Useful Lies: The Limits of Enlightening the Common Man. Frederick the Great and Franco-German Cultural Transfer (original) (raw)
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This article asks if the role of the Enlightenment philosopher was, as understood by contemporaries, to work against elites, or to underpin them. Concentrating particularly on the arch-elitist Frederick the Great and his court philosophers, we will track the notion of the elite and their position as holders of truth and enlighteners. The central tenet of the debate will concern the notion of lying to the masses and the utility of truth. It will be shown that advocacy of absolute truth was rare and often dissimulated by philosophers keen to avoid censure. This dividing line will be used to show the cultural transfer of Francophone debates to the German intellectual sphere.
This article seeks to show how seventeenth-century moralist literature had a decisive influence on the way eighteenth-century philosophes conceived their own personae and positioned themselves in public space. Specifically, it explores the fabrication of the philosophe's persona in the milieu of moderate rigorists gathered around Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet at Louis XIV's court. In so doing, the article casts light on the origins of the central figure of the Enlightenment narrative, the philosophe, and shows the proximity between this persona and that of the late seventeenth-century Catholic moralists.
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he December 1783 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift [Berlin Monthly] carried a response by the clergyman Johann Friedrich Zöllner to an anonymous article, published in the journal a few months earlier, that questioned whether the participation of clergy was necessary at marriage ceremonies. Zöllner took issue with the proposal, arguing that it would further corrupt public morality at the very moment when "the most horrible blasphemies are spoken with smiles," when libertinism ran rampant, when "French charlatanry" threatened to choke off whatever patriotic sentiments still remained, and when-"in the name of enlightenment [Aufklärung]"-much confusion had been wrought in the hearts and minds of the citizenry. This confusion, in Zöllner's view, extended to the very notion of enlightenment itself. So he inserted a footnote in his essay that asked: What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins to enlighten! And still I have never found it answered! 1
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This article reinterprets Catholic hostility toward the Enlightenment in the nineteenth century. Reading the efforts of German-Catholic scholars to distinguish "true" from "false" Enlightenment, it argues that this differentiation was part of a broader discourse of Catholicism through which Catholics sought to engage the modern world. More than merely an instance of co-opting a hegemonic terminology, laying claim to "true" Enlightenment helped scholars in three distinct ways: It legitimized their own scholarly praxis, served as a way of managing anxiety over Catholic involvement in the Enlightenment, and provided a framework for pinpointing Catholicism's cultural uniqueness. By reassessing Catholic hostility to one major tenet of modernity in this way, the article steps outside the "master narrative of secularization" and joins a growing tendency to approach religion from a postsecular perspective.
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The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Not too long ago, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western European masterminds, liberty, toleration, and modern science slowly percolated to the rest of the planet. Today the infrastructural geography and intellectual dimensions of the Enlightenment seem much more segmented and diverse, the older metropolitan histories are coming apart. My essay discusses the current state of the art in Enlightenment studies and connects it to a sprawling literature on rival Enlightenments in Central Europe. Organized around the three chief themes of structures, spaces, and translations, my chapter plugs fresh research on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Habsburg lands into the international debate on the sources, internal diversification, limits, and legacies of the Enlightenment.
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and so many others shook the fundaments of Western authority? 1 Or was it the critical stance of science, of daring to know, as Kant so famously put it, brought together by the Republic of Letters, an international network of pamphleteers, politicians, scientific scholars, philosophers, and bureaucrats? 2 Was it, as Carl Becker claimed, a secular quest to return to the Heavenly City of Christianity? 3 Or was the Enlightenment, or the idea of "instrumental reason," partially doomed and steeped in logics of power without morality that, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno would later claim, set the foundations of the Holocaust? 4 We have so many narratives of Enlightenment, and we are faced with so many of its paradoxes. The challenge here, from the standpoint of Enlightenment Florence, is to begin to put them all together. Historians still tend to see the Enlightenment, high or low, as literary and politically radical and mostly un-Catholic, for lack of a better term. 5 Yet there was a Catholic Enlightenment, and it was potent and widespread. It was not radical, yet it hewed to central Enlightenment principles of toleration and, most of all, to a commitment to empiricism drawn from natural science, to an ambition towards encyclopedic knowledge and the "study of man," and to the idea that reforms based on empirical observation could improve society. 6 And yet, the story of Enlightenment in the Catholic world often conflicts with or is overshadowed by the grand French, Dutch, and English Enlightenment narratives. During the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, the Catholic world and, indeed, much of the European continent was ruled by enlightened autocrats who still fit awkwardly into the historiography of Enlightenment. We know that Frederick the Great, with Voltaire, authored his own Anti-Machiavel , becoming a roi philosophe. He was a reformer and a thinker, but also a cruel tyrant. It seems that many historiographical traditions want the Enlightenment to tell a simple, coherent story of secular progress. Of course, the Enlightenment is rife with paradoxes. 7 Although it was clear to readers of eighteenth-century literature and scientific