The Practices of the Enlightenment

Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, The Practices of Enlightenment unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment.

By engaging with three critical categories—aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere—The Practices of Enlightenment illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.

Dorothea E. von Mücke is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project and The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale. Her coedited books include Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century and A New History of German Literature.

Jonathan Sheehan, University of California, Berkeley:
Why are the arts and literature such crucial spaces for the modern cultivation of human freedom? Dorothea von Mücke gives this question a remarkable history, revealing how and why aesthetics became so fundamental to Western ideals of creativity, responsibility, and autonomy. Moving nimbly across theology, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and print culture—and engaging a host of eighteenth-century literary figures from the familiar to the unknown—von Mücke's book charts how the Enlightenment made artistic creativity the very marker of humanity itself.

David Bates, University of California, Berkeley:
If the legacy of the Enlightenment has been endlessly debated, its origins are hardly well understood. Here, with great precision and elegance, Dorothea von Mucke traces the fundamental religious underpinnings of some key secular achievements of eighteenth-century culture, namely aesthetics, the individual, and the public sphere. This prepares the way for some rather unexpected—and convincing—readings of key Enlightenment texts. The reader emerges with a profound sense of how our secularism has been shaped from its inception by theological forms of thought, a timely consideration.

David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago:
This risk-taking, cliché-breaking book embodies the virtues of the writers it studies. Lessing, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, and Goethe come alive in its pages as the inventors of a new apprehension of art, as explorers of interiority, as creators of a critical public. Synthetic vision, astonishing breadth of learning, and richly textured analysis combine to produce a study of remarkable power and subtlety. Every chapter inspired me. The Practices of Enlightenment is a worthy successor to Habermas's great book on the emergence of the public sphere.

Paul Fleming, Cornell University:
A remarkable and innovative investigation of the confluence of religious (especially pietistic) and aesthetic writings in shaping Enlightenment thought, offering a decisive intervention into intellectual history and the emergence of the aesthetic lexicon that still accompanies us today.