Persistent Enlightenment

Adorno on Kant and Enlightenment (in 1959)

Posted on June 1, 2014 by James Schmidt

Over the last decade or so, the publication and translation of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France have led to a broader reconsideration of how his work ought to be understood. But, unless I’ve missed something, the publication and translation of Theodor Adorno’s lectures at the University for Frankfurt have generated considerably less interest. In part, the difference is not entirely surprising. Foucault’s influence has, if anything, grown since his death, while Adorno’s work tends to be regarded with an ambivalence tempered by incomprehension. But the neglect of Adorno’s Frankfurt lecture is unfortunate, if only because (as is also the case with Foucault’s lectures) they sometimes help us to avoid misunderstanding what he was trying to accomplish in his published work. For example, consider his 1959 lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and, in particular, the discussion of Kant’s relationship to the Enlightenment.¹ What we find here helps to supplement his great, enigmatic, and (as least in some quarters) passionately disliked collaboration with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Dialectic of Enlightenment tends to be read (and not just by those who have not bothered read it) as maintaining that “the Enlightenment” was responsible for the legion of horrors that defined the twentieth century. The fact that the book’s actual discussion of Enlightenment thinkers is confined to an excursus on Sade and Kant tends to be overlooked, along with a passage from Minima Moralia that provides a concise summary of what he and Horkheimer were trying to do, in the infamous Sade chapter and elsewhere: “Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.”²

Even Samuel Fleischacker’s recent discussion of the book, which distances itself from the tendency to see Horkheimer and Adorno as opposed to the Enlightenment “root and branch,” nevertheless maintains that they had significant reservations about Kant’s conception of enlightenment:

Horkheimer and Adorno saw fascism as but a symptom of a much wider social phenomenon, which included totalitarianism on the left and the right as well as the softer oppression of industrial capitalism and the mass media that works to promote consumption …. The root of the demonization they saw in all these evils was, they believed, a certain malformation of the Enlightenment: indeed quite specifically of the Enlightenment as Kant conceived it. They begin one of their chapters by quoting the opening of “What is Enlightenment?”, and go on to argue that the maturity, the independence of external guidance, that Kant lauds there is best exemplified by the amoral, egotistical characters in the works of the Marquis de Sade.³

Fleischacker sees their approach was “heavily influenced by Nietzsche, despite his politically right-wing, and sometimes anti-Semitic, proclivities” and, for that reason, can be seen as part of a “second wave of criticism explicitly directed at Kantian enlightenment.” This line of critique would be “further developed by the work of Michel Foucault, a left-wing thinker influenced by Heidegger, despite his right-wing proclivities, as well as by Nietzsche” (102).

This does not strike me as the most helpful way of approaching Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁴ To the extent that the book has much to say about Nietzsche, the discussion is confined to the excursus on Kant and Sade, and it is difficult (for me, anyway) to see Horkheimer (who bore the brunt of the responsibility for writing this chapter) as having been “heavily influenced” by Nietzsche (Schopenhauer, yes; Nietzsche, no). Nor is it clear that there is much in Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that Horkheimer or Adorno were particularly troubled by Kant’s account of enlightenment: for the most part, the discussion in chapter on Kant and Sade recycles Hegel’s critique of the alleged “empty formalism” of Kant’s ethics. While it is true that Kant’s definition of enlightenment is invoked in the opening sentence of the chapter, that is the last we hear of it. Indeed, the short shrift given to the essay in Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the things that makes the discussion of Kant’s answer to question “What is enlightenment?” in Adorno’s Frankfurt lectures all the more significant: they help to clarify Adorno’s stance towards Kant’s conception of enlightenment and to the Enlightenment in general.

Situating Kant

That Adorno discusses Kant’s article on enlightenment at all is, in itself, intriguing. After all, the course in question was devoted to Kant’s first critique and its principal focus fell on Kant’s treatment of questions of epistemology and metaphysics. In contrast, while Adorno’s 1963 lectures on Problems of Moral Philosophy consider Kant’s moral philosophy, they have nothing to say about Kant’s stance towards the Enlightenment.

When read in the context of the lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno’s discussion of Kant and the Enlightenment initially seems to be little more than a historical excursus. It begins:

Last time I told you something about Kant’s approach in the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing particularly on the problem of metaphysics, and I had reached the point of reading you the relevant passages in the text dealing with this problem and offering a brief interpretation of them. In the course of these passages in which Kant tells us about his intentions and about the meaning of the critique of reason there is a form of words that is extremely revealing about the problem I should like to discuss with you today. This concerns the relationship of the Critique of Pure Reason to the Enlightenment. He says there that in his book the answer of these metaphysical questions “has not been such as a dogmatic and visionary insistence upon knowledge might lead us to expect — that can be catered for only through magical devices, in which I am not adept” (57).

Suggesting that quotation from Preface to the first edition of the Critique should be read as an allusion to Swedenborg’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, he proceeds to quote the rest of it:

Such ways of answering them are, indeed, not within the intention of the natural constitution of our reason; and inasmuch as they have their source in misunderstanding, it is the duty of philosophy to counteract their deceptive influence, no matter what prized and cherished dreams have to be disowned (57, quoting Critique of Pure Reason A:xiii).

Adorno characterizes this a “an openly and explicitly enlightened statement” and goes on from here to discuss the “complex nature” of Kant’s relationship to the Enlightenment.

In order to appreciate what follows it helps to remember that, while we tend to see Kant’s relationship to the Enlightenment as anything but “complex”, the treatment of Kant as “an Enlightenment thinker” was hardly unproblematic in the tradition that Adorno sees himself as criticizing. Noting that the question of Kant’s relationship to the Enlightenment “has not escaped the attention of the traditional historians of philosophy,” he argues they have tended to deal with its complexity by deploying a cliché that he will sets out to “demolish” in the discussion that follows.

This cliché is the phrase that Kant was indeed the completer of the Enlightenment, but at the same time the Enlightenment was overcome in his philosophy. We shall shortly have more to say about what this ‘overcoming’ amounts to. First, however, we would do well to remind ourselves that the tradition of German thought and the German philosophy of which Kant was a part never achieved a full, authentic Enlightenment. It was once remarked — accurately, I believe — that there never was an Enlightenment in Germany, but only an enlightened theology (58).

In support of this claim he invokes the names of Leibniz and Lessing and “indeed, of Kant himself.” But arguing that his intent is not to provide “a historical introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason” but, instead, “an introduction to the substance of this book, that is, to the philosophical problems it raises,” he turns to a consideration of “how the problem of the Enlightenment appears to Kant.”

I have already told you that Kant is enlightened in the sense that he is a critic of dogmatism. It must be pointed out, however, that the concept of dogmatism undergoes a curious enlargement at his hands. Whereas the older Enlightenment and the Western Enlightenment mainly used the term to refer to theology proper, Kant uses the term, as I have already suggested, to apply also to metaphysics. This, too, is a feature that Kant shares with the mature Enlightenment. Those of you who have studied French will be aware that one of Voltaire’s chief works, certainly the book that is best known in Germany, is his Candide. Candide is an attempt to expose the dogmatic character not so much of theology as of German metaphysics, namely, Leibniz’s theodicy. To a degree, then, this critique of the dogmatic side of reason is to be found among the themes of the Critique of Pure Reason (58)

There is little in this account to suggest that Adorno has any particular problems with “Kantian Enlightenment” aside, perhaps, from a reluctance to draw a distinction between Kant’s conception of enlightenment and a “mature Enlightenment” that includes such figures as Voltaire.

What readers might overlook, however, is the difference between Adorno’s treatment of Kant and those earlier German histories of philosophy to which he refers at the start of his discussion. That tradition, which can be traced back at least to Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, always saw Kant as a thinker who represented a break with the Enlightenment. This can be seen even in the case of historians who were at pains (as Hegel was in his Berlin lectures) to distinguish between a German Enlightenment (e.g., Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and other “popular philosophers”) and the French version. By treating Voltaire and Kant united in an attack on “dogmatic” approaches to metaphysics, Adorno advances an interpretation of the relationship between Kant and the Enlightenment that — like Ernst Cassirer’s account — stressed the extent to which the Enlightenment was a European movement and that German thinkers were a part of it. At a time when the faculties of German universities were still home to scholars who, during the period between 1933-1945 labored very hard to draw distinctions between the profound and German Kant and the superficialities of the French Enlightenment, the political stakes of the way in which Adorno situated Kant should not be minimized.

Having situated Kant squarely within the “mature Enlightenment,” Adorno concludes that The Critique of Pure Reason and Candide — two works that, on first glance, would seem to have very little in common — were united in a common endeavor.

It is this refusal to accept statements unquestioningly that marks the rather more incisive version of Enlightenment thought in Kant in which reason broadens its critical, anti-dogmatic activities to embrace everything that is not completely transparent and self-evident. I should like to say that the programme of Enlightenment shares this feature with the entire movement of modern Western thought (59).

And nowhere does Adorno see the modernity of this project more clearly articulated than in “an essay entitled ‘Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’” (59).

Adorno on “What is Enlightenment?”

And so we arrive at the discussion of Kant’s response to the question “What is enlightenment?,” a discussion that occupies much of the remainder of the lecture. Perhaps the most surprising part of Adorno’s discussion comes at the very outset, when he explains to his students,

This essay is not very widely known, but it is very instructive. If you just taken an uninformed look at Kant’s own statements, you make some very striking and surprising discoveries. I should like to acquaint you with some of these statements, both for their own sake, and because of their value from the standpoint of method (59).

Because Kant’s essay is so familiar today, we tend to forget that this was not always so. As I noted in a previous post, as late as 1921 Gisbert Beyerhaus observed that the article had become a sort of step-child among Kant’s writings. While an Ngram for the phrase “selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit” (a phrase unlikely to be found anywhere other than quotations from or discussions of Kant’s essay) shows a steady increase from 1920 onward (with a significant uptick after 1945), the phrase was far less frequent at the time of Adorno’s lecture than it would be a decade or so later.

Hence, Adorno may not have been mistaken in assuming that the essay he was about to discuss might not have been a text with which his students would have been familiar.

He begins by stressing that the “positive side” of Kant’s account of enlightenment is consistent with

the kernel of the Kantian method in the Critique of Pure Reason. That is to say, it consists essentially in the demand for the unfettered use of reason and the installation of reason as the supreme authority. The disputes in which reason becomes involved, including those disputes with itself, are to be seen as reason’s own life-blood (62).

But he also notes two significant shortcomings in Kant’s discussion.

On the negative side, however, a couple of points will no doubt have occurred to you. The first is that in Kant enlightenment always refers to thought that does not allow itself to be dictated to; you have to have the courage to think for yourself as far as possible according to the principle of autonomy, that is, the laws of thought. But enlightenment does not really mean to be critical of the structures of objective spirit, that is, to be critical of whatever is not thought. We may say, then, that the concept of enlightenment in Kant is subjectively restricted from the outset: it is restricted to the way the individual behaves within the world of his own thoughts. The question of the objectification of spirit and therewith the institutions and arrangements of the world is not really included in this definition of enlightenment (62).

In other words, the “motto” that Kant associates with the Enlightenment — Sapere aude!, dare to be wise — turns enlightenment into an individual decision: one summons the courage to make use of one’s own reason or one doesn’t. In doing so, he neglects to consider the domain of possible courses of action that individuals fail to undertake, not because they lack the courage to do so, but instead because they have not conceived of the possibility of their doing so. The account of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment might be seen as a variant on this general line of criticism. It is not a lack of courage that prevents the consumers of cultural products from acting differently. It is rather a lack of imagination: like Odysseus’ oarsmen, their ears have been blocked to the possibility that there could be an alternative.

Adorno suggests that this shortcoming is bound up with a second failing in Kant’s account: the lack of a “real connection between enlightenment and the concept of practice” (62). This problem can be seen most clearly in the distinction Kant draws between public and private uses of reason.

Here, then, you find the definition of enlightenment restricted in all innocence by that disastrous word ‘as’ that plays such a dubious role in our age too. You find it when people say in the course of a discussion, ‘As a German, I cannot accept that …’ or ‘As a Christian, I must react in such-and-such’ a way in this matter …’. This predicative use of ‘as’ signals a restricting of reason in line with the division of labour in which human beings find themselves involved; the restriction imposed on enlightenment here is in fact a matter of the division of labour. The purely theoretical human being – and that means quite concretely, the independent writer, in other words, the writer who is not paid for specific services and for propagating opinions that serve specific causes to a greater or lesser degree – the purely theoretical human being is free to be enlightened in a radical sense. The moment he has a particular function, the post of civil servant, for example, all reasoning is at an end. At that moment the unfettered use of reason becomes precisely what is concealed in the double meaning of ‘reasoning’, namely, a kind of unseemly grumbling, and hence to a kind of practical criticism of given institutions (63).

Adorno’s criticism goes to the heart of what Kant’s account of enlightenment but, pace Fleischacker, there is little here that can be viewed as particularly indebted to Nietzsche. Instead, the argument is recognizably Marxist in its provenance: because Kant simply takes the division of labor for granted, the critical use of reason is circumscribed to those who have the time and means to take up the position of “independent writers.”

It is possible to quibble with the way in which Adorno initially formulates the problem in his initial discussion of the “disastrous word ‘as’”: neither the use of reason that one might make “as a Christian” or “as a German” constitutes what Kant would see as a “private” use of reason. In Kant’s notoriously confusing account, the “private” use of reason is characterized as the “use which one makes of his reason in a certain civil post or office which is entrusted to him.” He then proceeds to explain

a certain mechanism is necessary in many affairs which are run in the interest of the commonwealth by means of which some members of the commonwealth must conduct themselves passively in order that the government may direct them, through an artificial unanimity, to public ends, or at least restrain them from the destruction of these ends. Here one is certainly not allowed to argue; rather, one must obey.⁵

Hence, a Lutheran clergyman (who would, in eighteenth-century Prussia, be viewed as the holder of what Kant characterizes as a “civil post”) would be required to speak — as Adorno would have it — “as a Lutheran.” Or, as Kant puts it,

what he teaches as a consequence of his office as an agent of his church, he presents as something about which he does not have free rein to teach according to his own discretion, but rather is engaged to expound according to another’s precept and in another’s name. He will say: our church teaches this or that; these are the arguments that it employs.

If we see Kant’s discussion of enlightenment as inspired primarily by the ongoing discussion of the role of religious oaths (a discussion in which Moses Mendelssohn had been engaged, which may help to explain the comment on Mendelssohn in the closing footnote of Kant’s article), there would seem to be little here that is particularly problematic: insofar as a Lutheran clergyman is discharging the obligations of his office, it would seem reasonable to expect him to transmit Lutheran doctrine and to restrict his own theological speculations to the “public” (i.e., “published”) use of reason in which he may be engaged when he is not in the pulpit.⁶

But things begin to fall apart when we move on to the cases of the soldier (who is supposed to dutifully obey orders by day and write critical articles by night) or the taxpayer (who is obligated to pay taxes, but free to criticize, in print, the uses to which they are put). The problems with this line of argument were apparent to Kant’s friend and critic Johann Georg Hamann (who, appropriately enough, held a civil post as a customs collector)

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home? … the public use of reason & freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert. The private use is the daily bread that we should give up for its sake.⁷

What Adorno find problematic, then, is Kant’s failure to reflect on the “genuine social situation” that this account presupposes.

On the one hand, the world with all the resources at its disposal is caught up in a constant process of rationalization: in the production process, in its shaping of individual human relations, in bourgeois society generally. It is permeated with science to a constantly increasing degree. At the same time, the irrationality of the whole, that is to say, the blindness of the forces at work, and with that the inability of the individual to determine his own life in accordance with reason, remains intact. This peculiar oscillation between rationality and irrationality characteristic of bourgeois society at its very core is reflected in the ambivalent attitude of philosophy, especially the great philosophy, towards reason (64).

Rescuing the Enlightenment with (and from) Kant

Where, then, does this leave Adorno vis a vis “enlightenment,” “Kantian enlightenment,” and “the Enlightenment”? With regard to the latter, his position could not be clearer:

In general, I believe that few concepts have been such a catastrophe for the history of German thought as the cliche that labels enlightenment ‘superficial’ or ‘facile’. It was perhaps the greatest curse of this development that the effect of the Romantic, and ultimately theological, belittling of enlightenment was to ensure that much of the enlightened thought that flourished in Germany actually assumed the shape imagined by the obscurantists (64).

And, he insists, it is in the context of this “European Enlightenment” that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason must be understood (64). But, as he goes on to note,

I must point out that I am taking the liberty of using the term ‘enlightenment’ in the comprehensive meaning given to it in our Dialectic of Enlightenment. We use it there to describe the general trend of Western demythologization that may be said to have begun in Greek philosophy with the fragments of Xenophanes that have come down to us. The broad thrust of this process of demythologization is, as has frequently been shown, to demonstrate the presence of anthropomorphism. This refers to a practice in which objectivity, existence and absolute dignity have been ascribed to a whole series of assertions, doctrines, concepts and ideas of whatever kind, which in reality can be reduced to the products of human beings. In other words, they can be seen to be what the language of psychology would call mere projections, and since it is merely man that has produced these concepts from within himself they are not entitled to any absolute dignity (65).

This “comprehensive” sense of enlightenment — an enlightenment that, as the Dialectic of Enlightenment would have it, reaches back into Greek antiquity — provides the project that the Critique of Pure Reason allegedly carries forward

We could say, then, putting it rather freely and at a distance from Kant’s own words, that the metaphysical ideas whose absolute validity he is challenging are nothing more than hypostatizations of human beings as rational creatures; they are nothing other than attempts to translate the forms inherent in reason into absolutes without reference to anything that is not identical with or inherent in them. In this sense we may say that Kant’s supreme critical intention is in tune with that of the Enlightenment (65).

As Adorno sees it, Kant’s project rests on what might be regarded as a fundamental contradiction.

On the one hand, we think of the Critique of Pure Reason as a kind of identity-thinking, This means that it wishes to reduce the synthetic a priori judgements and ultimately all organized experience, all objectively valid experience, to an analysis of the consciousness of the subject. … On the other hand, however, this way of thinking desires to rid itself of mythology, of the illusion that man can make certain ideas absolute and hold them to be the whole truth simply because he happens to have them within himself. In this sense Kantian philosophy is one that enshrines the validity of the non-identical in the most emphatic way possible. It is a mode of thought that is not satisfied by reducing everything that exists to itself. Instead, it regards the idea that all knowledge is contained in mankind as a superstition and, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, it wishes to criticize it as it would criticize any superstition. It wishes to say that to make an absolute of everything human is not significantly different from endorsing the customs of shamans who regard their own rites as objectively valid, even though in reality they are no more than subjective abracadabra (66).

For Adorno, the significance of the Critique of Pure Reason lay with Kant’s willingness to accept this contradiction and maintain that, on the one hand, “we know absolutely nothing about things-in-themselves” and, on the other,

that our affections arise from things-in-themselves, for only in that way can his theory of knowledge introduce the element that is more than just mind or reason. For it is only in this way that this element of non-identity makes its appearance in his thought (67).

Working out the role of the “non-identical” provided Adorno with the guiding thread for the lectures that would follow. It would also be the great theme of Negative Dialectic, a work that might be read as his attempt to provide the sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment that he and Horkheimer had hoped to complete: a work that would explain how it might be possible to rescue enlightenment from what it had become.

See the Lecture of June 9 in Theodor Adorno, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). ↩
Theodor W Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978) # 122.↩
Samuel Fleischacker, What Is Enlightenment? (London; New York: Routledge, 2012) 102. ↩
Nor may it give an adequate picture of Foucault’s stance toward Heidegger. On that point, see Hans Sluga, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” in Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 210–39. ↩
Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 60. ↩
I’ve discussed this in one of my older articles, “The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 2 (June 1989): 269–91. Since then, a lot of work has been done on the question of the relationship of Kant’s text to ongoing disputes about religion. Among the more important contributions are Ian Hunter, “Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy,” Modern Intellectual History 2:1 (2005): 1–27 and Michael J Sauter, Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and the Politics of the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Leiden: Brill, 2009). ↩
Johann Georg Hamann, Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus, in Schmidt, What is Enlightenment? 148 (I’ve taken the liberty of cutting this passage rather drastically in the interest of making Hamann a bit clearer; I may have betrayed him in the process). ↩

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Light, Truth, and Caricature (without Consolation): Regarding James Gillray

Posted on May 26, 2014 by James Schmidt

A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism — “Magna est Veritas Praevalebit” was the first work by the great eighteenth-century London caricaturist James Gillray to catch my attention.

As chance would have it, I encountered it in precisely the same way in which those who first saw it would have: by opening the first volume of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine.

Looking back at the notes I took in the Houghton Library at Harvard on my old Handspring Visor, I see that I was confused as to who was the creator of the image that folded out (not unlike the collapsible Targus keyboard I’d attached to my Visor) from the pages from the journal.

My notes indicate that I initially confused the publisher of the Review with the creator of the print:

As frontispiece for the volume: J. Wright — “A Peep into the cave of Jacobinism — “Magna est Veritas praevalebit” — shows truth bringing a light that illuminates monster of egalite and burns up books labelled atheism, ignorances, anarchy, sedition, libels, etc.

I went on to include a brief discussion of it in my article on the problems with the OED’s definition of “enlightenment,” which summed up what I thought the print suggested about the struggle over the concept of “enlightenment” at the close of the eighteenth century:

The image of the light of truth banishing the darkness of error was far too powerful a trope for opponents of the Revolution to surrender to their enemies. So they used it themselves. The frontispiece of the first volume of the Anti-Jacobin Review was an engraving by James Gillray entitled “A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism.” It depicts a woman wearing a banner on which is inscribed the word “Truth.” Holding a torch in her hand, she enters the cave in which “Jacobinism”- a creature that is half-human and half-snake-sits surrounded by books bearing the titles “atheism,” “ignorances,” “anarchy,” “sedition,” and “libels.” The light from Truth’s torch not only frightens the creature in the cave (causing its mask to pop off, revealing the hideous face beneath); its rays also cause the equally monstrous books surrounding the creature to burst into flames. What is striking about the imagery employed in the engraving is how familiar it is. Change the name of the creature in the cave to “Jesuitism” and alter the titles on the books to “fanaticism,” “enthusiasm,” and “prejudices” and the frontispiece could have been used on any number of Enlightenment journals.¹

By and large, this still seems right to me, though there is, of course, a lot more that could have been said about Gillray and — as my recent foray into Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology has driven home — even more that could be said about the image of light and truth. The various implications of the cave are as good a place as any.

Spelunking with Blumenberg

Any discussion of the metaphor of light as truth is, of course, going to wind up dealing with Plato at some point and, even more inevitably, any discussion of light and truth in Plato is going to spend a fair amount of time puzzling out the mysteries of the allegory of the cave. It is hardly surprising, then, that Blumenberg’s 1957 article on “Light as a Metaphor of Truth includes an excursus on “the Cave.”²

In the course of conversation last week, a colleague mentioned that whenever he read Blumenberg he got the impression that what he was seeing on the page consisted of a dumping of Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten out onto the printed page. I take his point, but I’m still impressed: Blumenberg must have had a killer Zettelkasten. His survey
of caves visits Plato’s only briefly and spends most of the time showing how ubiquitous and various the image of the cave turns out to be (perhaps we can chalk this up to his admirable distaste for most things Heideggerian?).

His tour begins with the observation that,

The world of the cave is an “artificial,” indeed perfectly violent, underworld, relative to the sphere of natural light and natural dark: a region of screening-off and forgetting, a surrogate and derivative of Being (36)

We might expect, at this point, a descent into Plato’s cave. Instead, we get a comparison to Cicero’s:

The most important difference from the allegory of the cave in Book 7 of Plato’s Republic is that, in Cicero, the situation in the cave is merely a thought experiment for hypothetically reducing the factor of being accustomed. The normal situation … is outside the cave (37).

In Plato, the world beyond the cave was reserved for the initiates and the ascent to it is arduous, difficult, and dependent on an able guide. In contrast,

Cicero’s cave world is one of ‘urban’ luxury, a dazzlingly appointed sphere of culture, which captivates in virtue of its sheer attractiveness …. The realm of artificial light has nothing horrifying about it. Cicero has become familiar with the economy of the dark (37).

For Blumenberg, Cicero’s chief contribution lay in his stripping the cave of its “existential seriousness” (a phrase that appears — as might be expected — in scare quotes in Blumenberg’s text):

it becomes a hypothesis, a mental exercise. The contrasting background of obscuritas rerum, along with the internalization of lumen naturae corresponding to it, have undermined the assumptions behind the image of the cave. From here on, radical reinterpretations of “cave” become possible (38).

The reinterpretations include the Neoplatonic extension of the metaphor of the cave to the entire cosmos, which, in turn, was given a further modification in Eastern Christian accounts of the Incarnation, which replace the stable with a cave.

The paideutic path no longer leads out of the cave; the gaze is directed into the dark, because in it the unbelievable — that light could appear here — has become believable. The Platonic opposition of the cave fire to the sun of the Good has been eliminated: the light in the cave is of one essence with its origin; it is its steward and guarantor, and not a deceitful source of shadows (38).

This “reassessment” of the inside of the cave brings with it a shift in the location where Truth is to be found:

As individualized caves, the small room and the monastic cell become … places where the truth is openly present, an indication that now everything can be expected from within (38).

This image would ultimately be subject to a further twist with Francis Bacon, for whom “leaving the cave is now longer the paideutic path of the wise individual into full light, but rather a method, a ‘technique’ for the production of a ‘greater common world’ for all” (38-39)

From this point on, the cave becomes the accepted metaphor in the philosophy of history for the point from which “progress” must begin. The problems of human socialization are exemplified by the hypothetical situation of leaving the primordial cave (where, quite fittingly, the relics of primordial man are also sought and found) (39).

There is much here that Blumenberg would revise and extend, most immediately in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology and, ultimately in his Work on Myth. But there is already enough here to begin to make sense of what is going on in Gillray’s “Peep into the Cave.”

Gillray’s Caves

I closed last week’s post by characterizing (without much in the way of explanation or justification) “A Peep into the Cave” as “one of the great James Gillray’s weaker efforts” — though I went on to add that “weak Gillray is better than practically anyone else.” I would not disagree that — as Lichanos (who has a good discussion the print on his blog) pointed out in a comment on last week’s post — there is quite a bit to admire in the Peep. But it is somewhat difficult to square with the better-known works in Gillray’s portfolio. The explanation for that would seem to be simple enough.

Gillray had been courted for a number of years by George Canning, a member for Prime Minister William Pitt’s circle who had worked his way up to a position in the Foreign Office and would be instrumental in the founding of the Anti-Jacobin, a journal covertly supported by the government with the aim of responding to what the government saw as the growing threat posed by British friends of the French Revolution. These efforts culminated late in 1797 with the awarding of a secret government pension of £200 a year to Gillray. With it came with the expectation that he would support the government line — both in his contributions to the Anti-Jacobin and in the works he continued to produce for his publisher (as well as landlady and, until Gillrary got cold feet, prospective wife) Hannah Humphrey. Over the course of 1798 Gillray produced something on the order of one caricature a week, many of them single print caricatures that were displayed at Humphrey’s shop (frequently in front window) and, for those with the means, available for purchase.³

As part of this arrangement Gillray was expected to refrain from personal caricatures of government officials (though it is worth noting that Canning himself seems to have viewed his appearance in one of Gillray’s caricatures as a useful career move). This expectation was more easily enforced in the case of the prints that appeared in the The Anti-Jacobin and its successor, The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, where it was possible to exert editorial control over Gillray’s work, than it was with the prints distributed via Humphrey’s shop where, as Ian Haywood notes in a helpful discussion of Gillray’s work during this period, Humphrey’s “commercial independence” provided Gillray with a certain amount of cover.⁴

This context helps to explain the difference in style between the Peep and a caricature from 1790 that is, in many respects, thematically similar: Smelling out a Rat, Gillray’s famous homage to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.

In both, a creature engaging in nefarious activities under the cloak of darkness is surprised by the sudden entry of a figure that casts light on its deeds. The Peep gives us a literal cave with a masked monster, while Smelling Out a Rat gives us a clergyman (the great political theorist, friend of the American Revolution, and actuary Richard Price) working away in his study.⁵ In both cases, the creatures that labor in darkness cannot abide the light: the monster’s mask pops off (unveiling its hideous face) and Price is gripped with horror at the entry of what looks to us to be a duckbill with glasses, but which would have been instantly recognized by eighteenth-century consumers of caricatures as nothing less than a caricature of a caricature of Burke. It reduces him to nothing more than the two features on which his caricaturists had fastened: his nose (now grown to enormous size) and his spectacles.

Burke’s Reflections was treated rather roughly by other caricaturists. His long-time nemesis Frederick George Byron, focusing on the book’s somewhat lurid account of the events of October 6, 1789, when an “almost naked” Marie Antoinette was compelled (along with Louis XVI) to leave Versailles and take up residence in Paris and the lament for the demise of the “age of chivalry” that followed, fired off a series of prints — each one more outrageous than its predecessor — casting Burke in the role of Don Quixote, utterly smitten by his “Beautiful Vision.” The final installment imagines the happy lovers reunited at last: Burke forswears his wife’s “eggs and bacon” in favor of the “delicious Dairy” of his “celestial Vision,” while an aroused Marie embraces her “God of Chivalry” and excitedly grasps for his “invincible Shillelee.”⁶

When compared to what Byron and others were producing, Smelling Out a Rat might be viewed as a defense of Burke’s book. But as a number of commentators have noted, if the content of the piece puts Price in a bad light, its form makes Burke look ridiculous or worse.⁷ In Peep into the Cave we see a monster illuminated by an idealized image of a human being. In contrast, Smelling Out a Rat shows us a clergyman attacked by a monstrous nose and glasses. It must have been difficult for at least some contemporary viewers not to sympathize with the alleged villain of this piece.

By the end of 1798, it seems that Canning as his associates were beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of their arrangement with Gillray.⁸ The December issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review included a “note to readers” reporting that the journal was reconsidering its policy of including “satyrical prints” on the grounds that at the might be regarded as “derogatory from the dignity of the Work” (739). Nevertheless, Gillray continued his relationship with the Anti-Jacobin Review (though he was later replaced by Thomas Rowlandson) and also accepted a commission to contribute prints to the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. But he resisted the demand from Canning and his colleagues that (in keeping with the new policy of laying aside sectarian politics in order to present a united front against France) he cease personal caricatures of opposition leaders. When Gillray refused to submit his drawings for review prior to publication, Canning observed to an associate that “the scoundrel” Gillray was “not so ready as you imagined to receive any instruction or correction.”⁹

Among the works intended for the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin was yet another grotto scene, this one set in Hell. It depicts Voltaire instructing the monster child of Jacobinism. The image, an oil sketch on paper, appeared in a 2004-2005 exhibit of Gillray’s work at the New York Public Library along with an oiled paper transfer, which would have been produced as part of the process of transferring the image to plates for printing. But no prints of Voltaire Instructing the Infant Jacobinism survive: either the they were never made or they were among the plates that Gillray, bowing to Canning’s demands, turned over for destruction when his collaboration with Poetry for the Anti-Jacobin ended.

Artificial Lighting

Assessing Augustine’s role in the metaphorics of light as truth, Blumenberg argued that,

In contrast to the Neoplatonists’ ecstatic concept of truth, in which the highest level of the disclosure of truth is seeing-into-the-light, Augustine returns to the classical form of the metaphor of seeing-in-the-light: we can recognize the light only by the certainty that it grants us in elucidated beings. … Light is always, so to speak, ‘behind us’ and that is true precisely for lux interior, which is responsible for things being laid plain to us. the “locus” of illuminatio is the “depths” of the soul, especially memoria‘s “ground” of inwardness (43).

What would have perplexed the Neoplatonists about this was the lack of any clarification of “the ‘direction’ from which illuminatio comes.”

To put it in the language of Plato’s allegory of the cave, the accent is on turning away from the shadows, or more narrowly and precisely, on breaking the chains that forced the gaze toward the shadows. Everything depends on something that, in Plato, the prisoners in the cave were not able to accomplish by themselves, although this is treated as incidental there and is given no importance in comparison with the path of paideia. At the start of the path of paideia, there is now an all-important condition, namely, the act of gratia, which can be grasped in the experience of conversio. Augrustine’s doctrine is a “metaphysics of conversion” (43-44).

Laying aside the question of whether Blumenberg’s account captures the complex relationship between Plato, Neoplatonism, and Augustine (a topic I am incompetent to address), it does seem to capture something of the peculiar quality of the light in the various frontispieces that I discussed in my previous post. The source of the light is always hidden: it streams from above, it illuminates the world, but — aside from the ridiculous smiling suns that pop up from time to time — its origin always lays somewhere “behind” or “above” us.

But this is clearly not the case in Gillray’s treatment of light: it has a clear source and, in most cases, that source has political connections that are as clear as day. Burke blasts into Price’s study bearing the Cross and the Crown. The figure of Truth in Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism is accompanied by cherubs carrying the Cross, the Crown, and the scales of justice. And in LIGHT expelling DARKNESS, – Evaporation of Stygian Exhalations, – or – The SUN of the CONSTITUTION, rising superior to the Clouds of OPPOSITION, a 1795 print published by Humphrey we see this:

William Pitt appears here as Apollo (a role, it might be note, that had previously been played by Louis XIV), crossing the heavens in a chariot pulled by a lion (British, of course) and a white horse (Hanoverian — according to the New York Public Library’s explanation). Various “Foxite” Whigs (including Fox himself) flee in terror, while a Fury labelled “Whig Club” cowers to one side. Pitt’s chariot grinds its way over a scroll emblazoned with slogans that inventory the various Anti-Jacobin fears: “Plan for inflaming the Dissenters in Scotland,” “A scheme for raising the Catholicks in Ireland,” “Jacobin Prophecies for breeding Sedition in England.” The light that illuminates the scene is exactly where Blumenberg says it should be: behind Pitt. But it is clearly visible and labelled: on the face of the sun we see “Wisdom” (in Hebrew) and around it, those earthly arbiters of wisdom — Commons, King, and Lords. The whole scene is so ludicrously over the top is that it is hard to shake the suspicion that taking it seriously would reduce one to the level of those deeply confused individuals who have somehow managed to convince themselves that Stephen Colbert is actually a conservative.

A little over a month later, Gillray released Presages of the MILLENIUM:

Pitt returns as Death itself, riding a pale horse. Various Whig politicians are trampled underfoot, along with a herd of swine (obviously, an uncomfortably literal reference to Burke’s “swinish multitude”). But even a viewer unaware that the creature with the feathered crown busy kissing Pitt’s ass is the Prince of Wales (one might have thought it would be the other way around) cannot help but get the impression that Pitt comes off even worse than the Whigs. It probably matters that, as Robinson notes, Gillray was the son of an invalided soldier and, while he may have found the French Revolution and its British supporters appalling, he was no less appalled by the policies of Pitt and his ilk. Their only virtue would seem to be that they were willing to pay for his services.

Gillray’s ruthless exploration of the image of light and truth may well have reached its high point with the mind-bogglingly complex Democratic Transparency … with its Effect upon Patriotic Feelings: Representing, the Secret-Committee throwing a Light upon the Dark Sketches of a Revolution found among the Paper of the Jacobin-Societies lately apprehended, a print from April 1799, published by Humphrey and executed while Gillray was supposed to be towing the Pittite line.

Yale Center for British Art

There is much to sort out here and readers seeking a fuller account should consult Ian Haywood’s discussion of the print in his Romanticism and Caricatures.¹⁰ It helps to know that, in eighteenth-century London, a transparency was a popular form of street art, which involved illuminating pictures from behind. The pictures here illuminated are scenes from the report of a secret committee of the House of Commons investigating the activities of suspect groups in England and Ireland.

The report, which was released in March 1799 and published in the Anti-Jacobin Review, purported to have

found the clearest proofs of a systematic design, long since adopted and acted upon by France, in conjunction with domestic traitors, and pursued up to the present moment with unabated perseverance, to overturn the laws, constitution, and government, and every existing establishment civil or ecclesiastical, both in Great Britain and Ireland, as well as to dissolve the ties between the two kingdoms, so necessary to the security and prosperity to each (Anti-Jacobin Review Vol. II, January-April 1799, 413-414).

As Haywood explains,

four illuminated panels … form the centrepiece of Gillray’s Exhibition of a Democratic Transparency. The print claims to have based these ‘dark sketches of a revolution’ on material ‘found among the Papers of the Jacobin Societies lately apprehended’, but Gillray surely knew that none of the documents in the Appendix supported the report’s sensational insurrectionary narrative, and the ambiguously denoted ‘sketches’ could equally refer to the report’s transformation of obscure hints into full-blown tableaux.

Instead of exhibiting an actual Jacobin plot, the print shows that the insurrectionary narrative is actually the product of the report itself: by ‘throwing a light’ on these original documents, the report is likened to an illumination, a form of popular visual spectacle in which a powerful light magnified and projected an image painted on a transparent screen only by the assistance of artificially enhanced illumination (loyalist fantasy) that a small-scale, fragmented, group of radical political cells could be transformed into a vision of national revolution. The dazzling light of Gillray’s ‘democratic transparency’ connotes the hyperbolic luminosity of the loyalist imagination, not the penetrating beams of sublime Truth (67).

Haywood concludes that Gillray’s point was that “loyalist fantasies of Jacobin conspiracy have more in common with caricature than with the truth: politics and caricature have converged into an aesthetics of distortion, demonisation, defamation and violence” (67). But I wonder whether this interpretation — which turns Gillray into a covert operative that, even as he mouths the party line, finds ways to undermine it — captures what might be the truly unsettling force of Gillray’s work.

To say that Gillray’s Exhibition of a Democratic Transparency captures “the hyperbolic luminosity of the loyalist imagination” rather than “the penetrating beams of sublime Truth” rests on the presupposition that Gillray believed that there was a “Truth” unstained by the filth of party politics. While Haywood and others are far more familiar with the Gillray’s work than I am, I wonder whether we might do better to expand Max Horkheimer’s roster of “dark writers of the bourgeoisie” to include at least one caricaturist. Perhaps Gillray’s free-ranging suspicion, like Nietzsche’s distrust of pity, “redeemed the unwavering trust in humanity which day to day is betrayed by consoling affirmation.”

James Schmidt, “Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 64:3 (2003): 436. ↩
Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth at the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36-40. ↩
The classic resource for information about Gillray is Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist, a Biography (Greenwich, CT: Phaidon Publishers, 1965). For what was known about Gillray during his own time, see Christiane Banerji and Diana Donald, Gillray Observed : The Earliest Account of His Caricatures in London und Paris (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ↩
Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013) 60. ↩
Haywood notes that the image of Price parodied “traditional representations of holy anchorites such as Saint Jerome and Saint John the Evangelist “ 69. ↩
Robinson 143-144. ↩
Hall, 42; see also Haywood, 68. ↩
The New York Public Library’s Gillray site includes excerpts from a letter, dating from the end of 1797, in which Canning’s associate John Hookham Frere complains about Gillray’s failure to follow the instructions of his employers (see item 64 on http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/gillray/part4.html )↩
See item 69 at http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/gillray/part4.html ↩
Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature Chapter 3; Haywood has pursued this line of interpretation further in “The Transformation of Caricature: A Reading of Gillray’s The Liberty of the Subject,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43:2 (2010): 223–42. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anti-Jacobin Review, Blumenberg, James Gillray | 4 Comments

Hans Blumenberg on Light & Truth, with Some Thoughts on Eighteenth-century Frontispieces

Posted on May 18, 2014 by James Schmidt

There’s no good reason why it took me so long to get around to reading Hans Blumenberg’s Paradigms for a Metaphorology — a 1960 contribution to the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte that has been available in translation since 2010.¹ I’d read around in (a euphemism for “never quite appreciated the significance of”) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and Work on Myth when they were translated three decades ago and recall discussing Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence as part of a rapidly defunct reading group of Boston area intellectual historians shortly after it appeared in translation in the late 1990s. But it was only recently, while revising a lecture that I’d given on images of light in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, that I got around to reading his 1957 article on “Light as a Metaphor of Truth.”² It led me to Paradigms for a Metaphorology (and, at this point, I will resist the temptation to lie and write something like “which I’d been meaning to read for some time”) and realized that (1) it was quite wonderful and (2) it (shall we say?) “shed some light” on something that intrigued me about eighteenth-century frontispieces: the way in which they depict light.

Lucem Post Nubila Reddit

We can start with an old favorite: the frontispiece to Christian Wolff’s 1719 Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Rational Thoughts on God, the World and the Human Soul, Along with a Lot of Other Stuff) a work that — since life it too short to write Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt too many times — is better known as the German Metaphysics. While I suspect the sum total of those now living who have read the entirety of the German Metaphysics can be counted on two hands, the frontispiece turns up quite a bit. Karl Barth began the discussion of eighteenth-century thought in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century with a paragraph on it, Jeffrey Kosky used it as the point of departure for his recent Arts of Wonder, a book that explores the intersection of religion and the visual arts, and — back in 1996 — thwarted in my efforts to track down an engraving of the medal minted by the “Society of the Friends of Truth” that proclaimed “Sapere Aude!”, I used it as the cover for my collection of articles on the question “What is enlightenment?”.³ The point of the frontispiece is (shall we say?) blindingly obvious: the ascending sun burns away the clouds and “brings back the light.” Kosky notes that the Latin motto is not without a certain ambiguity — the subject of the sentence is implied (though a glance at the frontispiece would appear to make that … well … clear) — and discusses the connection between the motto’s reddit and the Leibniz-Wolff principium reddendae rationis (“principle of rendering reason”). While conceding that the smiling face of the sun is “so corny and silly as to seem unremarkable” he draws out what he sees as its implications for the (allegedly) secularized modern world:

… modern disenchantment does not mean the disappearance of God or the neutralization of theology. Indeed, there is a theology of modern disenchantment: divine is whatever holds the position of the sun in this picture, the smiling source of the light that illuminates a world in which objects appear at rest under the sun. God or reason — both make for a world that appears clearly and distinctly to the man who looks at it. It is as if a certain form of enlightenment (the principle of rendering reason) shared a common structure of bringing things to light with a certain form of religion (the God who shines a light on all things). This format or way of organizing our picture of the world is modern disenchantment (5).

But unlike Kosky, my interest in the frontispiece is historical, rather than theological (assuming, for the moment, that there’s a difference). And here is where Blumenberg enters the picture.

Clearing Things Up

One of the things that may have made Wolff’s frontispiece effective in its own day was that it draws on a variety of the implications of that protean German term aufklären. The term was, and still is, used to denote the “clearing” of the skies after a storm as well as the return to consciousness after a period of sleep or unconsciousness. From here it is but a short step to using it as way of referring to the moment when matters that have been previously obscure sudden become become clear. The power of the image was such that, at the close of the century, the Polish-Prussian painter and engraver Daniel Chodowiecki noted that the highest achievements of reason still had no more “generally comprehensible allegorical symbol … than the rising sun.”⁴ Sadly, only rather poor reproductions of Chodowiecki’s own engraving Aufklärung are available online:

One of the more important implications of the image of the rising sun is that it allows the process of enlightenment to appear inevitable and, conversely, makes the unenlightened seem, at best, remarkably dense (see the phrase “Light dawns on Marblehead,” a Boston-area euphemism for the moment when, at long last, someone finally gets a point that long ago should have been obvious) if not willfully stupid.

These connotations, however, stand in sharp opposition to the change that Blumenberg argues is taking place at this point.

With the emergence of the Enlightenment, “light” moves into the realm of that which is to be accomplished; truth loses the natural facilitas with which it asserted itself. … The truth does not reveal itself; it must be revealed. “Natural” luminosity cannot be relied on; on the contrary, truth is of a constitutionally weak nature and man must help it back on its feet by means of light-supplying therapy. … Phenomena no longer stand in the light; rather, they are subjected to the lights of an examination from a particular perspective.⁵

According to Blumenberg, this transformation — which might be crudely glossed as a shift from a world in which the truth was made manifest through divine revelation to a world where truth must be wrestled from a nature that gives up its secrets grudgingly — brought with it a handy way for the Enlightenment to explain the darkness that obscured the truth from earlier ages:

The ignorance of the Middle Ages must thus be attributed precisely to the illusion that the truth “reveals itself.” The truth does not reveal itself; it must be revealed. “Natural” luminosity cannot be relied on; on the contrary, truth is of a constitutionally weak nature and man must help it back on its feet by means of light-supplying therapy.” (52)

From the perspective of now-ascendent Enlightenment,

Phenomena no longer stand in the light; rather, they are subjected to the lights of an examination [Optik des Präparat] from a particular perspective.

As the translator’s note explains, in using the phrase Optik der Präparat, Blumenberg was attempting to capture is the way in which access to truth is achieved through various artificial “preparations” (e.g., experimental apparatuses) that place the truth in the proper light (perhaps Foucault’s account of the “clinical gaze” or his discussion of the relationship between disciplines, knowledge, and power might be relevant here). When viewed in this context, what is strange about the frontispiece of Wolff’s German Metaphysics is that it persists in using an allegory for enlightenment that Blumenberg sees as increasingly out of date. It continues to present what ought to be seen as the product of concerted human action as if it were the bestowal of a gift that demands nothing more from human beings than that they wait for a light that descends from above.

Lights from Above

Wolff’s frontispiece is hardly unique in this regard. Consider, for example, the frontispiece to Andrew Motte’s 1729 translation of Newton’s Principia:

We see Newton seated in the midst of clouds, with a light streaming from behind him. Below him, the clouds are beginning to dissipate, revealing the planets moving around the sun (albeit in circles, rather than ellipses, reminding us that those responsible for frontispieces are likely not to have read the books they are illustrating). Newton would seem to be receiving his enlightenment from the naked woman on his left (an allegory for Truth?), who points at him with her right hand while holding calipers in her left hand. What is perhaps most remarkable about the entire production is Newton’s relative passivity, which stands in sharp opposition to Alexander Pope’s famous couplet:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

Newton appears here less as the bestower of light and truth than as its recipient. God not only has to make Newton. He also has to enlighten him.

We see something similar in the frontispiece to Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738). Light streams over his left shoulder from an opening in the clouds above and is reflected in mirror held by a woman (Truth, again, I suppose, though now in the more earthly guise of the brilliant mathematician Gabrille Emilie du Châtelet) down onto the writing table where an idealized image of Voltaire, her student and lover is hard at work.

Newton now holds the calipers and does the pointing and it is possible that Truth (or the Madame du Châtelet) has her eyes fixed on him. But her main concern is with catching the heavenly light that has begun to break from behind the clouds at the proper angle so that her mirror can direct it down on the table so that the marble-headed Voltaire can scribble it all down (and claim credit for it as his own work).

Finally, and perhaps most famously, Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s frontispiece for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie serves up a riot of figures, clouds, and rays of light.

Diderot’s explanation of the allegory informs us that the veiled figure at the apex of the composition is Truth, while the figures lifting and pulling away the veil are Reason and Philosophy. As might be expected, Truth is “radiant with a light which parts the clouds and disperses them.” But to the right of Truth we see a separate shaft of light, descending from the clouds and illuminating the kneeling figure of Theology, who — as Diderot notes — “receives her light from on high.” So here we have two different sources of light: one radiates out from the figure of Truth at the top of the image to enlighten the various disciplines that behold her while another — more focused and discrete — provides a separate illumination for Theology (and is ignored by the figures that sit of her left, busy reading sacred texts and apparently oblivious to everything else that is going on).

False Light

The frontispiece to the Encyclopédie is one of the few eighteenth-century engravings where we are able to catch a glimpse of the contest — which I’ve discussed in a number of earlier posts — that was beginning between “true” and “false” enlightenment. I suspect this can be explained in part by the inherent limitations of the genre itself: it is far from obviously how one would go about representing a light that, rather than enlightening, only plunges us deeper into darkness. Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle of the Devil to Voltaire — allegedly, a collection of Voltaire’s letters with the Prince of Darkness himself — has a wonderful craziness about it, but its charm rests more with the idea that the book was a product of “Beelzebub Press,” a publishing house with a branch at Voltaire’s château in Délices and a main office in Hell (presumably, all contracts with authors must be signed in blood) than with the image on the page itself.

For the most part, friends and enemies of what we have come to call the Enlightenment were content to deploy the same set of visual tropes, while varying who was assigned the position of the bringer of light and who hid in the dark. For an example, consider one of the great James Gillray’s weaker efforts: A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism, his frontispiece for the Anti-Jacobin Review.

“Truth” arrives, torch in hand and accompanied by cherubs bearing the Cross, the scales of justice, and the Crown. The rays of her torch shine into the cave in which Jacobinism hides, literally unmasking the Jacobin conspiracy and setting aflame the various writings through which its false enlightenment is spread.

While even weak Gillray is better than practically anyone else, there is a considerably more skilled use of some of these same tropes in Smelling Out a Rat, Gillray’s contribution to the war of prints that greeted Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.

But since this post has gone on long enough, I’ll delay a consideration of the peculiar genius of Smelling out a Rat until another time.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). ↩
Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth at the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–62. ↩
Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background & History (London: SCM Press, 1972); Jeffrey L. Kosky, Arts of Wonder : Enchanting Secularity —Walter de Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). ↩
Ulrich Im Hof, “Enlightenment – Lumieres – Illuminismo – Aufklaerung: Die ’Ausbreitung Eines Besseren Lichts Im Zeitalter Der Vernunft” , in “Und Es Ward Licht”: Zur Kulturgeschichte Des Lichts, Maja Svilar (ed.) Berlin Peter Lang, , 1983 115-116. ↩
Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth at the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” 52-53. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Hans Blumenberg, History of Concepts, James Gillray, Light | 10 Comments

Culture & Civilization: The First English Translation of Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?” (Part II)

Posted on April 20, 2014 by James Schmidt

As should be apparent by now, my collection of hobby horses includes an interest in old translations of now-familiar texts.¹ The interest is not entirely idiosyncratic, nor is it entirely irrelevant to my labors in that open-ended field known as the “intellectual and/or “conceptual history.” Exploring how earlier translators wrestled with terms that we now take for granted opens a window the way in which new concepts migrate from one language into another. That this process is hardly simple becomes clearest when the noise in translations becomes apparent.

Moses Mendelssohn’s answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” is a particularly interesting example. As I discussed in the previous post in this series, he maintained that difficulties in answering the question that had been posed in the Berlinische Monatschrift could be traced to the fact that (1) the word Aufklärung was of relatively recent vintage and (2) could only be understood in the context of two other important new-comers: Bildung and Kultur. When Dan Dahlstrom, Bert Kögler, and I were doing our translations of Mendelssohn’s essay in the 1990s, we had a luxury that our anonymous and neglected nineteenth-century predecessor lacked: well-established conventions for dealing with these terms. Our only problem was what to do with Bildung — a term that we could easily have rendered as “culture” were it not for the need to use that word to translate Kultur. In contrast, our predecessor was confronted by a semantic field consisting of finely drawn distinctions between terms that are just beginning to be rendered into English.

The German Museum and its “Proprietors”

Since the translation was published anonymously, there is no way of knowing whether the translator was (like Bert, but unlike Dan and me) a native German speaker, though given what we now know about the German Museum, I suspect that was likely. In the decade since I first worked on the German Museum, we have learned more about the editors of the journal and the broader context from which it emerged.² In my article on the OED’s definition of “enlightenment,” I relied on Bayard Quincy Morgan and A. R. Hohfeld’s 1949 survey German Literature in British Magazine in crediting the editorship of the journal to “J. Beresford.”³ The current scholarship assigns editorial responsibility to Constantine Geisweiler, Peter Will, and Anton Willich.

There is a helpful discussion of the émigré bookseller and publisher Geisweiler (born Constantine de Giesworth) in a post on the Gothic Vault Facebook page. He seems to have arrived in London in the early 1790s and first enters the historical record when he married the German noblewoman Maria Countess Dowager of Schulenburg in 1799. Maria had already attained a measure of fame for her translations of various plays by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue — who, at this point, was enjoying a measure of popularity in England (one of his plays turns up in Mansfield Park) — and the Geisweilers seem to have done their best to take advantage of the Kotzebue craze. But by 1806 Geisweiler had given up publishing and moved into the wine trade. Little is known about his later life except that Maria died in 1840 and, shortly afterwards, Constantine entered the Kensington House Lunatic Asylum, remaining there until his death in 1850.

Geisweiler had been aided in his publishing endeavors by Peter Will, an émigré clergyman who translated various Gothic novels into English (by now, it should be clear that we are dealing with interesting people). After the collapse of the German Museum, he left London for New York (where he was a minister to a German congregation) and then moved on to Curacao (preaching to a Dutch congregation). Eventually, he moved back to southern Hesse, where he established his own publishing house in 1839.

The philosopher Willich was best known of the three — both among his contemporaries and (thanks to Rene Wellek’s account of his role introducing Kant into England) to later scholars.⁴ Willich attended Kant’s lectures from 1778-1781 before setting off to Edinburgh where he studied medicine in the early 1790s and supported himself by offering German lessons — his students included Walter Scott. He moved to London in 1798 and gained employment (and, according to rumors, protection from creditors) by taking up the position of physician to the Saxon ambassador. In addition to his brief stint with the German Museum, he was also an editor for the Medical and Physical Journal. Finally, he too, jumped on the Kotzebue bandwagon with a translation of a biography of the playwright.

The editors of the German Museum (or, as they called themselves on those rare occasions when they found it necessary to speak collectively to their readers, the “Proprietors” of the journal) did little to identify themselves or their translators. Geisweiler was listed on the front page as the journal’s “printer.” Willich’s name appeared on the articles he wrote. And the initials “P.W.” — presumably the hard-working Peter Will — can be found at the end of quite a few of the translations.⁵ But all that appears at the close of the Mendelssohn translation is the letter X. Since I’ve not undertaken a systematic examination of the initials at the close of articles there is little point in trying to guess who might have done the translation. It may be enough to reflect on the challenges that X would have faced in attempting to put Mendelssohn into English.

Culture, Mental Illumination, and Civilization

Then, as now, the easiest term to translate would have been Kultur — a French loan-word that appeared in Mendelssohn’s original draft as Cultur. A glance at an Ngram for the two spellings indicates that the French C was quite tenacious (can this possibly be correct?!). It is not until the start of the twentieth century that the Germanized spelling becomes consistently more frequent.

While Aufklärung would have presented greater problems in 1800, it is clear that the German Museum had a convention for translating it: “mental illumination.” A review of C. D. Vosz’s Das Jahrhundert der Aufklärung in the first volume referred to the book as “The Age of Mental Illumination” (I:435-436) and Georg Joachim Zollikofer’s “Der werth der grössern Aufklärung der Menschens” was translated as “An Estimation of the Advantages arising from the Program of Mental Illumination” (I: 396-403). A quick check of Volume II (the one volume that, to date, I have processed using OCR software) yields eight occurrences of the phrase “mental illumination” but none of “enlightenment” or “Enlightenment.”⁶ In contrast, “enlightening” used quite frequently (a total of twelve times, two of which occur in the text of the translation of the Mendelssohn essay). “To enlighten” occurs four times (“to enlighten the understanding of the multitude” (3), “to enlighten a whole nation by facts” (321), “a school to enlighten us” (343), and “endeavors to enlighten the nations” (477)). The translator strayed from the convention only slightly, preceding the words “enlightening the mind” with “intellectual improvement.”

Finally, confronted with problem of how to translate Bildung, the translator adopted a solution that never occurred to me (and, I suspect, would not have occurred to either Dan or Burt): civilization. That it wouldn’t have occurred to us has at least something to do what happened after 1800.

A Brief History of Bildung

Bildung is a word with a complicated history.⁷ It turns up quite frequently in Pietist theology, which — reviving elements from late medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Heinrich Seuse who had presented Christ as the ideal “image” (Urbild) for a union of the human and the divine — used Bildung to denote the process by which individuals form themselves into the image of Christ through the performance of good works.⁸ It was also been used in the natural philosophy of Paracelsus, Böhme, and Leibniz to denote the development or “unfolding” of certain potentialities within an organism.⁹ In Klopstock, Wieland, Herder, and especially Goethe, it came to denote the ideal of an “aesthetic individualism,” in which individuals viewed the cultivation of their personalities into harmonious wholes as something comparable to the creation of a work of art — an ideal which could find support in Shaftesbury’s notion of a unity between the morally good and the aesthetically beautiful.¹⁰ For members of the educated middle class who came to positions in the bureaucracy and the clergy by virtue of their talents and education, Bildung served as a social ideal that stressed the virtue of individual self-cultivation over the accident of noble birth.¹¹

That Mendelssohn regarded Bildung — despite this rich and complicated history — as a new-comer might have had something to do with the publication, a decade earlier, of Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774). Ngrams for eighteenth-century texts are, of course, probably useless (if only because the sample of eighteenth-century that would have been sitting on library shelves when Google did its scanning can hardly have been representative of the corpus of texts published during the period) and the problems are even greater in the case of eighteenth-century German texts (e.g., what sorts of texts would North American and English libraries be collecting?). But it is, I suppose, of some interest that, among these alleged newcomers, Aufklärung seems to have been the last to catch on, with a slow ascent beginning in the middle of the 1760s and a sudden uptick around the time that Zöllner asked his famous question in the Berlinische Monatsschrift.

More revealing, perhaps, is the trajectory of the three terms over the century and a half between Zöllner’s question and the advent of National Socialism.

Bildung would seem to be the most successful of Mendelssohn’s three newcomers, with a rapid ascent during the two decades after his essay. Kultur exhibits a somewhat more modest climb, a sudden descent (as Bildung continues its rise), followed by a steady increase from 1860 onward. The lines for Bildung and Kultur join around the time of the cessation of hostilities in 1918. It would, of course, be necessary to spend some time poking around in the snippets to see what is taking place here, especially since a fair number of the occurrences of Bildung are likely to be the result of the emergence of pedagogy as a discipline and discussions of public education. But it bears remembering that Aufklärung, which consistently lags the other two terms also has close connections to pedagogical concerns.

Substituting Erziehung for Kultur yields the following:

This Ngram, even more than is usually the case, leaves us with more questions than answers. Among the more important is the question of how many of the uses of Bildung and of Aufklärung over this period are simply discussions of education in the more specific sense that is typically associated with the term Erziehung? But that question, however important, is not the one that concerns me here. My interest lies with X’s decision to translate Bildung as “Civilization.”

Culture, Civilization, and the “Destiny of Man”

There were at least two reasons why it would have never occurred to me to translate Bildung as “Civilization.” The first has something to be said in its favor. The other is more problematic.

The best reason for avoiding “Civilization” is that it is out of sync with the religious resonances associated with Bildung. While “Education” doesn’t do much to convey these resonances either, it has the relative virtue of not ruling them out. Since at least Locke, English speakers have had the resources for differentiating the civil from the ecclesiastical and, employing these resources, have been able to argue that civil interests do not include the care of souls. Bildung, in contrast, has quite a bit to do with the care of souls and those of us who tend, almost instinctively, to think like John Stuart Mill (even if we haven’t read him) tend to think that the sort of care of souls that goes under the rubric of “cultivating individuality” is something that is best conducted beyond the reach of the state. And as those of us who have actually read On Liberty know, a good deal of what Mill was doing in the book rested on the account of Bildung that Wilhelm von Humboldt had provided.¹²

That X was likely unaware of these resonances is in keeping with his handling of what may well be the most crucial — and as well as the most underdeveloped — concept in Mendelssohn’s essay: that of the “Bestimmung des Menschen.” Dan and Bert, perhaps thinking of the famous essay by Fichte that carried the same title, rendered this as “vocation of man.” I considered that option, but went with “destiny of man,” in part because I wanted to capture the way in which the German Bestimmung allowed Mendelssohn to suggest that the definition of humanity lies in its destiny: it is what it becomes.

The term itself had been popularized by the clergyman Johann Joachim Spalding’s Bestimmung des Menschen (1748). Like Mendelssohn, Spalding was a member of the Berlin “Wednesday Society,” a secret society (known, privately, as the “Friends of Enlightenment) whose membership included the important figures in the Prussian bureaucracy, the Berlin clergy, and leading figures in Berlin intellectual life like Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai.¹³ There is much to be said about Spalding’s book and, fortunately, Michael Printy has written a superb article on it, which appeared about a year ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas.¹⁴ Go read it (I’ll wait).

As Mendelssohn saw it, Bildung was composed of a theoretical side (which he termed “enlightenment”) and a practical side — “culture”). The goal towards which Bildung was oriented was defined by the Bestimmung des Menschen. It was the telos that the process of Bildung sought to attain and, in order to achieve that goal, it was necessary to bring the contrasting imperatives of Aufklärung and Kultur into harmony. Here is how I translated the paragraph where most of the work gets done (I must confess that I wince when I see Bildung translated as “education,” but — as I explained in the earlier post — it strikes me as the best of a set of bad options).

The more the social conditions of a people are brought, through art and industry, into harmony with the destiny of man, the more education this people has.

Education is composed of culture and enlightenment. Culture appears to be more oriented towards practical matters: (objectively) toward goodness, refinement, and beauty in the arts and social mores; (subjectively) towards facility, diligence, and dexterity in the arts, and inclinations, dispositions, and habits in social mores. The more these correspond in a people with the destiny of man, the more culture will be attributed to them, just as a piece of land is said to be more cultured and cultivated, the more it is brought, through the industry of men, to the state where it produces things that are useful to men. Enlightenment, in contrast, seems to be more related to theoretical matters: to (objective) rational knowledge and to (subjective) facility in rational reflection about matters of human life, according to their importance and influence on the destiny of man.

I posit, at all times, the destiny of man as the measure and goal of all our striving and efforts, as a point on which we must set our eyes, if we do not wish to lose our way.

Perhaps the most striking feature of X’s translation is that it doesn’t quite know what to do with Bestimmung des Menschen. X opted for “condition of man” as a translation, turning a term denoting a goal that must be achieved into a state that one has. This is coupled with a tendency to emphasize the political connotations associated with the term “civilization.” For example, the first paragraph of the passage quoted above was rendered (the complete translation can be found in an earlier post):

The more the state of society of any nation is made to harmonize through art and industry with the respective conditions of men, to so much greater degree of civilization has that nation attained.

What we have lost here is any sense that the goal that Bildung attempts to achieve transcends public life, a point that is essential if we are to understand the tensions that will later surface in Mendelssohn’s essay when he explores the way in which the destinies of “man as man” — that is, people as human beings — and “man as citizen” — human beings as members of political societies. The goal of Bildung is emphatically not simply to improve the “state of society of any nation” — it is to improve society. To understand the normative force of that word for eighteenth-century thinkers it might be worth recalling how Mendelssohn’s friend Lessing understood the true mission of the Masonic movement: to undo the divisions that civil society had introduced among human beings by bringing them together into a society that encompassed all.

But while I think “civilization” doesn’t work as a translation for Bildung there is something about the choice that makes me reluctant to be too hard on X. This reluctance is bound up with my second, and less definable, reason why it would never have occurred to me to translate Bildung as “civilization.” Long before I knew about Spalding — indeed, long before I knew about Mendelssohn’s essay — I was already convinced that Bildung was a uniquely German word and “civilization” was, of course, French. Having read Thomas Mann, I knew that, in the run-up to the slaughter that began at the end of the summer of 1914, Kultur and Zivilisation had become opposing principles: Germans use the former, French use the latter, and the no-man’s land between them would be filled with rotting corpses.

While X’s choice of “civilization” as a translation for Bildung may have missed the particular nuances of Mendelssohn’s argument, there is something about it that gets to the heart of what Mendelssohn was attempting to do. The “Jewish Socrates” found a concept in the work of his Christian colleague that might be put to use in defining the tasks of enlightenment. That sort of bridging of divisions was also the goal of the Wednesday Society, whose rules forbad its members from calling each other by any titles they might hold and from talking about topics that were tied too closely to their vocations. The goal was to meet as human beings and talk about matters of common concern, a goal that — as Margaret Jacob puts it in her great study of the Masonic movement — amounted to attempting to live the enlightenment.

X’s search for an English word that might serve as a translation for the German Bildung was, in its own way, a small part of that same project. And so, of course, was the larger project of the German Museum: to enlighten English speakers about the efforts that German speakers were making to enlighten themselves. Even if the European Enlightenment had regional variations, it attempted to speak a common language, a language that might permit people from different nations to become members of that cosmopolitan community of readers and writers that would be sketched in that other famous answer to Zöllner’s question. Measured against that effort, perhaps X’s difficulties with Bildung hardly matter.

Courcelette, October 1916

The earliest public manifestation of this interest was a somewhat idiosyncratic article that was a great deal of fun to write: “A Raven with a Halo: The Translation of Aristotle’s Politics,” History of Political Thought, VII:2, (1986) 295-319 ↩
For what follows, I am indebted to two articles by Barry Murnane, “Radical Translations: Dubious Anglo-German Cultural Transfers in the 1790s,” in (Re-) Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France, ed. Maike Oergel, Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft/spectrum Literature 32 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 44–60 and “Gothic Translation: Germany, 1760-1830,” in The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, Routledge Worlds (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 231–42 and to the discussion in John R. Davis, The Victorians and Germany (Lang 2007) 54. There is a passing discussion of the German Museum and of Peter Will on p. 62 of Rudolf Muhs’ article “Geisteswehen: Rahmenbedingungen Des Deutsch-Britischen Kulturaustauschs Im 19. Jahrhundert” in R. Murhs, J. Paulmann, W. Steinmetz, eds. Aneignung und Abwehr. Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Grossbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim, 1998) 44-70. ↩
Bayard Quincy Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld, editors, German Literature in British Magazines 1750-1860 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949) 47-49. ↩
René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England 1793-1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931) 11-15. There are passing citations of the German Museum on 15 and 18, the fruits, presumably, of Wellek’s encounter with the copy in the Houghton Library that I would read some seven decades later. ↩
In Volume II (currently the only volume that I’ve run OCR software on), there are at least ten articles credited to “P. W.” (while the text is clean enough to yield a fairly good OCR layer, I doubt it catches everything). In contrast, two very short pieces are signed “M. G.” (presumably Maria Geisweiler, the married name of Countess Maria von Schulenburg, though there is also one M. S., which could conceivably also be by her). None are signed A. W. or C. G. ↩
I’m in process of converting the other two volumes and would be happy to share the finished products (to the extent that Google’s copyright claims permit) with anyone who would be interested in working with them (what is currently available on Google consists of image files only). ↩
The standard discussions include Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung” in O. Brunner, W. Conze, R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe I, 508-551, Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsprinzip (Bonn: Bouvier, 1930), and W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
↩
See E.L. Stahl, Die Religiose und die Humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee (Bern, 1934), 97-101 and Hans Sperber, “Der Einfluss des Pietismus auf die Sprache des 18 Jahrhunderts,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, VIII (1930), 508-9. ↩
Vierhaus, 510 ↩
See David Sorkin’s wide-ranging discussion in “Wilhelm Von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791-1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44:1 ( 1983): 55-73 and his shorter account in The Transformation of German Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 16-7. ↩
Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy 182-6 and Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) 8-12, 15-25, 86-90. For a discussion of the transformation of the concept within German neo-humanism in the two decades after Mendelssohn’s essay, see Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit 264-78 ↩
What we (or, at least what I) don’t know is how much of Mill’s acquaintance with German philosophy may have had something to do with his contact with Sarah Austin, the sister of Harriet Taylor (the object of Mill’s affections) and the wife of John Austin (the great English jurist). I’ve said a few things about her in an earlier post, but someone should spend more time working on this interesting woman. ↩
I’ve written about them in a variety of places, including the introduction to my collection What is Enlightenment?. ↩
Michael Printy, “The Determination of Man: Johann Joachim Spalding and the Protestant Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 74:2 (2013): 189–212. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, German Museum, History of Concepts, Moses Mendelssohn, translation | 2 Comments

Review of Samuel Fleischacker, What is Enlightenment?

Posted on March 27, 2014 by James Schmidt

My review of Samuel Fleischacker’s What is Enlightenment? (Routledge, 2013) has now been published on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Readers of this blog will likely find Fleischacker’s work of interest and my comments on it somewhat predictable. I can only hope that, like Tristram Shandy, “my hobby-horse … is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him.” And I trust that everyone is properly grateful for the existence of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a peerless demonstration of what academic publishing might become in the age of digital reproducibility.

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Moses Mendelssohn, “On Enlightening the Mind”

Posted on March 18, 2014 by James Schmidt

The text that follows is the first English translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s 1784 response to the question “What is enlightenment?” The anonymous translation appeared in 1800 in the second volume of The German Museum, a short-lived journal edited by the London-based German emigres Constantin Geisweiler, Peter Will, and Anton Willich. The transcription that follows retains the original spelling (including the rendering of Mendelssohn’s name in the title) and pagination. For a discussion of the translator’s choices and possible implications, see the accompanying posts on this blog.

MOSES MENDELSOHN: ON ENLIGHTENING THE MIND

[39] THE terms intellectual improvement, or enlightening the mind, cultivation, and civilization¹, are as yet scarcely naturalized in the German language. Their use is almost confined to books. By the majority of mankind they are scarcely known or understood: but can this be considered as a proof that the objects these words represent are new or foreign to us? Certainly not. It is said of a certain nation, that they have no words for virtue and superstition, and yet no small portion of each may justly be ascribed to them.

Common usage, however, although it apparently tends to establish a distinction between these nearly synonymous words, has not yet had time to fix the boundaries of each.

Civilization, cultivation, and intellect, are modifications of social life, the result of the industry and exertions of mankind to improve the general happiness.

The more the state of society of any nation is made to harmonize through art and industry with the respective conditions of men, to so much greater degree of civilization has that nation attained.

Civilization may be divided into cultivation and enlightening the public mind, the former of which seems to be chiefly practical, and to consist of refinement, beauty, and perfection in mechanics, in the arts, and in the manners of society of talents and industry in the arts, and of moral inclinations and propensities. The more these agree with the condition of men, the more cultivation may they be said to have acquired, as a piece of land is said to be better cultivated, the more industry has been bestowed on it, so as to produce things useful to mankind; but on the other hand, enlightening seems to relate principally to theory or rational knowledge, and a facility to reason on the affairs of life according to their importance and influence on the condition of men.

[40] I consider the condition of man as the grand measure and end of all our exertions and labours, and as a point which we must constantly keep in view, if we would avoid losing ourselves in conjecture and speculation.

A language becomes enlightened by means of the sciences, and it becomes cultivated or polished by means of social converse, poetry, and eloquence. By the former it becomes more adapted to objects of theory, and by the latter to those of practice. Both together give a language that quality which is denominated civilization.

The highest degree of cultivation is called refinement. Happy is the nation whose refinement is the effect of cultivation, and of an enlightened state of the public mind, whose external lustre and polish arises from an internal solid basis of truth and virtue.

An enlightened state of mind is to cultivation what theory generally is to practice, knowledge to morality, and criticism to taste. Considered in themselves, they stand in the nearest relation to each other, although they very often appear totally distinct.

It may be said that the inhabitants of Nuremberg and of France are more cultivated, those of Berlin and of England more enlightened, while the Chinese are highly cultivated, but very unenlightened: the Greeks possessed both these qualities. They were a highly civilized and polished nation, as their language is a highly civilized and polished language. In general the language of a nation is the best measure and criterion of their civilization, as well as of the more or less enlightened state of the national mind, and of the expansion of that mind as well as of its strength.

Farther, the actual condition of men may be divided into, 1. the condition of men considered as men, and, 2. the condition of men considered as citizens.

In considering the subject of cultivation these objects coincide, as the value of all practical perfections depends alone on their influence on social life, and must accord with the actual condition of men as members of society. Men as men require no cultivation, but even in this point of view they require much enlightening.

From the rank and profession of men in civil life arise certain duties and rights, and therefore in proportion to these require various talents and abilities, habits and inclinations, manners and customs, and degrees of cultivation and refinement; and the more these accord with the various ranks and professions of men, that is with their respective conditions as [41] members of society, the more cultivation that nation may be said to have attained.

To each individual, different theoretical knowledge, different abilities to acquire that knowledge, and different degrees of enlightened instruction, are necessary according to their various ranks and professions; but that species of improvement which regards men as men, is generally independent of the distinction of ranks, while that which regards men as citizens, is modified according to their ranks and professions in life. The condition of men, therefore, is here the measure and the end of their exertions.

According to these rules the enlightening the public mind of any nation will he regulated, 1st, by the degree of knowledge they possess; 2d, by the importance of that knowledge, that is, relatively to the actual state and condition of men as men and as citizens; 3d, by its extension through the various ranks and classes of society; 4th, by the nature of their professions and vocations: and were the degree of this enlightening of a nation to be measured by a fourfold compound ratio, the component parts thereof separately taken, would be found to be themselves composed of other more simple ratioes.

The enlightening of the man may not always accord with that of the citizen. Many truths there are, which, however useful to men as men, may sometimes prove injurious to them as citizens. Here we must weigh the consequences. A collision may also arise between the essential or the accidental condition of the man, and the essential or accidental condition of the citizen. Were men deprived of their essential condition as men they would sink into brutes; deprived of their accidental condition, they would not be the elevated beings they now appear. Without their essential condition as citizens, the political constitution of society would cease to exist; without their accidental condition, society would no longer retain its due subordination.

Unhappy is that country where the essential condition of the man does not harmonize with the essential condition of the citizen; where the degree of information which is indispensably necessary to men, cannot be extended through every class without danger to the political constitution.

But when the accidental condition of the man comes in competition with the essential or accidental condition of the citizen, rules must be established, according to which exceptions may be made, and competitions may be decided.

When the essential condition of men is unfortunately brought into a state of opposition with their accidental condition, when men dare not explain certain useful and [42] ornamental truths to mankind at large, without undermining the foundations of religion and morality, the instructor of his fellow-citizens who has a due regard to virtue, will act with caution and prudence, and rather permit prejudice to continue, than banish truths with which it is so intimately united. This maxim, however, has certainly proved the strongest bulwark of priestcraft, and we are indebted to it for many centuries of barbarism and superstition. As often as men were willing to destroy this evil, it took refuge in the sanctuary; and yet the friends of mankind will, even in the most enlightened periods, obey this maxim.

The more excellent any thing may be when perfect, says a Hebrew writer, the more prejudicial is it when corrupted and depraved. A rotten piece of wood is not so unpleasant as a corrupted flower; nor is this so disgusting as the putrid body of an animal; and this again is less horrible than a human corpse in a state of corruption. Thus it is with cultivation, and the enlightening the mind. The more valuable they may be at their first breaking forth, the more are they to be dreaded when in a state of corruption and destruction.

The abuse of this enlightened state of mind weakens the-moral sense, leads to insensibility, egotism, irreligion, and anarchy. The abuse of cultivation gives birth to licentiousness, hypocrisy, effeminacy, superstition, and slavery.

Where the enlightening and cultivation of mankind advance with equal pace, they become to each other the best security against corruption, and that civilization of any nation, which, according to the above definitions, consists of cultivation and an enlightened state of the public mind, is therefore the least liable to corruption.

A civilized nation has no other internal danger to fear than the excess of its national happiness, which, like the most perfect health of the human body, may be called either in itself a disease, or at least a passage to it. A nation which has through civilization attained the highest pinnacle of national happiness, is for that very reason in danger of falling; whereas it cannot rise higher: but this would lead us too far from the question before us.

Aufklärung, Kultur, Bildung [footnote in original] ↩

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The First English Translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”: Part I

Posted on March 17, 2014 by James Schmidt

Last summer I wrote a series of posts on the choices involved in translating Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” into English. Attempting something similar for Moses Mendelssohn’s answer to the same question, which appeared three months before Kant’s in the same journal, would be a less promising undertaking. In what turned out to be a massive duplication of efforts, Daniel Dahlstrom, Hans-Herbert Kögler, and I all produced translations of the essay in the late 1990s and, while they differ on a few points, there is not a lot to be learned from comparing them.¹ As we labored away on what each of us assumed would be the first translation of Mendelssohn’s essay into English, none of us was aware that, almost two centuries earlier, an anonymous translation of the essay had been published in the second volume on an obscure British called the The German Museum.² That translation turns out, as we shall see, to be very interesting.

The German Museum

The German Museum was a short-lived publication (two volumes appeared in 1800 and a third in 1801) with the ambitious agenda of trying to convince an Anglophone audience of the virtues eighteenth-century German literature and philosophy at a time when British opponents of the French Revolution were busy constructing an image of Germans intellectual as atheist Jacobins Hell-bent bent on destroy all that good Englishmen cherished. As the Anti-Jacobin Review warned its readers,

such a scene of corruption as Germany now exhibits, an English mind shudders to contemplate. The young women, even of rank, uncontrolled by that natural diffidence, unchecked by that innate modesty, which at once heighten the allurements of, and serve as a protection to, beauty, but which have been destroyed by the fatal infusion of philosophical principles, consider the age of puberty as the period of exemption from every social restraint, and sacrifice their virtue to the first candidate for their favour, who has the means either of captivating their fancy, or gratifying their avarice; while the dreadful number of abortions serves to proclaim the frequency and extent of their crime! … In short, the boundaries which separate virtue from vice appear to be entirely removed, and the beset cement of society is consequently dissolved (Anti-Jacobin Review IV (August-December 1799, xii-xiii)

I first became interested in the journal early in 2001, altered to its existence by a passing discussion in Bayard Quincy Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld’s 1949 survey of German literature in British periodicals.³ At that point, copies of the German Museum were hard to find, with WorldCat listing fewer than a dozen sets in existence. Fortunately for me, one of them was located just across the river in the Houghton library at Harvard. It took several days for the staff at Houghton to figure out where the volumes had been shelved (while waiting for them to show up, I amused myself with the Anti-Jacobin Review) and when the three large volumes were finally rolled over to the table where I was working, I discovered a few call slips with what appeared to be name of the last person to have requested them: René Wellek. As I began my reading I wondered whether I was the first person to turn these pages since Wellek did the research that produced Immanuel Kant In England, 1793-1838 seven decades earlier.

Copies of The German Museum are no longer difficult to find: Google scanned the set that now resides in the New York Public Library, a set that was previously owned by H. G. Fiedler, the editor of the Oxford Book of German Verse (1938), a collection that would serve as my introduction to world of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin. Fiedler’s copy of the German Museum now resides on my iPad, which allows me to browse the pages of a publication from the dawn of the nineteenth century during my morning commute. Jonathan Richman was right: the modern world is not so bad.

Translating Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn’s text does not present the translator with the sort of difficulties Kant’s posed. Contemporaries praised Mendelssohn’s style for its elegance and clarity and he avoided those paradoxical formulations (e.g., “selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit”) figure so centrally in Kant’s account. But the essay does pose at least one significant challenge and, as is the case in the Kant essay, it arrives at the very start. Here’s Mendelssohn’s opening paragraph:

Die Worte Aufklärung, Kultur, Bildung sind in unsrer Sprache noch neue Ankömmlinge. Sie gehören vor der Hand bloss zur Büchersprache. Der gemeine Haufe verstehet sie kaum. Sollte dieses ein Beweis sein, dass auch die Sache bei uns noch neu sei? Ich glaube nicht. Man sagt von einem gewissen Volke, dass es kein bestimmtes Wort für Tugend, keines für Aberglauben habe; ob man ihm gleich ein nicht geringes Maass von beiden mit Recht zuschreiben darf.

Here’s how I translated it:

The words “enlightenment”, “culture”, and “education” are newcomers to our language. They currently belong only to literary discourse. The masses scarcely understand them. Does this prove that these things are also new to us? I believe not. One says of a certain people that they have no specific word for “virtue”, or none for “superstition”, and yet one may justly attribute a not insignificant measure of both to them.

The problem that confronts any translator is what to do with the last of the trio of words that appear in the first sentence. The difficulty is not that Bildung defies translation into English: there are any number of words that will work and, in contexts such as this, “culture” will usually do quite nicely.

But Mendelssohn takes that option of the table by juxtaposing Bildung and Kultur, with Kultur denoting the “practical” aspect of Bildung (i.e., the improvement of mores and customs) and Aufklärung designating the “theoretical” side (i.e., the spread of scientific and technical knowledge). Since Kultur will, inevitably, be translated as “culture,” the translator is left with nothing but bad choices when it comes to translating Bildung. Both Dahlstrom and I opted for “education” — which (as I went on to explain in an apologetic footnote) doesn’t quite work in this context. Kögeler decided to leave it untranslated and explained the range of possible meanings in a footnote.

Our anonymous nineteenth-century predecessor took a very different approach:

The terms intellectual improvement, or enlightening the mind, cultivation, and civilization, are as yet scarcely naturalized in the German language. Their use is almost confined to books. By the majority of mankind they are scarcely known or understood: but can this be considered as a proof that the objects these words represent are new or foreign to us? Certainly not. It is said of a certain nation, that they have no words for virtue and superstition, and yet no small portion of each may justly be ascribed to them.

The German Museum’s translator was content to insert an asterisk after the word “civilization” and, at the bottom of the page, placed a footnote that simply lists the three German words, without explanation or apology.

When I first came upon this translation I didn’t take much notice of the use of “civilization” as a translation for Bildung. But, coming back to it after a decade and a half, that choice strikes me as an object lesson in what we can learn from looking at old translations.

Enlightening the Mind and Cultivating Morality

In 2001, what caught my attention was the prolix translation of Aufklärung “intellectual improvement, or enlightening the mind” — six English words to translate one German term. The translator’s avoidance of the (to us) obvious choice of “enlightenment” was in keeping with the early nineteenth-century practices, which favored the use of “enlightening” (which, as I discussed in a previous post, had been used in Richardson’s translation of Kant’s answer to the question) or “illumination” (which was the term employed, among other places, in the Anti-Jacobin Review).

The general practice in the German Museum was to render Aufklärung as “mental illumination.” A search of the scanned text on Google books turns up no appearances of “enlightenment,” but 38 uses of the phrase “mental illumination” (23 of them in first volume) and 17 occurrences of “enlightening,” usually coupled with “the mind” but sometimes standing on its own (five of the uses of the word are in the Mendelssohn translation). In contrast, “culture” turns up less frequently: five times in the first volume, eight in the second (though three of the uses have to do with agriculture), and five in the third.

The German Museum’s affection for “mental illumination” and “enlightening the mind” was somewhat idiosyncratic. Plotting the two terms against “culture” over the first two decades of the nineteenth century yields the following:

About the only surprise here is that the use of “culture” seems to be dropping. But a look at what happened to “culture” across the entire century provides a different picture:

We can get a better sense of the career of “mental illumination” and “enlightening the mind” if we can take “culture” out of search (and make the search case-insensitive):

Again, what we find here is not entirely surprising: terms favored of the German Museum decline over the course of the century. The only thing that is unexpected is that the terms survived as long as they did, but a glance at the text samples suggests that in the last third of the century both terms are being kept in circulation chiefly in religious works.

As is usually the case, we learn a bit more from looking at the text snippets that Google provides. They show that “mental illumination” was turning up in such publications as The Monthly Magazine (“the King of Prussia and his amiable Queen rival with each other in displaying their laudable zeal for the promotion of mental illumination”), the London Medical and Physical Journal (“Greece, in her brightest day of mental illumination, would have deified the discoverer of the circulation of the blood”), and the English translation of Condorcet’s Outlines of the Historical Progress of the Human Mind (“a more general diffusion of the philosophical ideas of justice and equality, and lastly by the slow but sure effect of the progress of mental illumination”). The phrase “enlightening the mind” turns up in Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, editions of the works of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Miller’s Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), a “sketch of the revolutions and improvements in science, arts, and literature,” written by a New York Presbyterian minister with connections to the American Philosophical Society and the History Society of Massachusetts. It would appear, then, that “mental illumination” and “enlightening the mind” did more or less the same work that would subsequently be done, more economically, by the word “enlightenment.”

Mendelssohn on Language and Concepts

By now it should be apparent that I have a certain weakness for staring at graphs of infrequently used words and savoring the peculiar text snippets that Google provides. In the present case, however, this peculiar habit is not without a certain justification. Mendelssohn, after all, began his answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” not, as Kant did, by defining the term, but instead with a claim about language use and, in the second paragraph of his answer, he offers the following suggestion about the relationship between language usage and concepts formation. Here’s how the 1800 translation renders it:

Common usage, however, although it apparently tends to establish a distinction between these nearly synonimous words, has not yet had time to fix the boundaries of each.

By the time Mendelssohn got around to answering the question “What is enlightenment?” he had been thinking about the relationship between words and concepts for close to three decades.⁴

As early as 1756 he included a discussion of the origin of language in the commentary he appended to his translation of Rousseau Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.⁵ Three years later he wrote an extensive review of Johann David Michaelis’s prize-winning response to the Berlin Academy’s question for 1759, “What is the reciprocal influence of the opinions of a people on language and of language on opinions?” for Nicolai’s Letters Concerning the Latest Literature and at about the same period wrote a manuscript on the development of language and its relation to thought.⁶

Mendelssohn maintained that progress in reasoning both fosters and is made possible by the development of “arbitrary signs” that allow for more complex and subtle understandings of relationships than is possible through the use of either “natural signs” (which are the direct effect of natural causes, for example smoke as a sign of fire) or “imitative signs” (sounds that mimic natural objects, either through verbal interjections or hieroglyphics). “The more men develop themselves [sich bilden],” he argued, “the more logical and abstract their ideas become, the more withdrawn their language is from the sensual expression of nature” (6/2:11). The possession of signs that are no longer tied to the materiality of objects fosters a process of abstraction and comparison that is “enlightening” (6/2:11).

Nowhere is Mendelssohn’s conviction that there is an intimate relationship between the development of language and the clarification of concepts more evident than in his discussions on the development of moral philosophy. At the start of Jerusalem, he observed that the “ingenious errors” of Thomas Hobbes — like those of Spinoza in the area of metaphysics — prompted efforts to clarify the relationship between right, duty, power, and obligation. The fruits of those efforts at clarification “have become so intimately fused with our language” that today the refutation of Hobbes “seems to be a matter of common sense” that is accomplished “by language itself” (8:106). It was this conviction that the development of conceptual distinctions was bound up with the development of language goes a long way to explaining why he argued, in his essay on enlightenment,

A language becomes enlightened by means of the sciences, and it becomes cultivated or polished by means of social converse, poetry, and eloquence. By the former it becomes more adapted to objects of theory, and by the latter to those of practice. Both together give a language that quality which is denominated civilization [Bildung].

I have, once again, quoted from the 1800 translation. But when I was doing my translation of Mendelssohn’s article, it never have occurred to me to translate Bildung as “civilization.” I suspect that this tells us something about the difference between the world in which Dahlstrom, Koegeler, and I live and that of our nineteenth-century predecessor. I will discuss that in the second part of this post.

In the meantime, for those who might be interested in reading the German Museum‘s translation, I have posted a copy of it here.

See Hans-Herbert Koegeler, “Reason, Tradition, and Critique: Mendelssohn’s Essay on Enlightenment,” Public Culture 6 (1993): 201–217, James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), and Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
Moses Mendelsohn [sic]. “On Enlightening the Mind,” German Museum II (1800) 39-42 ↩
Bayard Quincy Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld, editors, German Literature in British Magazines 1750-1860 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949). ↩
I’m much indebted to Leah Hochman’s discussion of these matters in her 1999 doctoral dissertation Sign, Art, and Ritual: Aspects of Moses Mendelssohn’s Theory of Language (Boston University). ↩
Mendelssohn, “Sendschreiben an den Herrn Magister Lessing in Leipzig”, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe 2:107-9 ↩
The review of Michaelis appeared in Literaturbriefe 72-5 (December 1759); see Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe 5/1:105-118. For the essays on language from the same period see “Über die Sprache” and “Notizen zu Ursprung der Sprach” in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe 6/1:3-28 ↩

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