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

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 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

11. 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.

12. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 273–74.

13. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counter Publics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90.

14. Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997).

15. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

16. 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.

17. Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 52–77.

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. 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: frommann-holzboog, 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 remained stable. There was one major addition to these illustrations: as of 1696 they also included prose explanations of the pictures.

8. 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.

9. 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.

11. 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.

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

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.

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, 1. “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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. See “Instinct” in Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire universel raisonné des conoissances humaines (Yverdon, 1773), 24/58:651 (my translation).

8. 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.

9. 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.

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:

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.

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.

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 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 this-worldliness. 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:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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. Johann Arndt, Sechs Bücher vom Wahren Christenthum (Philadelphia: J. Kohler, 1854), 733 (my translation).

10. 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.

11. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (New York: Routledge, 1991).

12. 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).

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

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 für 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).

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).

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 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 (Lebens-Beschriebung 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).

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. See Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, 2:292–94 (1717), for a comment on how nobility by birth should be considered a Western aberration:

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; 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.

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 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).

21. “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.

22. See Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (New York: Norton, 1983), 239–40.

23. For a defense of Rousseau’s position on deliberation in light of his fear of factionalism see Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 117–27.

24. 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 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 or networking, that promoted the piece. Moreover, he makes the point that he had no ambition to make it as a courtier.

28. 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.

29. See Rousseau’s narrative of the failed concert at M. de Treitorens in book 4 of the Confessions, 147–50.

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

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, 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.

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, “Self-Formations: 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,

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.

3. See also Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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 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.

8. 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.

9. 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).

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

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.

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).

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 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.

3. 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.

4. See ibid., 223–33, 260–81, and, for the reaction to Kleist’s death, 219–23.

5. 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.

6. Lessing, “Einleitung” to “Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend” (1759), in Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 4:455.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Lessing, “Briefe,” 495.

10. See Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 304–6.

11. 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 proposal for a patriotic institute, see Michael Zaremba, Johann Gottfried Herder. Prediger der Humanität. Eine Biografie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 185.

12. Friedrich Carl von Moser, “Ueber den Gehorsam, im Dienst der Könige und Fürsten,” Politische Wahrheiten (Zürich, 1796), 21–182, here 86 (my translation).

13. 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.

14. 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).

15. 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).

16. Gerhard Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1961).

17. See Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 315–16; and Friedrich Carl von Moser, Von dem deutschen National-Geist (Frankfurt, 1765), 75.

18. Thomas Abbt, Letters 178–180, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend 11 (July 1761): 3–38.

19. Moses Mendelssohn, Letter 181, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend 11 (July 1761): 39–58.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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 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.

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. 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 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 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).

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., 1. Res publica litteraria. Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Sebastian Neumeister und Conrad Wiedemann (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), 1:7–18.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 11:51–61, here 55–56 (my translation).

9. See Herder, Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 302.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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 (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.

13. 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.

14. See See Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969).

15. Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 55.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. See William Boehart, Politik und Religion. Studien zum Fragmentenstreit (Reimarus, Goeze, Lessing) (Schwarzenbek: Dr. R. Martienss, 1988).

20. Bodo Plachta, Damnatur—Toleratur—Admittitur. Studien und Dokumente zur literarischen Zensur im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1994), 27–32.

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 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.