Anne Pollok

This chapter examines the various strategies of intellectual self-formation by female intellectuals. While Henriette Herz created the public persona of the nurturing muse in her salon and established the idea of mutual exchange between the sexes, Rahel Varnhagen took the idea of self-reflection in the eyes of others one step further and, together with her husband, created a monument of remembrance with her collection of letters, fashioning the modern persona as fundamentally constituted through her exchange with others. Bettina von Arnim, finally, had no qualms using the most prominent poet, Goethe, as a prop in her writings, exercising the subversive power of remembrance to establish herself. Even though all these strategies build on the (male) other, they showcase the potential to subvert traditional gender roles.

This paper considers Mendelssohn’s attempt at a definition of Enlightenment in terms of Bildung, comprising the theoretical element of the enlightenment of reason with the practical requirements of culture. To avoid a possible dialectics of enlightenment, where the very methods one uses to enlighten harbour the seeds of new blindness, Mendelssohn advocates considering the lively connections between people, the role of traditions and personal relations in the formation of an individual self, and the connections we should have to our past, present, and future. Thus, his essay from 1784 can be read as an apt defence of a dialogical notion of freedom within the Enlightenment era.

In 18th-century Germany philosophers were occupied with questions of who we are and what we should be. Can the individual fulfill its vocation or is this possible only for humanity as a whole? Is significant progress towards perfection in any way possible for me or just for me as part of humanity? By following the origin and nature of these debates, this collection sheds light on the vocation of humanity in early German philosophy. Featuring translations of Spalding's Contemplation on the Vocation of the Human Being in its first version from 1748 and an extended translation of Abbt's and Mendelssohn's epistolary discussion around the Doubts and the Oracle from 1767, newly-commissioned chapters cover Johann Gottfried Herder's inherently cultural concept of the human being, Immanuel Kant's transformative interplay of moral and natural aspects, and the notion of metempsychosis in Fichte's work inspired by two neglected philosophers, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Georg Schlosser. Opening further lines of inquiry, contributors address questions about the adaptations of Spalding's work that focus on the vocation of women as wife, mother or citizen. Exploring the multitude of ways 18th-century German thinkers understand our position in the world, this volume captures major changes in metaphysics and anthropology and enriches current debates within modern philosophy.

In his essay On the necessary limits in the use of beautiful forms Schiller delineates to what degree beautiful packaging of philosophical thoughts is beneficial, as opposed to cases where it merely masks an inconsistent position—defending his philosophical style in contrast to Fichte’s, therewith taking another step in the Horenstreit. This paper shows how Schiller justifies the seeming paradox why his Aesthetic Education is not as nicely written as one might expect from a poet, and why his insistence on a full development of our sensible and imaginative capacities is not tantamount to a call for replacing textbooks with novels. Our capacity to coordinate reason and sensibility finds its limits in women, who are deemed unable to reason sufficiently and are forced to resort to beautiful form alone. Schiller relegates learned women to the sidelines of literary discussion, setting the tone for German academia.

Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859) is one of the most fascinating writers of German Romanticism. After a late, but spectacular start to her career as an author with the biographically inspired Goethe's Correspondence with a Child (1835) that boldly claims the legacy of Germany's most admired poet, Bettina continues to explore the realm of biography, but also widens her perspective to the pressing social questions of her time. Her message is entertaining, yet clear: we need a new way of thinking that engages the whole human being who understands and accepts her rational as well as sensible side, who is situated in a society and engages in dialogue with others. Accordingly, her work is an apt example of the practice of symphilosophy in late German Romanticism. This paper will concentrate on the notion of self-formation through dialogue in her letter books, and the political-aesthetic idea of a ‘king for the people’ that guided Brentano-von Arnim's political engagement in the 1840s.

Abstract:Complex aesthetic perception, according to Mendelssohn’s writings between 1755 and 1771, is most alluring if it showcases a breach in the order of perfection. With this, Mendelssohn introduces a shift in our understanding of the artistic act of imitation: Artistic semblance is always lacking, and a painting that does not point to this fact is, in fact, displeasing. This is also the main reason why we enjoy non-beautiful art: in the artistic rendering of an unpleasant ‘object’ we focus on the artistic act itself, on its formal features, and its effects on us as the perceiver. Thus, a representation that evokes the mixed feelings of pleasure, appreciation, and rejection is superior to ‘pure’ beauty, in that it better refers us to higher forms of perfection: the perfection of the perceiving and creative subject (hence, including both artist and audience). It is the nagging, near-painful impression of mixed sentiments that, according to Mendelssohn, guides our self-perfection, the highest aim of all human endeavors.

Who would hold that history is a dialogue? It sounds somewhat striking to concentrate on the second-person perspective in Cassirer’s account of history, since it is obviously true that the past may somewhat “speak to us”, but that it cannot “speak with us” in a truly dialogical sense. What is here and now contrasts with what is stored away in the past, as two different levels of fluidity. Symbols, as the expressions of past consciousness, are no longer in flux as the present ones are, but need to be actively reconstructed, or revivified by the historian. With Cassirer’s dynamic view on symbolic forms, however, this reconstruction can be understood as a movement from both sides, from the past and from the present.