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.
Paul Fleming, Cornell University This risk-taking, cliche-breaking book embodies the virtues of the writers it studies. Lessing, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, and ... Read moreGoethe 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.
David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago 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 Bates, University of California, Berkeley Why are the arts and literature such crucial spaces for the modern cultivation of human freedom? Dorothea von Mucke 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 Mucke's book charts how the Enlightenment made artistic creativity the very marker of humanity itself.
Jonathan Sheehan, University of California, Berkeley Show Less