K. P. Moritz’s Case Poetics: Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered

To historians of medicine, Karl Philipp Moritz is known as the founding editor of the Magazine for Empirical Psychology (1783–93), one the oldest psychiatric journals in Europe. In literary theory, Moritz counts as one of the inaugurators of aesthetic autonomy. Combining both fields, this article uncovers that Moritz’s interest in observation, his reservations towards rationality, and his concern for the particular as opposed to the universal helped to shape his concept of “uselessness” in On Creative Imitation of Beauty. From this double perspective, we recognize Moritz’s growing regard for case narrative as an end in itself, independent from plans for a future science of empirical psychology. Moritz’s passionate and compassionate approach to observership helps to revise Foucault’s “medical gaze.” This essay proposes that Moritz was a Wordsworthian figure in medical history, who injected psychiatric writing with the experience of ordinary life expressed in the simple language of non-experts.