Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment
CHAPTER 6 COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT FRANZ LEANDER FILLAFER AND )URGEN OSTERHAMMEL THE European Enlightenment has long been regarded as a host of disembodied, self-perpetuating ideas typically emanating from France and inspiring apprentices at the various European peripheries. Historians have demonstrated the. scope and depth of the Enlightenment's reach and have painted a variegated picture of a decentralized intellectual system with fulcrums as remote as Lima, Calcutta, and Batavia. There clearly was a set of overarching purposes of emancipation and improvement, but elaborating and pursuing 'the Enlightenment' also involved a 'sense of place.' We encounter sentimentalist empiricists, atheist republican hacks, Leibnizian metaphysicians, Kantian defenders of enlightened kingship, and Anglican Newtonians. Enlightened premises were reconfigured by translation, showing the disparities of audience and purpose. The German translators of Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, for example, diluted his civic humanism and praise of commerce and placed it in the service of an advocacy of spiritual freedom and aesthetic inwardness. Civic participation was in this way transmuted into the striving for individual perfection.L By its very nature, the Enlightenment imposed identifiable modes of thought on those who used it, while it always remained an expression of particular desires and meanings, and a response to particular condi tions. What difference did the Enlightenment make? It maintained that human reason was able to understand nature unaided by divine revelation, but attuned to its truths; 120 FRANZ LEANDER FILLA FER AND f0RGEN OSTEJUIAMMEL COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE c;ERMAN ENI.TC:HTENMENT 121 many En lighteners agreed that God, like Newlon's divine clockrnaker, had created the Moser in his Of Gerrnan National Spirit (Vmn deutschen Nationalgeisl, t765) tended to universe, but thereafter intervened no more.
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