Dorothea von Mücke
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231172462
- eISBN:
- 9780231539333
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century pietistic traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, this book unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern ...
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Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century pietistic traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, this book unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, it revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. It engages with three critical categories: aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere, tracing the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, the book also extends to France through Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the “sensible” individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.Less
Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century pietistic traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, this book unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, it revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. It engages with three critical categories: aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere, tracing the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, the book also extends to France through Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the “sensible” individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.
