Nationalist and Humanist Aesthetics in Klopstock, Lessing, and Kant
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COMMUNITIES OF EXPERIENCE: NATIONALIST AND HUMANIST AESTHETICS IN KLOPSTOCK, LESSING, AND KANT A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Matteo Donald Calla May 2018 © 2018 Matteo Donald Calla COMMUNITIES OF EXPERIENCE: NATIONALIST AND HUMANIST AESTHETICS IN KLOPSTOCK, LESSING, AND KANT Matteo Calla, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 Accounts of the emergence of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany, the study of “sensible cognition” in Alexander Baumgarten’s words, frequently associate its emergence with the imaginative autonomy central to Immanuel Kant’s influential 1791 Critique of the Power of Judgment. Bridging aesthetics, media, and reception studies, this dissertation presents a more diverse picture. Analyzing the works of three key figures – Friedrich Klopstock, G.E. Lessing, and Kant himself – it suggests that aesthetics instead respond to a secular crisis of authority precipitated by the emergence of a bourgeois reading public coming into self-consciousness of its own autonomy. As theories about the essential relation between a subject and a shared sensible world, aesthetics are theories about a subject’s essential relation to community, in the absence of the external authority operative in religion, feudalism, and Leibnizean/ Wolffean rationalism. This study claims that aesthetics are influenced by two models for a subjective relationship to community present in eighteenth-century Germany: Protestantism and Pietism. While Max Weber has suggested that, in substituting external authority for a subjective principle, Protestantism offers a model for secular community based on individual distinction, this study claims that German Pietism offers an alternative at odds with individualism: oriented instead towards an experience of spiritual community in the present. These two models inform two genealogies of aesthetics catalyzed by the emergence of print. Humanist aesthetics, such as those of Kant and late Lessing, reinforce the isolation of the print medium by emphasizing autonomous experience and privileging written media. By contrast, in the work of Friedrich Klopstock emerges a nationalist strain that, influenced by Pietism, is in tension with reading, emphasizing live performance and forms of print distribution binding individuals into more substantive contact. Analyzing Klopstock and Lessing’s poetry, plays, and political allegories, this study shows how these aesthetic practices actively seek to organize different forms of secular community around sensible presentations. This dissertation ultimately seeks both to uncover a genealogy of nationalist aesthetics obscured by humanist histories of aesthetics, and develop a methodology for understanding the role of aesthetic and medial practices in producing normative forms of secular community in the absence of absolute authority. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Matteo Calla received his B.ASc in Comparative Literature at McMaster University in 2007. He studied at The University of Chicago from 2008 to 2009, receiving his M.A. in the Humanities in 2009. From 2010 to 2018 he studied in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University, receiving his MA in 2014 and PhD in 2018; in 2014-2015 he was an exchange fellow at the Universität zu Köln in Cologne, Germany. v For my mother vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS So many people have supported me in reaching this point. It’s of course impossible to acknowledge all of them here, or the countless ways they’ve made a difference to me, academically or otherwise. To my committee members, Paul Fleming, Patrizia McBride, and Tracy McNulty, for their limitless support and encouragement, and for always being willing to humor my flights of intellectual fancy, and for künftige Geliebte, Eric Michaud, and Jacques Lacan. To past intellectual mentors, James Benn, David Nirenberg, Eric Santner, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Peter Hohendahl, for ushering me along a labyrinthine path. To intellectual companions, Nathan Taylor and Johannes Wankhammer, for their friendship and reminding me ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. To Wayne Stallaert, for winters in Hamilton and springtime in the Ruhrgebiet, and for making it simple to find a common ground between molecular biology and critical theory. To my family, for everything. And to Heather Fae, for the life you bring to our world. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii TABLE OF CONTENTS viii INTRODUCTION 1 Aesthetic Experience as Sensus Communis 1 The German Leserevolution and the Crisis of Secular Community 7 Pietist Communities of Experience 12 Nationalist and Humanist Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century Germany 16 CHAPTER ONE: Pietism and Protestantism: Two Models for Secular Community in Eighteenth-Century Germany 21 Protestantism, the Subject and the Copernican Turn 27 Pietism and Spiritualist Chiliasm: Philipp Jakob Spener’s Pia Desideria (1675) 31 Pietism and the Experience of Rebirth 38 Pietism and Conventicle Communities in Saxony, 1690-1693 41 The Pietist and Protestant Subjects 48 CHAPTER TWO: The Cult of Aesthetic Experience: Klopstock and Live Poetry 50 From Institutional Religion to Aesthetic Community, 1755-1758 60 Moving the Soul, in Excess of Reason: Klopstock’s Break with Aesthetic Rationalism 67 Affect Animates the Semiotic Binary, but Isn’t Found Within It 72 A Poetics of the Voice 76 The Poem’s Immortal Movement: An Fanny 78 The Cult of Live Poetry 83 Moving an Audience in Unison 87 Constituting the Charismatic Community 91 CHAPTER THREE: Charismatic Nationalism, In Print: Klopstock’s Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik 97 Imagining the Charismatic Nation: The Nordische Aufseher, 1758-1761 100 Printing Charisma: Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik 105 Mythologizing the Public as Charismatic Nation 113 CHAPTER FOUR: Producing a Humanist Subject: Indeterminacy in Lessing from Miss Sara Sampson to Laokoon 121 Producing Mimesis and Mitleid through Miss Sara Sampson 129 Medea as Medium: Indeterminacy between Miss Sara Sampson and Laokoon 138 Bourgeois Autonomy and the Fate of Miss Sara Sampson 148 viii CHAPTER FIVE: Against Inspiration: Kant’s Aesthetics of Geist and Written Poetry 153 Geist and Fanaticism in Kant’s Writings of the 1760s 156 Emanuel Swedenborg and the Boundary between Spirit and Matter 162 Geist in the Kritik der Urteilskraft I: Beautiful Art and the Aesthetic Idea 169 Geist in the Kritik der Urteilskraft II: The Geist of the Work and the Geist of the Subject 183 The Experience of Written Poetry 187 CODA: The Origins and Aporias of Charismatic Nationalism in Germany 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 APPENDIX 230 Appendix A: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Die künftige Geliebte” 230 Appendix B: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “An Fanny” 233 ix INTRODUCTION Aesthetic Experience as Sensus Communis When Immanuel Kant identifies aesthetic judgment as a form of sensus communis, he is not discarding the political and social dimension of the term.1 He is merely revising it. The claim that, on the contrary, Kant’s aesthetics abandon the “politisch-sozialen Inhalt” (24) of sensus communis is made by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode. Gadamer begins his text by discussing Kant’s divergence from the humanist tradition of sensus communis, which includes thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Francis Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury.2 In the humanist tradition, Gadamer claims, sensus communis connects individuals to the community; with reference to Vico, he suggests it is “nicht nur jene allgemeine Fähigkeit, die in allen Menschen ist, sondern er is zugleich der Sinn, der Gemeinsamkeit stiftet” (18). Not merely a universal sense, sensus communis is also a sense for the common, for “die konkrete Allgemeinheit, die die Gemeinsamkeit einer Gruppe… darstellte” (18). Gadamer claims that in referring to aesthetic judgment as “eine Art von sensus communis” (5:293), Kant leaves this tradition. Kant’s aesthetic judgment does not connect individuals to what is common: to each other, to shared historical 1 See sections 20-22, 44 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. the Königlich-preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1910-), 238-240; 293-296. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Kant’s work are hereafter taken from Gesammelte Schriften and offered parenthetically, with the volume preceding the colon and the page number following it. 2 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik [1960], 3rd ed. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1972), 16-27. 1 circumstances, for example. Rather, for Kant it is the judgment itself that becomes common, in the sense of universal. When Kant claims that a judgment of beauty has “exemplarische Gültigkeit” (5:239), he is referring to this universality; what it exemplifies is the universal faculties of the transcendental subject.3 For Gadamer, it is only in this manner, and as a disinterested judgment abstracted from personal desire, that aesthetic judgment remains a sensus communis in Kant’s work, characterizing the loss of the political and social dimension of the term in eighteenth-century Germany more generally.4 If Gadamer begins Wahrheit und Methode with a discussion of Kant’s aesthetic break with the social dimension of sensus communis, it is because it is this break his own theory seeks to correct. Influenced by Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the artwork, Gadamer’s work attempts to reground the subject in historical circumstances exceeding