FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER
Did Adam Ferguson inspire Friedrich Schiller’s philosophy of play? An exercise in tracking the itinerary of an idea
I. The Scottish-German context of the Ferguson-Schiller link
The impact of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on their German contempora- ries has been recognized by recent scholarship as one of the most rewarding intellectual trajectories of the eighteenth century. The sheer volume of Scot- tish works translated into German tells a powerful bibliographical story of cultural reception.1 The qualitative effect of Scottish texts on German thought and letters is documented in numerous engagements of German writers with Scottish works, philosophical as well as belletristic. Scotland, a unique part of what many eighteenth-century Germans reverentially and inaccurately called ‘England’, left particular fingerprints on the high age of German Enlighten- ment, Sturm und Drang, and early Romanticism.2 Some of the greatest philosophers of the Aufklärung, including Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn, followed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, were substantially affected by Scottish sources according to their own testi- monials, and in ways far transcending their own testimonials.3 David Hume most famously, but Thomas Reid no less effectively, were part of a sea
1. Mary Bell Price and Lawrence Marsden Price, The Publication of English humaniora in Germany in the eighteenth century (Berkeley 1934); Bernhard Fabian, ‘English books and their eighteenth-century German readers’, in The Widening circle: essays on the circulation of literature in eighteenth-century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia 1976), p. 119- 195; Norbert Wazsek, ‘Bibliography of the Scottish Enlightenment in Germany’, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century 230 (1985), p. 283-303. 2. Michael Maurer, Aufklärung und Anglophilie in Deutschland (Göttingen 1987); Ian Buru- ma, Anglomania: a European love affair (New York 1999); Fania Oz-Salzberger, Transla- ting the Enlightenment: Scottish civic discourse in eighteenth century Germany (Oxford 1995), chs. 1-2. 3. Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s account of civil society (Dordrecht, Boston, New York 1988). 316 Fania Oz-Salzberger change in the history of German philosophy.4 Adam Smith influenced, not al- ways in ways he himself would have recognized, the modernization of Ger- man political economy.5 Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and John Millar stirred an interest in the new historical science of man and society.6 In the thriving milieus of German literature, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christian Garve were among those who not only read and quoted, but also translated and actively transmitted Scottish works. Thinkers associated with Sturm und Drang and the origins of German Romanticism, such as Jo- hann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, were guided by Scottish thinkers and poets to criticize French Rationalism. Anglophone uni- versity professors, such as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Christoph Mei- ners at Göttingen, were fascinated by books and ideas from Scotland.7 Between 1750 and 1800, David Hume, closely followed by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Thomas Reid, and others, made a successful journey in translation (and at times also in the original English) to German philosophical and literary circles, journals and bookshops. The rise of Ger- man sentimental literature and philosophies of art and the sublime was infor- med by the Earl of Shaftesbury and his Scottish proponents, Francis Hutche- son and Henry Home, Lord Kames. Their effect on Sturm und Drang sensibi- lities was complemented by the highly successful translation and reception of the poetic opus presented to the world by James Macpherson as the ancient lyrics of the Scottish bard Ossian.8 This fascination was not, up until the early nineteenth century, bilateral. Scottish luminaries were far less aware of the emerging German intellectual scene than vice versa, and knew little of their own role in it. This was partly due to the fact that German authors consciously drew on Scottish models in the process of modernizing German philosophy, literature, and cultural self-
4. Gunter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl, Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung (Stuttgart- Bad Cannstatt 1987); Manfred Kuehn, Scottish common sense in Germany (Montreal 1988). 5. Wilhelm Treue, ‘Adam Smith in Deutschland: zum Problem des “Politischen Professors” zwischen 1776 und 1810’, in Deutschland und Europa: historische Studien zur Völker- und Staatenordnung des Abendlandes, ed. Werner Conze (Düsseldorf 1951), p. 191-233; Keith Tribe, Governing economy: the reformation of German economic discourse 1750-1840 (Cambridge 1988). 6. Laszlo Kontler, ‘William Robertson’s History of Manners in German, 1770-1795’, Journal of the history of ideas 58.1 (1997), p. 125-144; Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlighten- ment. 7. Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, pt. 3. 8. Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition (Oxford 1953), ch. 8; Howard Gaskill, ‘German Ossianism: a reappraisal?’, German life and letters 42 (1989), p. 329-341.