with that of her husband (LebensBeschriebung Johannis Wilhelmi Petersen). To this second version, Johanna Petersen added a lengthy description of her divine revelations. For background on Johanna Petersen’s theology and an English translation of her autobiography, see Barbara Becker-Cantarino, trans., The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Written by Herself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For a description of von Merlau’s activities in Frankfurt, her teaching, her conflict with public authorities, and her contacts with the leading Quakers, see Markus Matthias, Johann und Johanna Eleonora Petersen. Eine Biographie bis zur Amtsenthebung Petersens im Jahre 1692 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1993), 84–88 and 89–95. See also Richard Critchfield, “Prophetin, Führerin, Organisatorin: Zur Rolle der Frau im Pietismus,” in Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Die Frau von der Reformation zur Romantik. Die Situation der Frau vor dem Hintergrund der Literatur- und Sozialgeschichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 112–37. Critchfield’s essay emphasizes the importance of women as prophets and organizers for the early phase of radical Pietism. He constructs a continuous trajectory between Petersen’s interest in the philadelphic movement of Jane Lead and the later Moravian brotherhood of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. For a biography of Petersen’s husband that explores the circumstances of his dispensation from his office, see Matthias, Johann und Johanna Eleonora Petersen, esp. 198–330. In this respect I can only confirm Niggl’s argument that early Pietist confessional literature had little if any direct influence on later eighteenth-century uses and discussions of the autobiographical genre. According to Niggl, who in his criticism relies on Herder’s discussion of the potential and dangers of autobiographical writing, the Pietist autobiography lacked any secular concept of development. Of later literary interest and influence for the uses of psychological detail was the diary and epistolary culture of pietism. Niggl discusses “The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” book 6 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, as the “Fictional Psychologization of Religious Autobiography.” See Günter Niggl, Geschichte der deutschen Autobiographie im 18. Jahrhundert. Theoretische Grundlegung und literarische Entfaltung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) esp. 6–14, 41–75, 101–29. See Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, 2:292–94 (1717), for a comment on how nobility by birth should be considered a Western aberration: In the entire Orient there has never been a people that knew of such a special class and that supported the inheritance of a rank of honor. For the ancients, as well as the Turks and throughout Asia there was the dictum: Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus [Virtue alone is the only nobility]. The Turkish emperor made the most skilled men into princes, counts and barons: those men would not be ashamed to have learned a craft in their youth, nor would they be ashamed to let their children learn a craft, since they could not inherit the office and rank of their fathers but had to start anew to acquire their temporal fortune through virtue and skill.

( 262 )

8. RO U S S E AU

8 . RO U S S E AU 1. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980): and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1992). 2. See Roland Galle, Geständnis und Subjektivität. Untersuchung zum franzözischen Roman zwischen Klassik und Romantik (Munich: Fink, 1986). 3. In this context see Tzvetan Todorov’s argument that every literary genre has its origin in a speech act, of which it represents a complex set of transformations, “The Origin of Genres,” in Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13–26. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102, here 98–99. 5. For an account of the events following upon the publication of the Émile, see Pierre Maurice-Masson, La “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (Fribourg: Hachette, 1914), liii–lvi. 6. “I have written on diverse subject matters, but always along the same principles: always the same moral, the same belief, the same maxims, and, if you want, the same opinions” (my translation). “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citroen de Genève, à Christophe de Beaumont, Archevêque de Paris, Duc de St. Cloud, Pair de France, Commandeer de l’Ordre du St. Esprit, Provider de Sorbonne, etc.,” in Rousseau, OC IV, 928. 7. “Let me decide my opinions and principles once and for all, and then let me remain for the rest of my life what mature consideration tells me I should be.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin, 1979), 53; OC I, 1016. 8. See Pierre Burgelin’s introduction to the Émile in OC IV, cxlv–cxlvi. 9. See Martin Rang, “Das Glaubensbekenntnis,” in Rousseaus Lehre vom Menschen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), 468–98. According to Rang, Rousseau called this “philosophical-theological tractatus” a “profession of faith” because it represented the highly personal result of careful, solitary meditations that were directed polemically against the “philosophes” (469ff.). 10. In the letter to the archbishop, Rousseau writes, “Sir, I am Christian, and sincerely Christian, along the doctrine of the Gospel. I am Christian, not like a disciple of priests, but like a disciple of Jesus Christ. My master has been little concerned with dogma but insisted much on duties; he prescribed articles of faith less than good works” (OC IV, 960; my translation). See also Rang, “Das Glaubensbekenntnis,” 574–88. 11. I know that in such an undertaking the author, who ranges at will among the theoretical systems, utters many fine precepts impossible to practise, and even when he says what is practicable it remains undone for want of details and examples as to its application. I have therefore decided to take an imaginary pupil, to assume on my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required for the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood, when he needs no guide but himself. This method seems to me useful for an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to the visionary;

8. RO U S S E AU

( 263 )

for as soon as he departs from common practice he has only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know, or the reader will know for him, whether he is following the development of the child and the natural growth of the human heart. Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1993), 18; OC IV, 264. Hereafter the Émile will be cited in the text as E with page numbers from this translation followed by page numbers for OC IV.

12. In this context see Galle’s analysis of Julie, especially 58–110. See also Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Zur Pragmatik der Frage nach persönlicher Identität,” in Identität, ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle, Poetik und Hermeneutik 8 (Munich: Fink, 1979), 674–81. 13. In the entirety of the Émile titles are used extremely rarely. Only in book 2, when Rousseau discusses the detrimental effects of fables on children and at the beginning of book 5, when he begins the characterization of Sophie, the ideal woman, does he use titles. Otherwise the text is merely divided up into the numbered books. 14. Quoted from Bard Thompson, Liturgies of the Western Church (Cleveland: Collins, 1962), 65–66. 15. See Lettre à Christophe Beaumont (OC IV, 937). 16. “If I had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, I would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in his catechism” (E 220; OC IV, 554). 17. Whereas Rousseau’s Confessions clearly work with the autobiographical tradition of Augustine’s conversion narrative, the “Profession” does not hark back to this distinctly literate and literary form of self-stylization but instead works with the much more formulaic, deindividualized forms of the oral confession and profession of faith that are part of the public church ritual. 18. Letters from Petrarch, selected and trans. Morris Bishop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 49. For an analysis of the gradual emergence of a secular contemplation of natural beauty, see also Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft,” in Subjektivität: Sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 141–63. 19. In contrast to its Catholic counterpart, Calvinist doctrine and liturgy tends to place much more emphasis on teaching and the word rather than the mere ritual. In this respect it seems relevant that the sequence of speech genres alluded to in the vicar’s conversation with the young man on the hill is more evocative of Calvinist liturgy than the order of the Catholic mass. See Thompson, Liturgies of the Western Church, 219–24. 20. As Kelly has shown, Rousseau very soon in his career as a published writer conceived of anonymous publishing practices as a form of cowardice. An upright citizen had to sign his proper name to his pronouncements. Rousseau thus portrayed his own publication practice in contrast to the intricate games of anonymous polemics and slander associated with the name of Voltaire. His insistence on attaching one’s own name to one’s publications is marked by a novel ethos of responsibility, the willingness to be liable and to attach to the person not just the text but also the praise and the blame that might result from a controversial position. See Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8–28. The traditionally relatively

( 264 )

21.

22. 23. 24.

8. RO U S S E AU

separate cultures of the republic of letters, the court, and the salon, as Lilti has demonstrated, were actually intricately, even programmatically interwoven in the new salon culture of the second half of the eighteenth century. For it was then that salon culture treated the homme de lettres as part of the culture of mondanité. As such the author is neither the protégé of a specific patron, where he would resemble a domestic servant in that he would have to perform certain functions in the household, e.g., as a private secretary or tutor, nor the recipient of a generous donation by a maecene, where the cultural worth of his products would be acknowledged in terms of a stipend, which would then be publicly acknowledged, for instance in a preface or dedication, but he is considered a mobile, entertaining, prestige-enhancing guest, whose loyalty would be encouraged with gifts given in the spirit of friendship. See Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005). “This favor of the public, in no way courted and for an unknown Author, gave me the first genuine assurance of my talent which I had doubted until then in spite of the internal feeling. I understood all the advantage I could take from it for the decision I was ready to reach, and I judged that a copyist of some celebrity in letters would not be likely to lack work” (C 305; OC I 363). For an excellent analysis of Rousseau’s paranoia as a symptom of a new publication landscape in view of the fate of a celebrity author, see Antoine Lilti, “The Writing of Paranoia,” Representations no. 103 (2008): 53–83. See Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (New York: Norton, 1983), 239–40. For a defense of Rousseau’s position on deliberation in light of his fear of factionalism see Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 117–27. Although he did not have his Confessions published during his lifetime, between December 1770 and the spring of 1771 he offered private readings from this work. The audience’s reaction, however, was disappointing, even frustrating to him, for his listeners just remained silent. Although in the opening pages to this work he challenges his reader to judge him, but only once he knows him in his entirety and then basing the judgment on a comparison with the life and conduct of the reader him- or herself, he does not want this silent reaction or judgment either. What Rousseau expected from his readers, according to Ellrich, was complete acceptance of the “truths” he proclaimed as well as an empathetic reaction in perfect resonance with his own emotional states. In brief, Rousseau constructed for himself in his writings an “ideal reader” who had not necessarily much to do with any actual reader. See Robert Ellrich, Rousseau and His Reader: The Rhetorical Situation of the Major Works (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), esp. 74. For actual readers’ reactions to Rousseau’s work, see the by now classic study by Darnton, who shows how in actuality Rousseau did find many readers who responded exactly in the desired fashion to Rousseau’s works by identifying with his fictional characters’ plight and joys and by taking his advice very concretely to heart for how to deal with their own challenges. It is significant that the reaction of those readers was not expressed in a public setting, not even a private assembly of a group, but in private letters. One such reader documented this relationship in letters to a bookseller, for instance, in which they expressed their warm

8. RO U S S E AU

( 265 )

friendship to an author they had never met in person. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). For the later eighteenth-century reception of Rousseau, see also Bernard Gagnebin, “L’Etrange accueil fait aux Confessions de Rousseau au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 38 (1969–71): 105–26. Gagnebin shows that the posthumous publication of the Confessions (the first part appeared in 1782), an immediate publication success that sold eight thousand copies instantly, solicited quite negative criticism: Rousseau was considered too busy displaying silly and embarrassing details of his youth, indiscrete toward Madame de Warens, vainglorious, and finally mad in the display of his paranoia. It was not until 1788 that Madame de Stäel expressed her great admiration for the writer. During the French Revolution the Rousseau reception (including the position toward the Confessions) changed drastically, though initially, when the second part was published in 1789, it provoked an even more critical reception than the first. But then condemnation altered to high praise, and this also applied to the reception of this work in Switzerland. In England the initial negative reception prevailed for a longer time due to Edmund Burke, who condemned the author and his works, making him responsible for the French Revolution. In Germany, by contrast, the Confessions were more appreciated, in line with his other works, which provided a fresh and originally natural depiction of man. The Confessions, especially for the group of leading eighteenth-century German authors, were enthusiastically received as a way of communing with the mind of this much admired author. 25. “I feel very well that if these Memoirs ever succeed in seeing the light I myself am perpetuating the remembrance of a fact the trace of which I wanted to efface. . . . In the strange, in the unique situation in which I find myself I owe myself the truth too much to owe anything more to anyone else. To know me well it is necessary to know me in all my good and bad relations. . . . But since in the end my name must live, I ought to try to transmit along with it the remembrance of the unfortunate man who bore it, as it was really, and not as unjust enemies work without respite to depict it” (C 335–336; OC I 399–400). 26. “While walking and taking the waters in the morning I made some sorts of verses very hastily, and to them I adapted the songs that came to me while I made them. . . . I could not keep myself from showing these tunes to Mussard and to Mlle Du Vernois his housekeeper . . . I so little imagined that this was worth the trouble of being continued, that, without the applause and the encouragement of both of them, I was going to throw my scraps in the fire . . . but they got me so excited that in six days my Drama was within several verses of being written” (C 314; OC I 374–75). 27. Before presenting the narrative about the reception of his opera, he alerts his reader to the fact that the venue choice for the premiere of his opera was due neither to his efforts nor his preference: “Everyone who heard it was so enchanted by it that, as early as the next day, nothing else was spoken of in all social circles. M. de Cury the Intendant of the Menus, who had been present at the rehearsal, asked for the Work to be given at Court. Judging that I would be less the master of my Piece at Court than at Paris, Duclos, who knew my intentions, refused it. Cury laid claim to it by authority” (C 315; OC I 375–76). Rousseau hence emphasizes again that it was solely the quality of the work, not his name

( 266 )

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

8. RO U S S E AU

or networking, that promoted the piece. Moreover, he makes the point that he had no ambition to make it as a courtier. Kelly quotes an earlier version of this scene in which Rousseau makes reference to the noises arising from the king’s box; in the final version this has been deleted. See note 123, 646 in Kelly’s translation. See Rousseau’s narrative of the failed concert at M. de Treitorens in book 4 of the Confessions, 147–50. On originality, plagiarism, and attempts to undermine his position by d’Holback, see book 8, esp. 381–83. See also how he called attention to the resemblance of Madame the Comtesse de Boufflers’s play L’Esclave généreux to the English play Oroonoko in book 4, 554–56. See also Cranston, Jean-Jacques, esp. 283. For the most extensive treatment of Rousseau’s claim that his intervention in the Querelle des Bouffons prevented an uprising, see Robert Wokler, “La Querelle des Bouffons and the Italian Liberation of France,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11, no. 1 (February 1987): 94–116. The proponents of Italian opera would gather under the box of the queen and hence would be dubbed Coin de la Reine; the much larger group of the proponents of the operatic style à la Rameau would be referred to as Coin du Roi, since they had their principal gathering place under the box of the king. See C 458. This kind of private, absorbed reading is also what he programmatically holds against the collective enjoyment of a spectacle in his Lettre à d’Alembert. In the storm that has submerged me, my books have served as a pretext, but it was my person they wanted. They cared very little about the author, but they wanted to ruin Jean-Jacques, and the greatest harm they found in my Writings was the honor they could do me. . . . Since then La nouvelle Héloïse appeared also with the same ease, I dare to say with the same applause, and, what seems almost unbelievable, the profession of faith of that very Héloïse dying is exactly the same as that of the Savoyard Vicar. Everything that is bold in The Social Contract was previously in the Discourse on Inequality; everything that was bold in Emile was previously in Julie. (C 342; OC I 406–7)

35. For a careful reading of this text as a crucial “minor” text of Rousseau’s that nevertheless provides us with a key to the entirety of his oeuvre in that it helps Rousseau scholars to bridge the gap between the Rousseau of the literary scholars and the Rousseau of the political scientists and intellectual historians, see Thomas Kavanagh, “Rousseau’s The Levite of Ephraïm: Synthesis Within a ‘Minor’ Work,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 397–417. Based on a careful comparison between the biblical text and Rousseau’s text, Kavanagh points out the major modifications undertaken by Rousseau. Apart from the tonal and stylistic difference, there is the disambiguation of the relationship between the Levite and his concubine. Rousseau depicts them quite sentimentally, not shying away from Rococo imagery. Furthermore, he adds a personalized passionate story of love and its voluntary renunciation at the request of a paternal figure and in the service of a higher paternal authority, à la St. Preux and Julie,

9. GOETHE

( 2 67 )

and he adds as well the reassembly of the dismembered corpse of the concubine and her joint burial together with the deceased Levite. This, Kavanagh argues, shows us how Rousseau identifies with the Levite and also makes this story into a narrative about his own life and oeuvre: “The Levite, like the author of the Confessions, addresses himself to and asks justice of a higher tribunal that he identifies with society as a whole, with the community of readers from which the truth of his victimization cannot remain forever hidden. In order that the social order be preserved once justice has been administered, one axial figure, a human yet superhuman Lawgiver, must, as in the Social Contract, step beyond and restructure the laws of society so that it might incorporate the truth revealed by the victim’s act of self-representation” (ibid., 414). For a discussion of the differences between Rousseau’s text and the extremely cryptic and ambivalent biblical text, see also Michael S. Kochin, “Living with the Bible: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Reads Judges 19–21,” Hebraic Political Studies 2, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 301–25.

9. GOETHE 1. There are two major trends in the scholarly reception of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. There are those scholars who have taken Goethe’s own remarks from the preface of the work and from book 7, that he wrote this biography responding to a request from a friend who wanted to have the missing pieces that needed to be filled in between his diverse writings, as well as his remark that Dichtung und Wahrheit represents the fragments of a grand confession (“Bruchstücke einer großen Confession”), as the decisive, guiding cue for their research. These scholars would aim to compare biographical details found in Dichtung und Wahrheit with those found elsewhere in order to establish their relationship to other literary works produced in the time period covered by the narrative of Dichtung und Wahrheit, i.e., the years from Goethe’s birth up to his composition of Egmont. Whereas these scholars are primarily committed to Goethe’s exceptional gifts and stellar career, they nevertheless occasionally tend to lapse into a discussion of Dichtung und Wahrheit as if it were the narrative about the formative years of a typical or even paradigmatic self rather than an exceptional, even unique self. What might encourage that generalizing trend is the fact that Goethe very rarely uses the first-person singular in that autobiography but instead makes use of a distant, often slightly ironic narrator who refers to the former, much younger self in the third person. The other trend in the scholarly reception of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit focuses on the compositional principles, the order and segmentation of the long work, with its many diverse foci and its prominent principle of juxtaposing at first sight rather disparate concerns in one and the same book (i.e., chapter). Among those more recent studies, there are especially prevalent those that see a tight nexus between Goethe’s scientific work in his Theory of Colors and his morphological studies. See, for instance, Bernhard Kuhn, “SelfFormations: Order and Disorder in Poetry and Truth,” in Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism. Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 97–113. According to Kuhn,

( 268 )

9. G O E T H E

Poetry and Truth is animated throughout by a tension between form and formlessness, wholeness and fragmentation, determinism and self-determination, purpose and chance; and this irresolvable, yet productive tension is the very subject of his autobiography and constitutes what for Goethe was the basic experience of the modern subject. Goethe’s morphological science does not seek to resolve this tension, but rather attempts the more difficult task of sustaining it. The self is both constant and ever-changing; the world is filled with both patterns and disorder. Poetry and Truth can be seen as an evolving attempt to present in narrative form the dynamic relationship between the self and the world without succumbing to an autonomous, transcendent notion of subjectivity, on the one hand, or a materialist socially constructed notion on the other. (99)

Though Kuhn asserts that the narrative mainly focuses on Goethe’s growth as a writer, he does not analyze how the self of the writer is different from a generic self that could be analyzed according to those general scientific models. Nicholas Boyle emphasizes the connection between Goethe’s history of science and his autobiography. He thus provides a genetic account of Goethe’s autobiographical writings of that period, which he situates in the completion of the Theory of Colors, from which, according to Boyle, Goethe took his approach to history. Boyle sees Goethe’s autobiographical work “Aus meinem Leben” as a work of intellectual history—his own biography as the individual spirit that is traced. According to Boyle, Goethe wants to portray Werther as emerging from a private, individualized experience and not admit its indebtedness to the culture of sensibility, its epistolary form, which motivated its great success as it also expressed the uneasiness of the bourgeoisie over its political impotence. Nicholas Boyle, “Geschichtsschreibung und Autobiographik bei Goethe (1810–1817),” Goethe-Jahrbuch 110 (1993): 163–72, esp. 171. Günter Niggl argues that although Goethe adopted insights into the nature of change from his morphological studies to his autobiography, he did so only for the first half of Poetry and Truth. For the second half of this work he abandoned the morphological principle in favor of the demonic principle. See “Morphologische Lebensdeutung in Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit,” in Günter Niggl, Studien zur Literatur der Goethezeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2001), 142–56. 2. Against the dominant trend in the reception of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, which tends to read the work not as a well-composed whole but rather as an accumulation of more or less true autobiographical factoids, Bernd Witte’s article is groundbreaking in that he focuses not on the referential truth but on the meaning and composition of the work. As stated in the title of his essay, he reads Goethe’s autobiography as a poetological work. In the discussion of book 7, the book in which Goethe first focuses on the literary trends and achievements of his time (Goethe only praises Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm; otherwise he sees the available contemporaneous literary production as out of sync with the communicative tasks of literature. Then he provides an excursus on the function of the sacraments in the Catholic Church, how they mediate the individual life span’s demands

9. G O E T H E

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

( 2 69 )

for meaningful acknowledgments with the ritual function of the Church), Witte shows that Goethe’s excursus—inspired by Chateaubriand’s “Le génie du Chrétianisme”— provides Goethe with a way of seeking a standard and example for the symbolic function of art and literature. Witte sees in these references to religion (also in the references to politics, especially the coronation ceremony) Goethe working out the role of the poet and the function of literature and argues that the poet takes over the function of the priest; whereas art is to provide the symbolic function formerly held by religion and partially by grand political actions—both, however, had become hollowed out. In that sense, according to Witte, the poet is to become a secular priest. In brief, Witte considers and reads Poetry and Truth as a poetological work that reflects on how Goethe came to develop his own sense of the true function of art and his own abilities as an exemplary artist and genius capable of producing this kind of art. See Bernd Witte, “Autobiographie als Poetik. Zur Kunstgestalt von Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit,” Neue Rundschau 89, Heft 3 (1978): 384–401. See also Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall, vol. 9 in Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), here 224. Hereafter Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship will be cited in the text as WM with page numbers from this translation followed by page numbers from volume 9 of the Deutscher Klassiker edition of Goethe’s Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: 1992), here 773. Günter Niggl analyzes Goethe’s portrait of Pietism and argues that in general Goethe presents this religious movement in a very positive light by depicting Pietism as positioned outside mainstream culture and attributing to it a productive influence on a growing person in a religious, aesthetic, and philosophical sense. See his “Goethes Pietismus-Bild in Dichtung und Wahrheit,”—in Günter Niggl, Studien zur Literatur der Goethezeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2001), 157–71. Looking beyond Poetry and Truth, however, especially in view of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” I disagree with Niggl’s claim that this productive influence is unmitigated. Günter Niggl shows that Goethe might quote literally from the Bible; he might take over distinct formulations or he might borrow certain images. He would never shy away from making a very liberal use of theologically significant passages, of appropriating and transforming them by always giving a central position to nature and the human being. In brief, according to Niggl, Goethe appropriates the Bible in order to portray what is universally valid in a secularizing fashion. See his “Biblische Welt in Goethes Dichtung” in Günter Niggl, Studien zur Literatur der Goethezeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 180–200. My approach to Goethe’s autobiography is informed by the work of Bernd Witte, Günter Niggl, and Ulrike Landfester, who approach Dichtung und Wahrheit as a consciously composed work, which portrays the poet’s childhood and youth in terms of his biography as an innovative writer and artist from a historical perspective. All these scholars pay particular attention to Goethe’s recurrent references to various aspects of religion and the Bible in order to reflect on what would constitute an effective symbolic intervention in the life of a specific culture and where one would find the symbolic and cultural resources that would

( 270 )

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

9. G O E T H E

transcend contemporaneous trends and fashions. By contrast to these scholars, who all engage with specific textual analyses, Gerhard Sauder’s, “Aufklärerische Bibelkritik und Bibelrezeption in Goethes Werk,” Goethe-Jahrbuch 118 (2001): 108–25, merely provides generalizing overviews without elaborating with any kind of precision on Goethe’s uses of the Bible in their distinction from what he claims to be the generally critical attitude of the Enlightenment toward the Bible. See Ulrike Landfester, “Buch der Bücher, Text der Texturen. Goethes bibelphilologischer Kulturbegriff,” in Goethe und die Bibel, ed. Johannes Anderegg and Edith Anna Kunz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2005), 217–40. Although Goethe does not directly criticize his contemporaries for the way in which they practiced the retelling of biblical stories, he makes the point that his own attempts in this direction were stillborn because of a lack of life experience, a term he does not develop much further, but one that continues to play an important role in his self-portrait as an emerging artist: “I did not reflect—and indeed no young person can—that substance was also required, and that this can only come from our perception of actual experience.” Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, trans. Robert R. Heitner, in Goethe’s Collected Works, vols. 4 and 5, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), here 4:114 (translation modified). All subsequent references to Dichtung and Wahrheit will be cited in the text as PT with page numbers from this translation followed by page numbers from volume 14 of Goethe’s Sämtliche Werke (here 156). Sheehan describes this kind of phase in the production of the Enlightenment Bible. See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 223–40. For an excellent overview of how the understanding of revealed religion (in contrast to natural religion) evolved, between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, from the concept of a religion that demanded a trust in supernatural truths that were not accessible to human reason—albeit they need not necessarily contradict human reason-to an early nineteenth-century understanding of revealed religion as the “positive” religion that spelled out the supernatural beliefs and moral maxims for a concrete, historically specific nation, see Maria Rosa Antognazza, “Revealed Religion: The Continental European Debate,” in Cambridge Histories Online (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 666–82. If therefore the believers of natural religion have no single guarantee that the transgressions that they repeatedly committed against natural law would be forgiven, then what kind of miserable religion is this, which cannot give to its adherents the slightest certainty? One must surely have little self-respect and pay little attention to the miserable situation one gets oneself into through such a bad conceit as the one that is fostered if one considers natural religion a resort of greater certainty than revealed religion. If one does so by pretending that revealed religion would be hard to reconcile with one’s understanding whereas natural religion would only be challenging to those arrogant, incorrigible spirits who are always ready to rebel against everything that exceeds their narrow horizon. (1020)

10. PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C

( 271 )

Here we can find Zedler’s argument for the necessity of revealed religion from an orthodox and a psychological point of view: only a religion that goes back to a God beyond the human imagination and reason can provide the human being with a true sense of security. And what is it, Zedler asks, that authorizes the Bible as divine revelation, rather than a document of a local cult? It is its antiquity and its broad acceptance both by the Jews as the document of their old contract with God and by the Christians as the document of their new contract: “However it is a book that has been recognized as divine for as long as can be remembered; a book that the Jews unanimously made into their rule of faith; and that the Christians have made into their rule of faith for over seventeen-hundred years; the Jews have done so with the writings of the Old Covenant; and the Christians with the writings of the Old and New Covenant together” (1021). Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon. Cited from the online version provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (http://www.zedler-lexikon.de/). Translations are my own. 13. As to the composition of the whole of Poetry and Truth, Bernd Witte makes the point, with regard to the caesura between books 10 and 11, that this constitutes a crucial turning point in which the growing poet comes to the realization that art is not to be used to escape from life but to guide and shape life. See Bernd Witte, “Autobiographie als Poetik. Zur Kunstgestalt von Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit, ” Neue Rundschau 89, Heft 3 (1978): 396–98. 14. See Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 280–84.

PA RT 3 1. Lucian Hölscher, “Öffentlichkeit,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett, 1978), 4:413–67, esp. 437. 2. Benjamin Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2000).

10. PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C 1. See especially Vierhaus’s excellent and very influential article that is still considered the standard article on the topic of German concepts of patriotism. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Patriotismus—Begriff und Realität einer moralisch-politischen Haltung,” in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert. Politische Verfassung, soziales Gefüge, geistige Bewegungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 96–109. 2. In the main part of his study, Blitz investigates three “proto-nationalist” discourses during the Seven Years’ War (1757–1763) and right after. He analyzes 1. the pamphlets and official sermons in Berlin churches as well as sermons for the troops initiated by Frederick’s war publicity efforts during the early years of the war, both trying to reach out to

( 272 )

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

10. PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C

the most diverse and widest audiences; 2. the public and prominent pro-Prussian promotion of patriotism by the scholar Thomas Abbt and the pastor Adolph Dietrich Ortmann and their most vehement critic Friedrich Carl von Moser, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the private discussion of the war among scholars, critics, and poets such as the Berlin-based publicist Friedrich Nicolai, the cathedral secretary, canonicus, and poet Johan Wilhelm Gleim from Halberstadt, the poet Joahnn Peter Uz, and the poet Karl Friedrich Ramler, the influential Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and the playwright and critic Lessing in their letters to each other; and 3. the actual literary productions by some of these poets and writers, ranging from Ewald von Kleist’s heroic poem Cißides und Pares and Gleim’s patriotic Grenadierlieder to Lessing’s play Philotas, Gleim’s versified version of Philotas, and Johann Jakob Bodmer’s parody of Philotas entitled Polytimet. Hans-Martin Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 179–84. According to Blitz, the production of pamphlets was most intense during the first two years of the war. See ibid., 154 and “Publizistische Propaganda: Flugschriften,” 153–71. See ibid., 223–33, 260–81, and, for the reaction to Kleist’s death, 219–23. For a good brief essay on Frederick’s Francophilia, see James Steintrager’s entry, “From Enlightenment Universalism to Romantic Individuality,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 404–8. Lessing, “Einleitung” to “Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend” (1759), in Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 4:455. According to Blitz’s reading of Lessing’s Philotas, the playwright was neither the fiery Prussian patriot in which the nineteenth-century reception of the play wanted to believe nor the clearly cosmopolitan Enlightenment critic of the war propaganda that post-1960s literary scholars wanted him to be. For a far more subtle and convincing account of Lessing’s attitude toward various strands of proto-nationalism throughout his life, see Wilfried Barner, “Res publica litteraria und das Nationale. Zu Lessings europäischer Orientierung,” in Wilfried Barner, ed., Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik. Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang (Munich: Text u. Kritik, 1984), 69–90. See Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 199–202, for a discussion of the “private” epistolary exchange over the objectionable ode; see also 211–15. Blitz emphasizes the fact that both Lessing and Gleim were mainly driven by market and publishing interests and that there was less interest in the political stakes of their differences. Lessing, “Briefe,” 495. See Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 304–6. See Eckhart Hellmuth, “Die Wiedergeburt Friedrich des Großen und der ‘Tod fürs Vaterland.’ Zum patriotischen Selbstverständnis in Preußen in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Eckart Hellmuth and Reinhard Stauber, eds., Nationalismus vor dem Nationalismus (Hamburg: Felix meiner, 1998), 23–54. It is noteworthy that Hellmuth makes the point that the extensive flourishing of patriotic iconography coupled with the cult of a deceased monarch was not at all exclusive to Prussia in the 1780s, but can also be observed in England where the memory of the Seven Years’ War was cultivated and the heroic death for the fatherland celebrated as well; see especially 52–54. On Herder’s attempts to land a

10. PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

( 273 )

proposal for a patriotic institute, see Michael Zaremba, Johann Gottfried Herder. Prediger der Humanität. Eine Biografie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 185. Friedrich Carl von Moser, “Ueber den Gehorsam, im Dienst der Könige und Fürsten,” Politische Wahrheiten (Zürich, 1796), 21–182, here 86 (my translation). See Redekop’s discussion of Moser, which does not at all acknowledge the irony of the essay. Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2000), 49–50. Friedrich Carl von Moser, “Das Publikum,” in Johann Jakob und Friedrich Carl Moser, Freie Worte aus der Zeit des Absolutismus des 18. Jahrhunderts, Vorkämpfer Deutscher Freiheit, vol. 43 (Munich: Buchhandlung Nationalverein, 1912), 54–59, here 54–55. All subsequent references will be made parenthetically; translations are my own. For an earlier publication of “Das Publikum,” see Moser’s Gesammelte moralische und politische Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1763). For a comprehensive study of Friedrich Carl von Moser’s writings in the context of his work and in the context of enlightened absolutism’s relationship to the upper-level members of its bureaucracy, see Angela Stirken, Der Herr und der Diener. Friedrich Carl von Moser und das Beamtenwesen seiner Zeit (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrsheid, 1984). Gerhard Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1961). See Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 315–16; and Friedrich Carl von Moser, Von dem deutschen National-Geist (Frankfurt, 1765), 75. Thomas Abbt, Letters 178–180, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend 11 ( July 1761): 3–38. Moses Mendelssohn, Letter 181, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend 11 ( July 1761): 39–58. Abbt, Letter 252, Briefe, die neueste Literattur betreffend 15 (August 1762): 143–44. This passage is also partially quoted in Redekop, Enlightenment and Community, 129. On Abbt’s indebtedness to Montesquieu and to Shaftesbury, see Eva Piirimäe, “Dying for the Fatherland: Thomas Abbt’s Theory of Aesthetic Patriotism,” History of European Ideas 35 (2009): 194–208. Thomas Abbt, “Vorbericht zur ersten Ausgabe (1761)” in “Vom Tode für das Vaterland,” in Vermischte Werke (Berlin, 1780), 1:2–4, here 3 (my translation). Future references will be made parenthetically. Maybe the good recommendation arrived just a few years too late to have a general decree command that preachers would have to teach from the pulpit the doctrine of dying for the fatherland; there would have been no doubt about their swift obedience. Each one would have tried to outperform his colleague. Within the shortest amount of time our churches would have become recruitment centers. The spiritual/secular soul merchants would have made good use of their rhetorical gifts, and there would have been grateful men among the officers. The entire business of recruitment would have been easier and more decent than it was during the past war in some of the German lands, when during the service the church portals were occupied by soldiers and all of the middle aged and younger males on their way out were forcefully recruited and abducted by the commanding officers. . . . The author of this text seems to have been wondering like that Spaniard who asked whether Lutherans were humans too? He certainly meant

( 274 )

10. PAT R I O T I C I N VO CAT I O N S O F T H E P U B LI C

by fatherland nothing but Brandenburg; now, if other Germans also believe to have a fatherland; if there would be patriots from Brandenburg and from Austria, as one even believes it to be the case in Berlin? If beyond that there would be a significant number of a third kind of patriots, who also entertained the idea to have a fatherland that would, however, have interests different from the other two? If those two parties would fully adopt the principles of the author, if the Roman Catholic Church, in referring to the merit of good works and by way of other such means, would advertise death in defense of the fatherland attacked by the heretics, and if they would, according to good Russian custom, promise a free ticket to heaven to those that would fall by the sword; if the imagination of the common people would be thus artfully excited to fight not just for their fatherland but also for their faith . . . —what would have become of all of that? Crusades! Entire provinces would go against each other, and even that would not have been enough; it would not have been less than an entire civil war, it would have amounted to murder and devastation in the fashion of Catilina, this would have happened especially in those lands inhabited by adherents of several different religious parties. Friederich Carl von Moser, “Der Prediger,” in Reliquien, 2. Verbesserte Auflage (Frankfurt, 1766), 138–43, here 140–43 (my translation).

24. Lessing wrote two plays that both critically engage with the Seven Years’ War. Philotas (1759) criticizes the overzealous concept of military honor as “dying for one’s fatherland” and Minna von Barnhelm oder das Soldatenglück questions the possibility of transferring the happy equality and solidarity among soldiers (the soldiers’ happiness) into a civilian state of peace.

1 1. R E A L A N D V I RT UA L AU D I EN C ES I N H ER D ER ’ S CO N C EP T O F T H E M O D ER N P U B LI C 1. See Michael Zaremba, Johann Gottfried Herder. Prediger der Humanität. Eine Biographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 47. 2. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991). 3. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?” in Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 1:40–55, here 40–41. All translations of Herder’s texts are my own. 4. In this context see also Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 73–98. 5. Herder, “Haben wir noch das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?” Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 7:301–38, here 323. Further references will be given parenthetically. 6. See Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, preface by Jacques Derrida, “L’archéologie du frivole” (Auvers-sur-Oise: Galilée, 1973 [1746]). 7. For Herder’s philosophy of language, see his “Über den Ursprung der Sprache,” in Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 1:695–810. For the artist’s ability to present

11. R E A L A N D V I RT UA L AU D I EN C ES

( 275 )

to his audience with the human capacity of world-making through human language, see also Herder’s “Shakespear,” in Werke, 2:498–521. 8. For a recent study of Herder’s concept of Volk and Nation with regard to the question of language, territory, and law and Herder’s rejection of multinational units, see Karol Sauerland, “Herders Auffassung von Volk und Nation,” in Maja Razbojnikova-Frateva and Hans-Gerd Winter, eds., Interkulturalität und Nationalkultur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bamberg: Thelem, 2006), 21–34. For a most thorough and differentiated overview of Herder’s concept of “Volk,” including its reception in German philosophy and political thought throughout the nineteenth century, see Ulrich Gaier, “Herders Volksbegriff und seine Rezeption,” in Tilman Borsche, ed., Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten. Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre (Munich: Fink, 2006), 32–57. Gaier shows that whereas Herder uses the singular Volk in a general anthropological fashion in order to denote an ancient, unspoiled relationship that connects a collectivity to its language and cultural roots, the plural Völker is used in order to denote the different stages this original relationship toward a more natural relationship to human language and culture will undergo throughout the course of history, which will be reflected in folksongs and folktales. Nation, by contrast, means always the historically, geographically specific relationship of one collectivity to its linguistic and cultural roots. The task of each nation is to aim at the development of the full human potential for each and all of its members. In conjunction with this article see also Ulrich Gaier’s discussion of Herder’s notion of Humanität in the context of his anthropological assumptions and his philosophy of history: “Humanität als Aufgabe. Physis als Norm bei Johann Gottfried Herder,” in Manfred Beetz, Jörn Garber, and Heinz Thoma, eds., Physis und Norm. Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert, vol. 14 in Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert—Supplementa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 13–28. According to Gaier, Herder emphasizes in his philosophy of history, on the one hand, the decrease and decline of a primal, natural relationship of man to nature and, on the other hand, man’s increasing capacity for progress and world making, which compensates for the loss of natural, primal bonds to nature; finally there is also each individual’s capacity for self-perfection grounded in the physical, concrete circumstances and the human being’s defining capacity to transcend these by working with them as a concrete, embodied, sensing, and feeling creature. 9. Herder is, however, opposed to multinational units. See Sauerland, “Herders Auffassung von Volk und Nation.” And Herder is also opposed to any unifying teleological concept of progress. For a study of Herder as the critic of the traditional notion of translatio imperii as well as later teleological concepts, being instead the advocate of the diversity of individual cultures, see Aleida Assmannn, “Herder zwischen Nationalkulturen und Menschheitsgedächtnis,” Saeculum 52, no. 1 (2001): 41–54. 10. In this context see also the essay by Schneider, which examines Herder’s appeal to the “invisible church” as it takes off from Lessing’s freemason dialogues “Ernst und Falk” in contrast to Friedrich Schlegel’s reception of the same text by Lessing. Schneider analyzes the various concepts and practices of sociability implied by Lessing, and then Friedrich Schlegel and Herder, and points out the degree to which Herder in his fifty-seventh “Letter for the Promotion of Humanity” (“Haben wir noch das Publikum und Vaterland der

( 276 )

11. R E A L A N D V I RT UA L AU D I EN C ES

Alten?”), where he explicitly refers to the Lessing text, distances himself from all kinds of live communities exclusively in favor of the imagined community of the readers of print: Helmut Schneider, “Die unsichtbare Kirche der Schriftsteller: Geselligkeit und Bildung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühromantik (Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Herder),” in Anja Ernst and Paul Geyer, eds., Die Romantik: ein Gründungsmythos der Europäischen Moderne (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2010), 145–65. 11. For an essay comparing Kant’s and Herder’s concept of Humanität in view of today’s debate about universality in the context of anticolonialism, see Bernd Fischer, “Von der Moral zur Kultur: Kant und Herder,” in Acta Germanica: German Studies in Africa 37 (2009): 107–17. 12. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010).

12 . M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C 1. Keith Michael Baker, “Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,” in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, ed., Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 204–46. 2. In a very recent piece Habermas discusses today’s public sphere, especially the function of an “educated journalistic press,” which is threatened by the loss of advertising due to the Internet. He articulates his fears for the loss of the foundations of a deliberate democracy, for the latter needs public debate, that is forming opinions, bundling and sorting and prioritizing public concerns in a critical fashion, different from the mere representation of interests and different from mere opinion that can be polled. See Jürgen Habermas, “Zur Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit,” in his Ach Europa. Kleine Politische Schriften XI (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 131–91. 3. Most interesting in this context is the work of James Siegel (building on the work of Benedict Anderson) for a colonial context and, more recently with regard to an American context, Michael Warner; see James Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic. Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) as well as his Public/Counter Public (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 4. See Rudolf Stichweh, “Universität und Öffentlichkeit. Zur Semantik des Öffentlichen in der frühneuzeitlichen Universitätsgeschichte,” in “Öffentlichkeit” im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Wolf Jäger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997), 103–16. Stichweh argues that the main structural transformation of the university during the eighteenth century consisted in its changing self-definition as public (öffentlich) in opposition to private institutions, which meant more specific, more specialized, but also more elementary as opposed to the institutions of learning that addressed a very wide, general audience that extended beyond local constituents. Eventually, according to Stichweh, the “public” nature of the university was entirely transformed by its increasing disciplinarization and exclusivity. 5. See Rudolf Vierhaus, “‘Theoriam cum praxi zu vereinigen. . . . ’ Idee, Gestalt und Wirkung wissenschaftlicher Sozietäten im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Detlef Döring and Kurt Nowak, eds.,

12. M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

( 277 )

Res publica litteraria. Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Sebastian Neumeister und Conrad Wiedemann (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), 1:7–18. Notable exceptions in this case are the work of Jonathan Sheehan, especially his The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); on Michael Warner on evangelicalism in North America, see “The Evangelical Public Sphere,” University of Pennsylvania Libraries A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography for 2009. It is exactly in this respect that I differ considerably from Bosse, who relates Kant’s prizewinning essay to the project of Enlightenment pedagogy. Whereas Bosse constructs a continuity between Thomasius, Herder, and the pedagogical reforms affecting the universities as a top-down pedagogical program ultimately directed by Frederick II, I would like to emphasize the discontinuity between stealth pedagogy and Populärphilosophie, on the one hand, and the transformation and mobilization of the republic of letters under Enlightened absolutism, on the other hand. The criterion of distinction between the two concerns what I describe as the arrangements of the communicative situation: whereas the transformation of the republic of letters operates under an exclusive but egalitarian model that encourages the critique of authority, stealth pedagogy operates under an inclusive but authoritarian model. See Heinrich Bosse, “Der geschärfte Befehl zum Selbstdenken. Ein Erlaß des Ministers v. Fürst an die preußischen Universitäten im Mai 1770,” in Diskursanalysen II—Institution Universität, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler, Manfred Schneider, and Samuel Weber (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1990), 31–61. Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 11:51–61, here 55–56 (my translation). See Herder, Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 302. Rudolf Stichweh explains Kant’s unusual use of the terms private and public as Kant’s intervention in a university setting where the university scholars had become too specialized and professionalized and had lost their appeal to a general audience, which according to his argument constituted the earlier mission of the university. To a certain extent my argument agrees with Stichweh’s take, i.e., to the extent that Kant seems to favor an imagined, “ideal” audience of the generally educated reader. However, Stichweh does not comment on the aspect of the institutional, official “authorization” of the “private speaker,” and Kant’s apparent opposition to that, which demands a critical reader, who can potentially talk back, an element that appears not at all grounded in the didactic, hierarchical university setting, but much rather in the egalitarian republic of letters fostering lively exchanges. See Heinrich Bosse, “Die gelehrte Republik,” in “Öffentlichkeit” im 18., 51–76. Bosse traces the dissolution of the republic of letters through the introduction of the vernacular and of media of mass publication: literary authorship, no longer predicated on acquired knowledge (of Latin and Greek) and skills (such as rhetorical facility), became universally accessible— anyone could become an author who had “genius” or was able to satisfy the market. This was not a linear process. When, for instance, the first Berlin Academy (Electoral Brandenburg Society of Sciences) under Prince-elector Frederick III of Brandenburg (1657–1713) was created in 1700, Leibniz, its founding president, made it part of its mission to cultivate German as a language of learning. In 1744, however, when Frederick II

( 278 )

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

12. M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C

(1712–1786) founded the Académie Royale des sciences et belles-lettres, he made French the official language and chose a francophone secretary of the academy. In practice, submissions to the academy tended to arrive in three languages: a small minority of generally quite learned submissions in Latin, with the remainder fairly evenly divided between German and French. Some of the French submissions, however, were barely legible, as their authors were obviously quite incompetent in the language and wrote a fantastic French of their own invention. See the analysis of the submissions in response to the question of 1771 in Cordula Neis, Anthropologie im Sprachdenken des 18. Jahrhunderts. Die Berliner Preisfrage nach dem Ursprung der Sprachen (1771) (New York: de Gruyter, 2003), 70–82 and 102–4. Regarding popular philosophy in Germany, and especially the programmatic aspects that led to the falling out between Kant and his student Herder over Kant’s critical turn— which, thus Herder, betrayed the mission of philosophy as a widely accessible enterprise— see John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially chapters 2–4. For the fate of the French terms, see the article by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Rolf Reichardt, “Philosophe, Philosophie” in Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820, no. 3, ed. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985), 7–88. See See Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 55. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Gedanken über die Herrnhuter” [1750?], in Werke und Briefe, vol. 1: Werke 1743–1750, ed. Jürgen Stenzel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 935–45, here 935. Future citations will be given parenthetically. This, of course, was the choice made by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, who decided to abstain from all engagement in theological debates in order to devote his energies exclusively to the far more relevant domain of ethical action by founding the Pietist community in Herrnhut in 1722. Lessing’s choice of title for this manuscript and the fact that the text ends with a discussion of Zinzendorf has led some Lessing scholars to argue that Lessing advocated the equivalent of Zinzendorf ’s choice: a return to basic ethics and abstention from learned debate. In the first half of the eighteenth century, theological writings dominated the German book market and, even in 1750, new publications in theology and religion—ranging from learned theological debates in Latin to speculations about Christian doctrine and religion by church people and laypersons to anonymous invectives against religion—outnumbered those in philosophy. Regarding the quantitative shifts between religious/theological and philosophical/secular writings, see the tables in Wilfried Barner, Helmuth Kiesel, Volker Badstübner, Rolf Kellner, Martin Kramer, and Gunter E. Grimm, Lessing: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung, 4th ed. (Munich: Beck, 1981), 76. See William Boehart, Politik und Religion. Studien zum Fragmentenstreit (Reimarus, Goeze, Lessing) (Schwarzenbek: Dr. R. Martienss, 1988). Bodo Plachta, Damnatur—Toleratur—Admittitur. Studien und Dokumente zur literarischen Zensur im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1994), 27–32.

12. M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C

( 279 )

21. Letter to Karl Lessing, Wolfenbüttel, August 11, 1778, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 12: Briefe von und an Lessing 1776–1781, ed. Helmuth Kiesel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1994), 185–86. 22. See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 443–50. 23. See Karl Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit (Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1929). 24. Cf. e.g. Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Erlöser der Menschen. Nach unsern drei ersten Evangelien [1796], in Werke, vol. 9/1: Theologische Schriften, ed. Christoph Bultmann und Thomas Zippert (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 609–724. Herder articulates a position regarding the gospels and the nature of Jesus that is no less radical—but he does so in a homiletic mode and in his officially function as a supervisor of the training of Lutheran theologians. 25. This is the argument of William Boehart, “Zur Öffentlichkeitsstruktur des Streites um die Wolffenbütteler Fragmente,” in Lessing und die Toleranz. Beiträge der vierten internationalen Konferenz der Lessing Society in Hamburg vom 27.–29. Juni 1985, ed. Peter Freimark, Franklin Kopitzsch, and Helga Slessarev (Munich: text + kritik, 1986), 146–57. 26. Lessing’s most sustained argument on how to deal in specific terms with the claims of revealed religion, his “Education of the Human Race” (“Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts”) is largely an immediate extension of his commentary on Reimarus. 27. See book 7, chapter 9 of St. Augustine’s Confessions and cf. the conversion beneath the fig tree in book 8, chapter 12. 28. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Eine Tragödie, in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, part 1: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7/1: Faust. Texte, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 11–464, here 61. 29. “The Testament of John” provoked extremely contradictory reactions: Goeze immediately recognized it as an attack on core Christian doctrine and indicted the arrogance inherent in Lessing’s offering his text as a substitute for the divinely inspired gospel. He was highly sensitive to the way in which this text, by way of generic hybridity and the staging of various speech situations, ridiculed any kind of authoritative proclamation, a fundamental challenge to the authority of the gospel. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft [1777] and Das Testament Johannis [1777], in Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Werke 1774–1778, ed. Arno Schilson (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 437–45 and 447–54. For Goeze’s reaction see the commentary, ibid., 1003. By contrast, Bollacher accepts the conciliatory tone of Lessing’s announcement of the text at face value. Martin Bollacher, Lessing: Vernunft und Geschichte. Untersuchungen zum Problem religiöser Aufklärung in den Spätschriften (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978), 145. 30. According to Bollacher, the text can be reduced to the last will and hence to the testament of John, articulated by the dying evangelist: “Children, love one another!” (Lessing, Werke und Briefe 8:451). As such, Bollacher argues, “The Testament of John” stands in direct relation to Lessing’s early manuscript about the Moravians in that it insists on the utmost importance of a Christian ethic, in view of which all doctrinal strife becomes irrelevant. In the case of the early manuscript, we have seen that Lessing invokes the dichotomy of scholarly or doctrinal debate and relevant ethical action only to undermine the simple opposition and to insist that—even though individual discursive articulations of any kind

( 280 )

12. M O B I LI Z I N G A C R I T I CA L P U B LI C

of position cannot lay claim to ultimate truth and must not be mistaken for a valid substitute for ethical action—the exercise of human freedom must pass through verbal reasoning despite the latter’s inevitable pitfalls. It would be strange if the mature Lessing had abandoned this commitment to critical engagement with the forms of verbal reasoning and instead preached a simple, consensus-inviting precept. 31. Lessing, Werke und Briefe, 8:452. 32. See also Wolfram Mauser, “Toleranz und Frechheit. Zur Strategie von Lessings Streitschriften,” in Lessing und die Toleranz, 276–90. 33. The actual historical example Kant points to are exactly those observers of the French Revolution who watched the events with great interest and passion and articulated their partisanship (Theilnehmung) so clearly as to risk losing their professional posts. See Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten [1798], in Werke (Akademieausgabe), vol. 7: Der Streit der Fakultäten. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Berlin: Reimer, 1917), 85.

I N D EX

Abbt, Thomas, 190, 195, 196–204, 244, 272n2; Herder and, 201–2, 206; Lessing and, 197; Moser and, 185, 197, 200, 202; patriotism and, 200, 243; Seven Years’ War and, 203; see also specific works Académie Royale des sciences et belleslettres, 278n12 Academy Annals, 129 Academy competitions, 226 Academy of Nancy, 129 Adam (biblical figure), 9, 25 Addison, Joseph, 11, 36, 256n1 Aesthetic education, 144 Aesthetic experience, 9, 10, 62, 67–68, 158–65; aesthetic judgment and, 11; authorship and, xiv; beautiful soul and, 146–47; contemplation and, 11; disinterested interest and, xvi; mindfulness and, 24; Strasbourg Cathedral and, 52; Townsend on, 251n3; universality of, xxvi Aesthetic ideas, 257n8 Aesthetic judgment, xiii, 30; aesthetic experience and, 11; beauty and, 32, 40; disinterested interest and, 74; Kant and, 27, 32; originality and, xiv; Townsend on, 251n3; universal validity of, xiv Aesthetic pleasure, 5 Aesthetics, see specific topics

Aesthetic subjectivity, xv Agathon (Wieland), 144 Allgemeine Betrachtung über die Triebe der Thiere hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (H. S. Reimarus), 33 “Die Alpen” (Haller), 41–43 Anderson, Benedict, xxiii, 207–8, 276n3 Anidjar, Gil, xxv Animals: automatism and, 29, 254n18; behavioral patterns of, 29, 33–34; classificatory approach to, xix; instinct and, xvii, 2–3, 28–29, 33–39; species change and, 45–48 Anonymous audiences, 127 Anthropocentric teleology, 47 Anti-intellectualism, 93 “Antique Matters (Antikes)” (Goethe), 59–60 Antiquity, 182; ancient artifacts, 59; classical, 51, 54, 200 Architecture, 72–73; art and, 65–66; edification and, 65; Gothic, 63–64; subjectivity and, 63; see also Strasbourg Cathedral Arndt, Johann, 79, 85, 87; Bible and, 17, 24; contemplation and, 73–74; dogma and, 25; Fall of Adam and Eve and, 9; Pietism and, 7; spiritual exercises and, 7, 70, 73; teleology and, 17–18; verbal emblems and, 8, 10–12, 19–20, 24–25; see also specific works

( 282 )

Arnold, Gottfried, 87, 88, 92 Art, 72; architecture and, 65–66; as autonomous entity, 1; form of, 258n8; function of, 158–65; Greek, 59, 212–13, 215; intelligent design and, 147; mirroring function of, 69; public and, 212–18; religion and, 147–48; as techne, 58; as unique original, 68; value of, 5 Artistic production, xv, 38, 75 Asad, Talal, xxv Ashley-Cooper, Anthony, see Shaftesbury Attention, practices of, 5–7, 25 “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment” (Daston), 6 Audiences, 182; anonymous, 127; live, xxiv, 226, 244–45; of Rousseau, 126–40, 264n24 Augsburg Confession, 79 Augustine, 70, 78, 178, 263n17; Bible and, 235; conversion and, 80, 121, 179, 235, 238; J. E. Petersen and, 106 The Author, Art, and the Market (Woodmansee), 1 Authorial independence, 167 Authorial intention, 146 Authorship, see specific topics Autobiography, xviii, 79, 81, 89–91, 177; of J. E. Petersen, 82–83, 93–107; “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” as, 118, 124; spiritual, xv, 110 Automatism, 29, 254n18 Bacon, Francis, 55 Baker, Keith, xxii, 247n1 Bakhtin, Michael, 111, 114 Baroque emblem books, 11, 19–20, 22, 250n8 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 167, 169, 170 Bates, David, 254n18 Baumgarten, Alexander, 5, 249n2 Beaumont, Christophe de, 112, 113, 120 Beautiful soul, 143–47 Beauty, 36, 39, 71, 75–76; aesthetic judgment and, 32, 40; disinterested interest and, 27;

I N D EX

language and, 44; line of, 47; in nature, 38, 40–42, 47–49, 75, 146; poetry and, 41–44 Behavioral patterns, 75; of animals, 29, 33–34 Beherzigungen (Moser), 197 Beholder, 12, 36, 44, 51, 63, 69, 71–72 Belle âme, see Beautiful soul Berlin Academy, 222 Berne Academy, 225 Bible, xxiv–xxv, 87, 269n7; Arndt and, 17, 24; Augustine and, 235; Moser and, 150; J. E. Petersen and, 100–1, 103; revealed religion and, 149–58; scholarship on, 148; study groups, xvi, 86 Biodiversity, 33, 36, 47–48 Biographies, xxi; see also Autobiography Bisky, Jens, 257n3 Blitz, Hans-Martin, 187–90, 195, 271n2, 272n7 Blumenbach, Hans, xix, 40 Bonnet, Charles, 6 Bosse, Heinrich, 277n7 Botany, 40, 45, 62, 68 Bourgeois public sphere, xxi, 181, 183 Bourignon, Antoinette, 88–89 Boyle, Nicholas, 268n1 Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 42, 43 Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 188–89, 197–98, 203–4, 244 Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Herder), 185 Buffon, xix, xx, 29 Burgelin, Pierre, 112–13 Bürger (citizen), 182, 198 Bürgerlich (civic), 182, 203 Burke, Edmund, 265n24 Calvinism, 112–13, 125, 263n19 Cambridge Platonists, 251n3 Camera obscura, 12, 13 Cassirer, Ernst, 27–28 Catholic Church, 112–13, 121, 125; Calvinism and, 263n19; confession and, 116–17;

I N D EX

Goethe and, 148; profession of faith and, 119–20; Seven Years’ War and, 187 Celebrity authors, xiii, xxi Censorship, 186, 208; bourgeois public sphere and, 183; by Duke of Saxony, xvii, 239; by Frederick III, 242; public gatherings and, xv; Rousseau and, 139; self-censorship, 223 Chartier, Roger, xxi, 247n1 Christianity, 78, 91, 100, 112–13; Arndt and, 20–21, 24–25; Arnold and, 88; communion and, 123; confession and, 79; conscience and, 54; dogma of, 9–10; Germany and, 195; Goethe and, 171–72; Lessing and, 234–38; meditational practice and, 71; nature and, 48; original sin and, xvii, xxvi, 9–10, 32; orthodoxy, xviii; J. E. Petersen and, 103; Pietism and, 86–87; profession of faith and, 120; secularism and, xxv; see also Bible; On True Christianity; specific denominations Citizen, see Bürger City Opera, 135–37 Civic, see Bürgerlich Classical antiquity, 51, 54, 200 Collegia pietatis, 86, 91 Common good, 30, 194 Common public, 194 Communion, 123–24 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 29, 33, 214 Confession, 78–79, 115–17, 119 Confessional discourse, 79, 177, 246; Goethe and, 141; Pietism and, 80, 83, 91, 105–6; popularization of, xv; subjectivity and, 142 Confessions (Augustine), 70, 80, 106, 121, 178, 263n17 Confessions (Rousseau), 77–81, 106–7, 109, 125–28, 137–39, 263n17, 264n24 “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” (Goethe), xv, 143–47, 178 Conjectures on Original Composition (Young), 2, 53

( 283 )

Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History (Kant), 37 Contemplation, 2, 12, 23, 27; aesthetic experience and, 11; Arndt and, 73–74; attention practices and, 5, 25; beauty and, 39; disinterested interest and, 36–37; Herder and, 11; human nature and, 51; nature and, 122; Pietism and, 19; pleasure and, 32; Shaftesbury and, 11; Strasbourg Cathedral and, 62, 69 Contest of Faculties (Kant), 242 Contrat social (Rousseau), 139 Conversion narratives, 90; Pietist, 82; secularization of, 110 Courtly behavior, 110 Cranston, Maurice, 127 Critical public, 219–22, 235–46; Herder and, 220; Lessing and, 220, 229–35; “What Is Enlightenment?” and, 222–29 Criticism and Crisis (Koselleck), 247n1 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 11, 40, 58, 244 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 227 Culture, 39, 52, 148; book, xvi; of confession, 79; French, 164; German, 164, 211; Greek, 208, 215; Hebrew, 209; of mondanité, 264n20; oral, 183, 220; preprint, 208; print, 208, 220; Roman, 210; salon, xxii, 126–27, 179, 264n20; of sensibility, 103, 105; written, 220 Darnton, Robert, 247n1 Daston, Lorraine, 6–7, 18 Debate, xviii, 182, 225–27, 240; Bible study groups and, xvi; public, 87, 128, 183, 225; rational, 223; theological, xxiv–xxv, 85 De l’esprit des lois (Montesquieu), 198 Demagoguery, 164 Descartes, René, 29, 113, 254n18 Le Devin du village (Rousseau), 127, 129, 131–32, 135–36 Devotional emblems, 16 Devotional literature, 1, 70

( 2 84 )

Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), see Poetry and Truth Diderot, Denis, 127, 164–65 Dijon Academy, 81, 127, 131, 225 Dilherr, Johann Michael, 249n6 Discourse Networks (Kittler), 247n1 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau), 30, 37, 112 Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Rousseau), 129 Disinterested interest, 1–3, 39; aesthetic experience and, xvi; aesthetic judgments and, 74; beauty and, 27; contemplation and, 36–37; Kant and, 11, 25, 74, 124; moral sentiment and, 31; pleasure and, 37; Shaftesbury and, 27–28, 74–75 Dogma, 124, 148, 149; Arndt and, 25; conversion narratives and, 82; in everyday experience, 10; profession of faith and, 109 “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” (Herder), 205 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 131 Duke of Saxony, 22, 233; censorship by, xvii, 239 “Dying for One’s Fatherland” (Abbt), 201 Edict of Nantes, 104 Edification, 65, 72 Educated journalistic press, 276n2 Education, 142; aesthetic, 144; “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” and, 113, 124 “The Education of the Human Race” (Lessing), 153, 156 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 247n1 Ellrich, Robert, 264n24 Emblems, 249n6; Baroque, 11, 19–20, 22, 250n8; devotional, 16; verbal, 8–13, 20, 22–25; visual, 8, 11–13, 19–20, 22–23 Émile (Rousseau), xvii, 111–15, 142, 263n13; confession and, 79; profession of faith and, 178; secularization and, 83

I N D EX

Empiricism, xviii, 251n3 Engelsing, Robert, 247n1 England, xxi, xxiii; Bible in, xxv; Puritans in, 86 Enlightenment, see specific topics Enlightenment and Community (Redekop), 184 The Enlightenment Bible (Sheehan), xxiv Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Condillac), 214 Essay competition, 226–27 “An Essay on Man” (Pope), 6 Exercitia pietatis, 86 Fabian, Bernhard, 55 Fall of Adam and Eve, 9–10, 12, 155 Fama, 66 Farbenlehre (Goethe), 62 Faust (Goethe), 167, 235 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 2 Final ends, models of, xiv Fischer, Bernd, 24 Formations of the Secular (Asad), xxv Foucault, Michel, xix, xx, xxi, 78 “Fragments of an Unnamed Author (Fragmente eines Ungenannten)” (Lessing), xviii, 233, 241, 242 France, xxi, xxiii; culture of, 164; language of, 163, 278n12; literature of, 163–64 Francisci, Erasmus, 249n6 Francke, August Hermann, 86 Frederick II (king), 190, 196, 277n7 Frederick III (prince-elector), 242, 277n12 Freemasonry, xxiii French Revolution, 217, 265n24, 280n33; imagined community and, xvi; public gatherings and, 205 Gelehrter (scholar), 224 General confession, 116 General Reflexions on the Drives of Animals, especially on their Technical Drives and Skills (H. S. Reimarus), 33

I N D EX

Genius: aesthetic ideas and, 257n8; Goethe and, 62; local, 54; originality and, 51; vegetable, 53, 55–56, 76; see also Original genius Georgics (Virgil), 44, 48 Gerhard, Johann, 8 Germany, xxi, xxiii; Bible in, xxv; Christianity and, 195; culture of, 164, 211; language of, 190, 205, 211–12, 277n12; nationalism of, 187, 205; original genius in, 2; patriotism in, 195, 200; public sphere of, 184 Gessner, Salomon, 139 Gierl, Martin, xxiv–xxv Ginsborg, Hannah, 255n1 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 188, 272n2 Globalized religion, xxv Glory, 134 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xvii–xviii, 73, 82, 158–65, 235, 257n1, 267n1; architecture and, 63–64; authorship and, xxi, 82, 179; beautiful soul and, 143–47; Bible and, 81, 148, 149–58; biblical stories and, 270n9; Catholic Church and, 148; as celebrity author, xiii; Christianity and, 171–72; confessional discourse and, 141; Diderot and, 164–65; dissertation of, 159; edification and, 65; form of art and, 258n8; French literature and, 163–64; genius and, 62; Herder and, 163; literary productions of, 167–68; Mohamed and, 167–68, 171; nature and, 38, 40, 48–49; prophets and, 170; revealed religion and, 149–58; Rousseau and, 81, 164–66; species change and, 45–47; spiritual autobiography and, xv; Voltaire and, 164, 166; Wandering Jew and, 167–68, 173; Winckelmann essay by, 52, 59; see also specific works Goetz (Goethe), 167 Goeze, Melchior, 233, 239 Goldsmith, Oliver, 163 Goodman, Dena, 247n1 Gothic architecture, 63

( 285 )

Göttingen academy, 227–28 Government, 196, 199 Greeks, 201; art of, 59, 212–13, 215; culture of, 208, 215 Greschat, Martin, 250n8 Ground of the soul, 249n2 Habermas, Jürgen, xxi–xxiii, 181, 218, 247n1, 276n2 Haller, Albrecht von, xix, xx, 41–45, 48 Hanseatic League, 206 Harsdörffer, Johann Georg, 249n6 Hebrew culture, 209 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 144 “Heidnisches” (Goethe), 60 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 28, 61–62, 72, 190, 195, 243–45, 249n2; Abbt and, 201–2, 206; animals and, xvii; art and, 212–18; contemplation and, 11; critical public and, 220; Goethe and, 163; invisible church and, xxvi, 275n10; language and, 27, 36, 38; live audience and, xxiv; nationalism and, 205, 217; original genius and, 56–58, 76; philosophical schools and, 213; print technology and, 209; public and, 205–7, 210–13; public of literature and, xvi, xviii, 186; Shakespeare and, 52, 55–57, 76; teleology and, 56; Volk and, 275n8; see also specific works Hesse, Carla, 247n1 Historie der Wiedergebohrnen (History of the Born-Again, Reitz), 89, 91, 92 History, xviii, xx, 36–38 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 194 Hogarth, William, 47 Hölscher, Lucian, 182 Holy Roman Empire, 189–90, 195–96 Humanism, 112; neo-humanism, xvii, xviii, 142; pagan, 60; secular, xxv–xxvi Humanität, 275n8 Human nature, 142; contemplation and, 51; Hobbes and, 27; Kant and, 25

( 286 )

Hume, David, 27, 30, 112 Hutcheson, Francis, 27, 30 Ideales Publikum (ideal public), 210, 216, 220, 226, 240 Imagination, 34, 37 Imagined Communities (Anderson), xxiii Imagined community, 184, 199, 213, 217; French Revolution and, xvi; nationalism and, 207–8 Imitation, 53, 58, 106 Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy (Arnold), 88, 91 Impartial public, 193 Ingenium; see Talent Innate ideas, 29, 75 Innovation, 75–76, 147–48; of Goethe, 174–75; Kant and, 58; Young and, 55 “Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit” (Shaftesbury), 30 Instinct, xv, 75; animals and, xvii, 2–3, 28–29, 33–39; Kant and, 36–38; language and, 36; memory and, 29; moral sentiment and, 30–32 Intellectual property, 1 Intelligent design, 18, 40, 56, 147 Interdisciplinary institutes, 221 Invisible church, xxvi, 275n10 Italian opera, 266n32 Jerome, Saint, 236–37 Journal publications, 221 Judaism, 151, 153, 156 Judeo-Christian tradition, 81 Judgment, 37; worldly, 80–81; see also Aesthetic judgment Judt, Tony, 218 Julie (Rousseau), 112, 138, 139, 144 Kaiser, Gerhard, 195 Kant, Immanuel, xiii, 28, 87, 183, 244–45, 248n7, 251n3, 255n1; aesthetic judgment and, 27,

I N D EX

32; beauty and, 40, 71; critical public and, 220, 222–29; disinterested interest and, 11, 25, 74, 124; genius and, 257n8; human nature and, 25; innovation and, 58; instinct and, 36–38; original genius and, 58; Pietism and, 74; public sphere and, 242; republic of letters and, 184, 186, 240; sensus communis and, xvi; taste and, 31; teleology and, xx; Woodmansee and, 1; see also specific works Kittler, Friedrich, 247n1 Kleist, Ewald von, 187–88 Klettenberg, Susanne von, 172, 191 Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 167, 169 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 150, 190 Koselleck, Reinhart, 247n1 Labadie, Jean de, 85 Landes, Joan, xxii Landfester, Ulrike, 269n7 Language, 35–38, 151, 162; beauty and, 44; development of, 214; French, 163, 278n12; German, 190, 205, 211–12, 277n12; Herder and, 27, 36, 38; instinct and, 36; Latin, 220–21, 223–24, 237; public and, 208–12; shared, 208 Laocöon (Lessing), 40–41 Largier, Niklaus, 249n2 Larson, James, xix–xx, 248n7 Latin language, 220–21, 223–24, 237 Laugier, Marc Antoine, 64, 66 Lavater, 169, 170, 172 Lead, Jane, 88–89 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 167, 169 Le Roy, Charles Georges, 29, 33, 34 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, xviii, 75, 156, 245– 46, 272n7, 279n29; Abbt and, 197; animals and, xvii; Christianity and, 234–38; critical public and, 220, 229–35; Haller and, 43; Jesus Christ and, 232, 234–35, 236; nature and, 38, 40–41, 43–45; public and, 203–4; reason and, 231; H. S. Reimarus and, 236,

I N D EX

241; republic of letters and, 240; Seven Years’ War and, 188–89, 274n24; teleology and, 48–49, 153; see also specific works Letters Concerning the Newest Literature, 188–89 Letters for the Promotion of Humanity (Herder), 185 Lettre à M. d ‘Alembert (Rousseau), 112 Lettre sur la musique françoise (Rousseau), 136–37, 138 Levite of Ephraim, 139 Life sciences, xix Life-writing, 80, 82 Lilti, Antoine, 247n1 Linnaeus, Carl, xx Literacy, xvi, 1, 86 Literature, 110–11; confessional, 261n20; devotional, 1, 70; entertainment, 1; French, 163–64; meditational, 7–8; public and, 212–18; public of literature, xvi, xviii, 186, 216–18, 244–45; wisdom, xiv Live audience, xxiv, 226, 244–45 Live performance, 160, 162, 216 Local genius, 54 Locke, John, 28, 29 Lowth, Robert, 148, 152 Lucian (satirist), 151 Lully, Jean-Baptiste de, 130–31 Luther, Martin, 7, 85, 88, 151–52, 250n8 Lutheran Church, xxiv–xxv, 25, 85, 234, 250n8 “Mahomeds Gesang” (Goethe), 167 Manichaeism, 235 Marcus Aurelius, 253n10 Masson, Jean-Pierre, 112 Materialists, xxv Mayr, Ernst, 254n15 Medieval mysticism, 249n2 Meditation, 72; of Arndt, 8, 71; Pietist practices, xv, 11, 19; Protestant literature, 7–8 Meditationes Sacrae (Gerhard), 8 Melton, Van Horn, xxiii Memory, 29, 33–34

( 287 )

Mendelssohn, Moses, 169, 197, 272n2 Mercure (publication), 127–28, 130 Merlau, Eleonora von und zu, see Petersen, Johanna Eleonora Mimesis, 65 Mimetic images, 23 Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing), 268n2, 274n24 Mirroring function, of art, 69 Mohamed (religious figure), 167–68, 171 Mondanité, culture of, 264n20 Le monde, 80 Montesquieu, 198 “The Moralists” (Shaftesbury), 252n9 Moral sentiment: disinterested interest and, 31; instinct and, 30–32; teleology and, 30 Moravians, 144, 145 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 1 Moser, Friedrich Carl von, 190–96, 203, 244, 272n2; Abbt and, 185, 197, 200, 202; Bible and, 150; Blitz on, 189–90; Pietism and, 191; Seven Years’ War and, 196, 200 Music, 126; performance and, 129–30; public and, 212–18; Rousseau and, 135 Narcisse (Rousseau), 138 Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, Lessing), 234 Nationalism: German, 187, 205; Herder and, 205, 217; imagined community and, 207–8; proto-nationalism, 271n2 Nationaltheater, 22 Naturalists, 28, 73 Natural religion, 113, 155, 270n12 Natural science, xix Nature, xix, xx, 2–3, 18, 75; beauty in, 38, 40–42, 47–49, 75, 146; Bosheit (evil nature), 230; Christianity and, 48; contemplation and, 122; as divine creation, 247n7; Lessing and, 38, 40–41, 43–45; moral authority of, 6; order of, 166, 248n7, 253n11; “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” and, 122; Rousseau and, 38; trust in, 33; see also Human nature

( 288 )

Neo-humanism, xvii, xviii, 142 Neologians, 234 “Die neue Melusine” (Goethe), 160, 162 Newton, Isaac, 58, 61 Nicene Creed, 119–20 Nicolai, Friedrich, 171, 197, 272n2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62 Niggl, Günter, 261n20, 268n1, 269n5, 269n7 Noble stranger, 54 Nonliterary conventions, 119 Nonliterary genres, 110–11, 123–24 Observation: cultural practices of, 9; of natural phenomena, 6–7 “On Dying for the Fatherland” (Abbt), 196–98 On German Architecture (Goethe), 52, 62–63, 69, 72–73, 257n1 “On Merit” (Herder), 201 “On Obedience” (Moser), 192 On True Christianity (Arndt), 9, 71, 74, 79, 85; cultural influence of, 7; editions and translations of, 7, 249n7; emblems and, 16, 19–20, 22, 24; nature and, 18; Riga edition of, 8, 11–12, 17, 24; spiritual exercises and, 70 Oral culture, 183, 220 The Order of Things (Foucault), xix, xx Original genius, xiii, xvi, 1–3, 51, 73; in Germany, 2; Goethe and, 59; Herder and, 56–58, 76; historical context of, 56; Kant and, 58; models of, 52, 61; Storm and Stress poets and, 63; Young and, 2, 53, 55, 76 Originality, xxi, 61, 92; aesthetic judgment and, xiv; genius and, 51; Kant and, 58; Storm and Stress poets and, 53; stranger within and, 54 Original nonsense, 58 Original sin, xvii, xxvi, 113; Arndt and, 9–10; Shaftesbury and, 27, 32 Orthodoxy, xvi, xvii–xviii, 27, 74, 87 Ortmann, Adolph Dietrich, 272n2

I N D EX

Pädagogium regium, 86 “Pagan Matters” (Goethe), 60 Pallas, Peter Simon, 247n7 Patey, Douglas Lane, 256n1 Patriotisches Archiv (Moser), 190, 196 Patriotism, 198–99; Abbt and, 200, 243; in Germany, 195, 200; iconography, 272n11; of public, 185 Patronage, 131 Pelagianism, 120, 172 Petersen, Johanna Eleonora, 80, 82–83, 89, 93–107, 177; Augustine and, 106; Bible and, 100–1, 103; childhood of, 94–100; Christianity and, 103; engagement of, 100–2; Jesus Christ and, 95 Phenomenology (Hegel), 144 Philosophes, xvii–xviii, 112, 227; Confessions (Rousseau) and, 126, 137, 179; Goethe and, 164 Philotas (Lessing), 272n7, 274n24 Pia Desideria or the Heartfelt Desire for a Godpleasing Betterment of the True Evangelical Church Together with Some Simple Proposals Aiming Thereto (Spener), 7, 85–88 Pietas, 66 Pietism, xvi, xxiv–xxv, 146, 229; Arndt and, 7; Christianity and, 86–87; confessional discourse and, 80, 83, 91, 105–6; confessional literature of, 261n20; contemplation and, 19; conversion narratives, 82; individual experience and, 85–93; Kant and, 74; meditational practices of, xv, 11, 19; Moravians and, 144–45; Moser and, 191; J. E. Petersen and, 93–107; reading culture of, 79; tolerance and, 202 Pietismus und Aufklärung (Gierl), xxiv Pitié, 30 Platonism, 235 Pleasure: aesthetic, 5; contemplation and, 32; disinterested interest and, 37; mathematics and, 31–32, 37; taste and, xiii “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Addison), 11

I N D EX

Poetry, 214–15; beauty and, 41–44; epic, 66; production of, 162; Storm and Stress, 53, 63, 73, 167–69, 171 Poetry and Truth (Goethe), xv, xvii, 141, 148, 168, 179, 269n7; Bible and, 149; Confessions (Rousseau) and, 81; Spinoza and, 174–75; turning point of, 159–60 Pope, Alexander, 6, 256n1 Populärphilosophie, 277n7 Positive religion, 153, 156 Powell, Vavosar, 89 The Practice of Christian Prayer and Meditation (La Pratique de l’oraison et méditation chrétienne, Labadie), 85 Preprint culture, 208 Presence, production of, 158–65 Print culture, 208, 220 Printed journals, 226–27 Print market, xiii, xxii, 1, 181 Print technology, 208–9, 216 Profession of faith, 110, 115, 118–21, 125; dogma and, 109; Émile and, 178 “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” (Rousseau), xv, 83, 107, 110, 114; as autobiography, 118, 124; communion and, 123–24; confession and, 115–17, 119; education and, 113, 124; Nicene Creed and, 119–20; nonliterary genres and, 110–11; reception of, 112; setting in, 122; voice in, 115, 117, 118 “Prometheus” (Goethe), 167 Prophets, 170 Protestant Church: attention practices and, 7; Gospel of John and, 235; meditational literature of, 7–8; Seven Years’ War and, 187, 189; Spener and, 85–87 Proto-nationalism, 271n2 Providence, 106, 154 Prussia, 187–88, 190, 196 Publications: journal, 221; Mercure, 127–28, 130 Public debate, 87, 128, 183, 225 Public institutions, 207

( 289 )

Public of literature, xvi, xviii, 186, 216–18, 244–45 Public opinion, 219 Public sphere, xv, xxi–xxiii, 276n2; bourgeois, xxi, 181, 183; German, 184; Kant and, 242; representational, 181; “What Is Enlightenment?” and, 87 Public Sphere (Habermas), 218 Publicum, 182 Publikum (Herder), 208 “Das Publikum” (Moser), 190, 192 Puritans, 86 Purposiveness, models of, xiv Pygmalion (Rousseau), 165 Querelle des Bouffons, 136 Ramler, Karl Friedrich, 272n2 Rang, Martin, 113 Rational debate, 223 Reales Publikum (real public), 210, 224 Redekop, Benjamin, 184 Reflection, 33, 35 Reill, Peter Hanns, xix, xx Reimarus, Elise, 233 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 36, 233; animals and, 33–34; innate ideas and, 75; Lessing and, 236, 241; Mayr on, 254n15 Reitz, Heinrich, 79, 87, 89–90, 92, 103 Religion, see specific topics Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason (Kant), 242 Reliquien (Moser), 194, 200 Repertory theater, xxii Repräsentative Öffentlichkeit, see Representational public sphere Representation, 65 Representational public sphere (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit), 181 Republic of letters, 226, 245; Kant and, 184, 186, 240; Lessing and, 240; salon culture and, 126–27, 264n20

( 290 )

Republics, 198–99 Res publica, 182 Res publica literaria, 220 Revealed religion, 149–58, 270n11 Richardson, Samuel, 144, 256n1 The Rise of the Public (Melton), xxiii Roman Catholic Church, see Catholic Church Romans, 201; culture of, 210; mythology of, 53; pietas and, 66 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xvii–xviii, 32, 78–82, 106–10, 177–79; arrest warrant for, 112; audiences of, 126–40, 264n24; as celebrity author, xiii; censorship and, 139; confessional subjectivity and, 241; Goethe and, 81, 164–66; Klinger and, 169; music and, 135; nature and, 38; oral confession and, 263n17; pitié and, 30; Rococo imagery and, 266n35; volonté général and, xxii; Voltaire and, 263n20; see also specific works Salon culture, xxii; philosophes of, 126, 179, 264n20; republic of letters and, 126–27, 264n20 Schiller, Friedrich, 144 Schlegel, Friedrich, 275n10 Schmidt, Sebastian, 151 Schöne Seele, see Beautiful soul Schumann, Robert, 236, 238 Schütz, Heinrich, 102 Scientific community, 221 Scrivener, Christian, 249n6 Secret societies, xxiii Secular humanism, xxv–xxvi Secularization, 75, 159; confession and, 123; of conversion narrative, 110; Émile and, 83; Lessing and, 234 Self-censorship, 223 Self-discipline, 110 Self-knowledge, 54 Self-sacrifice, 199 Self-stylization, 263n17

I N D EX

Sensibility, culture of, 103, 105 Sensuous experience, 71–72 Sensus communis, xvi, 198, 203, 244 “Sensus Communis: An Essay on Wit and Humour” (Shaftesbury), 197 Seven Years’ War, 184–86, 204, 271n2, 272n11; Abbt and, 203; Catholic Church and, 187; context of, 187–90; imagined community and, xvi; Lessing and, 188–89, 274n24; Moser and, 196, 200; Protestant Church and, 187, 189 Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), xviii, 37, 197, 251n3, 252n9; animals and, xvii; contemplation and, 11; disinterested interest and, 27–28, 74–75; moral sentiment and, 30–32; order of nature and, 253n11; original sin and, 27, 32; prayer and, 27; sensus communis and, 198, 203; virtue and, 144; see also specific works Shakespeare, William, xx, 52, 55–57, 76 Sheehan, Jonathan, xxiv–xxv Siegel, James, 276n3 Smith, Adam, 30 “Songs of a Grenadier” (Gleim), 188–89 Speaking, as private person, 223–25 Species change, 45–48 Spectator (Addison), 36 Speech genres: confession as, 79, 117, 119, 121, 125; playing out and, 111; profession of faith as, 109–10, 121, 125 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 7, 85–88, 91, 102 Spinoza, Baruch, 149, 168, 234; authorship and, 171; Poetry and Truth and, 174–75; Wandering Jew and, 173 Spiritual autobiography, xv, 110 Spiritual exercises, 6–7, 70, 73 Spiritual Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers. Held forth by them at severall solemne meetings (Powell), 89 Stanislas (king of Poland), 127–29, 131, 138, 179 Steinbach, Erwin von, 63, 66–68, 76 Stoicism, 110

I N D EX

Stolnitz, Jerome, 27 Storm and Stress poets, 73, 167–69, 171; original genius and, 63; Young and, 53 Stranger within, 59, 61, 76 Strasbourg Cathedral, 52, 62, 63, 66–71, 73, 149, 159 Subjectivity, xiv, 109; aesthetic, xv; architecture and, 63; confessional, 241; confessional discourse and, 142 Sublimation, 6 Sweden, 206 Tabula rasa, 33 Talent (ingenium), 53, 59 Taste, 76, 251n3, 257n8; French, 63, 130; moral sentiment and, 31; pleasure and, xiii; as sensus communis, 244; social distinction and, xiii, 11, 39 Techne, art as, 58 Technology: media, 183; print, 208–9, 216 Teleology, 33, 38, 39, 45, 75; anthropocentric, 47; Arndt and, 17–18; Herder and, 56; Kant and, xx; Lessing and, 48–49, 153; moral sentiment and, 30; natural religion and, 155 “The Testament of John” (Lessing), 235–39, 279n29 Theological debate, xxiv–xxv, 85 Theory of Colors (Goethe), 62, 268n1 Thirty Years War, xvi, 85, 244 Thomasius, Christian, 227 Tolerance, 202 Tower of Babel, 67, 153 Townsend, Dabney, 251n3 Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), xxi Treatise on the Origin of Language (Herder), 36 “Über die Herrnhuter” (Lessing), 229, 233 Universalism, 217 Unparteiisches Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Arnold), 88, 91 Uz, Johann Peter, 272n2

( 291 )

Vegetable genius, 53, 55–56, 76 Verbal emblems, 8–13, 20, 22–25 The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith), 163 Virgil, 44, 48 Virtual reality, 214 Virtue, 252n9, 253n14; beautiful soul and, 144; happiness through, 231 Visual emblems, 8, 11–13, 19–20, 22–23 Vitalism, xix Vitruvius, 66 Voice, 210; first-person, 115, 118; third-person, 115, 117, 118 Volk, 216–17, 275n8 Volonté général, xxii Voltaire, xvii, xxv, 164, 166, 188, 263n20 “Vom Tode für das Vaterland” (Abbt), 196–98 Vom Verdienste (Abbt), 197 Vom wahren Christenthum (Arndt), see On True Christianity Von dem deutschen National-Geist (Moser), 195 Von deutscher Baukunst (Goethe), 52, 62, 69, 72, 73 Votum (vote), 210 Vox (voice), 210 Wagner, Heinrich Leopold, 167, 168 Wandering Jew, 167–68, 173 Warner, Michael, xxiii War propaganda, 272n7 Weltweisheit (worldly wisdom), 227, 232 Werther (Goethe), 158, 167 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), xx “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), xviii, xxiii, 183–84, 186, 216, 242; critical public and, 222–29; historical context of, 225; public sphere and, 87 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 144, 167 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), 83, 142–44, 171, 178 Wilhelm of Schaumburg Lippe, 196

( 292 )

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 52, 59–60, 76, 255n9 Wisdom literature, xiv Witte, Bernd, 268n2, 269n2, 269n7, 271n13 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich, 247n7 Wolff, Christian, 227 Woodmansee, Martha, xvi, 1–3 Worldly judgment, 80–81 Worldly wisdom; see Weltweisheit Writing, 160, 162 Written culture, 220

I N D EX

Young, Edward, 57, 64, 256n1; innovation and, 55; local genius and, 54; original genius and, 2, 53, 55, 76; self-knowledge and, 54; Storm and Stress poets and, 53; stranger within and, 59; vegetable genius and, 56, 76 Zedler, Johann Heinrich, 271n12 Zedlers Universallexikon, 155 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von, 229, 278n17 Zoology, xix, 40, 62

CO LU M B I A T H EM ES in P H I L O S O P H Y, S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M , and the A RT S

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, editors Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations