Ethical Code

1989, the year that marked the end of the communist utopia, launched
worldwide a phase of complex critical rethinking of the traditional interpretations of the past. By that time historians of the Enlightenment
began to call into question the old paradigm that tied the winning project and the ultimate and deepest meaning of the Enlightenment to the French Revolution. Instead of it, they fully seized the European dimension of a big cultural transformation that has been marking and still marks western life. In this way the last decades of the century before the Revolution have begun to reveal the independent wealth and originality of the culture of the so-called Late Enlightenment. Denis
Diderot was certainly one of the stars of that particular season, especially thanks to his great aesthetic revolution, that revisited the artistic phenomena in the light of the growing public opinion, of a new communicative aesthetic, and of a political before than philosophical redefinition of the relationship between imagination and reason and among the subject creator, the artistic product and the active participation of the viewer.

This essay interprets and contextualizes Hoelderlin’s fragmentary text Über Religion from 1796/97, starting with Lessing and K. Ph. Moritz, in the debates on a New Mythology (Hegel, Schlegel, Novalis).Hölderlin understands religion as a task for the individual, a project of communitarisation and a challenge for art - and all these together. Religion and art, they are not only rivals; and art does not simply compensate the loss of religious reliability.

By focussing on Christian Gotthilf Salzmanns Der Himmel auf Erden (1797) and Johann Gottfried Grubers polemic counter-essay Die Hölle auf Erden in der Geschichte der Familie Fredini. Gegen Salzmanns Himmel auf Erden (1800), this article discusses the issue of «happiness» of the people as the ultimate object of the «project» of the late Enlightenment. As it emerges in the article, the happiness as a telos of the Spätaufklärung and as a result of the self-enlightenment of the bourgeoisie implied the attempt to combine traditional (Christian) belief in an afterlife with the gaze on the real world, far beyond the Theodizeedebatte of the early and middle Enlightenment.

The essay sets out to survey the debates arisen around the concept of the «whole man» in German 18th-Century studies, departing from the articulate miscellany edited by Hans-Jürgen Schings in 1992 and involving more recent venues that consider humanity from the viewpoint of “national character” as well as of the distinguishing features encountered during geographic explorations. Going beyond, however, the two main research paths of the last two decades, respectively focussed on enquiries in physical anthropology and on the relationship between anthropology and cultural history, the present essay offers manifold reflections on the relationship between anthropology and aesthetics, on medical-theological issues as well as on literary anthropology. The essay ends up with a projective gaze cast upon the 20th Century: in the 1920s we find the concept of “person” and the interest for a philosophy of language that integrates Herder's and Wilhelm von Humboldt's studies, thus projecting new theoretical solutions to foster and enhance «Humanität».

Università degli Studi di Bologna

The aim of this essay is to highlight the relevance of aesthetic education in the German Popularphilosophie. After a brief introduction on the anthropological issue in general, the essay examines three main
ways to consider ‘humanity’. In the first part, the analysis concerns the establishment of humanity through the fine arts at the dawn of civilization, as it is suggested in philosophers like Mehmel and Sulzer. In the second part, the focus is set on the fact that ‘humanity’ cannot be
considered as a once-and-for-all acquisition, but has a pedagogical basis which clearly emerges in the reception of Baumgarten’s aesthetics. In the last section, the text turns to the normative overtones of the idea of humanity and to its seminal role as a propaedeutics for moral life in several authors such as Eberhard and Heyne.

The title pages of the very first two romantic oeuvres, i.e. W.H. Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and L. Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, are adorned by the portrait of the «divine Raphael». Nevertheless both of them could have been accompanied – if only the contemporaries had known him! – by the portrait of the «abstract and deformed» (Vasari) Piero di Cosimo, to whom in the Herzensergießungen a unique and innovative chronicle is dedicated and with whom Sternbald ends up identifying. This article explores Wackenroder’s work at the wake of the most uneven Vite of painters (Francesco Francia, Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo), mainly by examining the impact that Vasari and Fiorillo – masters of art of both Wackenroder and Tieck – had on this romantic incunable.

At the end of the 18th Century, travel and travel literature become fashionable. The discovery and description of new places, looking for what is foreign, leads to a new literary sensibility. Within an Enlightenment model, travel literature focuses on the human being who is able to grasp the sorrounding reality not only using more rational categories and the concept of utility, but also relying on a more varied perception and sensibility. The contribution aims to highlight the new perspective within the travel literature of the last decade of the 18th Century, exploring the reports that deal with Germany and its various territories, up to the Reiseberichte by Wackenroder, the best example of the transformation taking place in the sensibility that leads to perceive and represent the surrounding reality in a different way.

There is hardly any other writer within German late Enlightenment discourse who has put forward the image of non-conformist philosophers as prominently as Christoph Martin Wieland did. In several of his novels, he engages a fight with anti-intellectualism, mocking those who smugly despise unconventional ideas. Ancient Greek republics provide the scenery. By means of irony, Wieland’s witty philosophers attack forms of quaint old morality and indifference to new civic and aesthetic values. Uncouth bourgeois, lacking curiosity or delicacy, are targeted and satirised. Their narrow-minded assertions on life and politics are smilingly debunked and outwitted. This paper takes a sample of Wieland’s critique and is conceived as a foray into three of his novels, i.e. Sokrates Mainomenos oder Die Dialogen Des Diogenes Von Sinope (1770), Geschichte der Abderiten (1781) and Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen (1800-1801). In these novels, forward-looking cosmopolitans and politicized philosophers develop intriguing new projects in the fields of politics and aesthetics which in many respects are still to be charted.

In more than one regard, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s reflections anticipate romantic issues and concepts. First, Lichtenberg insists on the dependency of human experience from a subjective point of view, from human sensuality and its pre-conditions and from media taking
influence on experienced reality. His imaginations about the use of
microscope and telescope can be compared with texts of, for instance,
Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Secondly, Lichtenberg’s ideas concerning subjectivity stimulate an intense interest in cases of madness. His comments on a madness scene depicted by Hogarth anticipate imaginations as they are developed in the famous Nachtwachen of Bonaventura (Klingemann) as well as in the texts of Hoffmann, especially with regard to Hoffmann’s hermit Serapion.

The Trivialliteratur of the end of the eighteenth Century is an observatory which is effective for focusing on the liminal space in which the concept of poetry and the vision of the world and of man which were typical of the Age of Enlightenment live together with the premonitory signs of romantic sensitivity. Interest in ancient Egypt is also an aspect of eighteenth-Century German culture in which the tensions between the rationalist point of view, typical of the classical intellectuals like Winckelmann and Herder, and the Egyptosophic view, cultivated especially by the masonic world, give rise to dialectics between Aufklärung and Schwärmerei, which marks the threshold between Spätaufklärung and Frühromantik. Considering both these aspects,the paper focuses on the novel Aylo und Dschadina oder die Pyramiden of the Trivialautor Friedrich Eberhard Rambach, the Berlin
school teacher of Tieck and Wackenroder, which is an interesting document showing the complexity of German culture and literature of the last decade of the eighteenth Century.

Starting from the Seventies of the Eighteenth Century a strong inter-est arose in the ancient  mystery cults among German intellectuals. Be-yond the mere antiquarian interest, the dual  structure of the mysteries– an “esoteric” (philosophical) only for the initiated, a “exoteric” (aes- thetical) for the people – offered the model for several masonic exper- iments, particularly the Bavarian Illuminati and the  Deutsche Union, which developed projects of moral reform of the German nation on the basis of new  forms of governmentality. The interest in mysteries attracted also Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters  Lehrjahre (1796) and Schil- ler in Die Sendung Moses (1790), in which the political, aesthetical  and pedagogical mission of Moses already shaped the idea of an aestheti- cal education of man. The  essay traces the genealogy of this interest between Spätaufklärung and Frühromantik. In this latter context, the dual structure of the mysteries provided the basis for the romantic project of a «new mythology», as it was outlined in Das älteste System-programm des deutschen Idealismus (1796).

This essay undertakes to examine how the concepts of irritability and sensibility operate in works of Novalis. His reflections on irritability and sensibility as a pivotal dichotomy of 18th-Century medicine are not systematic and do not influence the research of his time. But they mark the shift from Enlightenment to pre-romantic writing in German-speaking parts of Europe by emphasising the role of the subject as a sensible and fragile unit. In Novalis, irritability and sensibility are also strongly connected with notions of the self and artistic creativity. Thus, the precisely defined medical key terms are broadened by this author. We suggest that his discussion of irritability and sensibility might lead to an even modern understanding of the artist as it is later described by Lautréamont, Kafka, Hofmannsthal and Nietzsche.

By relying on the concept of «project» in the Frühromantik, this essay faces the epistemological issues concerning the perception of world and nature in Novalis’ Das allgemeine Brouillon. Novalis’ occasional
annotations of this «enciclopedistic» project must not misled their interpret, because the work must be read at the wake of the romantic
chaos «that only awaits the touch of love to unfold in a harmonious world». As it is argued in the contribution the Brouillon therefore meets the needs of the romantic «universal and progressive» project of knowledge of the world by a sincretic explotation of an entire tradition of scientific and philosophical thought. While highlighting the most relevant predecessors of Novalis’ reflection on the “encyclpoedia”, the contribution thus clarifies, on the one hand, the boundaries of the author’s «enciclopedistic» project and, on the other hand, the significance of this work in his production with the aim to free the Brouillon from the most conservative readings of the work.

Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy

The article analyses the revaluation of the Bible as literary model in the 18-Century Germany, in the frame of the anticlassical debate of the time, and highlights the theoretical and translational perspective of two Jewish authors who, in Germany and in Austria, are deeply involved in the ambitious project of a new translation of the Psalms of David. A “Jewish” project that aims proudly to demonstrate the modernity and the incomparable beauty of the davidical texts reassessing the prominence of the poetry of the Jews in the world literature. They are Moses Mendelssohn and Thomas von Schönfeld that, albeit in different perspectives, reaffirm though the primacy of the biblical poetry the substantial role that the Jews can have in the development both of the German poetry, and of the German culture.

Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa