Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment by T. J. Reed (review)

This lucid study aims to shed light on a German Enlightenment ostensibly shrouded in obscurity. Yet the Enlightenment in question is in fact mainstream German Enlightenment thought: Kant, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, with briefer discussions of figures like Herder, Wieland, Georg Forster, Karl Philipp Moritz, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Alexander von Humboldt. In Reed’s understanding, this vibrant and vital corpus of German Enlightenment thought remains unknown to “educated nonspecialists” and “historically literate” people for many reasons (2). The first is a “moral darkness” that retroactively pervades Germany’s history: “the atrocities of the twentieth century cast a long shadow over its whole political and cultural past” (here Reed raises, but does not address in any depth, the “controversial concept of a Sonderweg” [1]). The second reason that German Enlightenment thought remains in the dark, as it were, is the impenetrability of its philosophical writing: “It can be difficult for light to break through the thickets of a German sentence” (1), Reed observes. No wonder, then, that the German Enlightenment, “[i]f people have even heard of such a thing, has been outshone to the point of invisibility by what went on elsewhere” in Europe and America (2). Finally, there are the attacks on the Enlightenment from within German culture itself: a right-wing rejection of the Enlightenment and its thought in favor of a more profoundly “German” spirit, dating from the Romantics; a neglect, and indeed erasure, of the Enlightenment by certain historians of ideas (Friedrich Meinecke serves as an exemplar); and “much overrated sniping from the Left” (Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was “directed at modern phenomena that have questionable connection to the Enlightenment” and which has licensed “iconoclasm from any quarter” [3]). Hence, Reed sets out to reclaim an “unknown” German Enlightenment and demonstrate its profound relevance to the present, maintaining that the subtitle of his study is “only a slight exaggeration” (2).

If Reed overstates his case in the introduction, he succeeds admirably well in providing concise, instructive, eminently readable overviews of select seminal German Enlightenment writings in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. Kant forms the backbone of the study. The opening chapters are largely devoted to excellent discussions of “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (the “primal scene,” to use Reed’s rubric [6]); to the basis of the critical enterprise, the simple import of which has been “obscured by technical questions” raised by wrangling philosophers and by Kant’s notoriously dense writing style (in providing a cogent and readily understandable summary of the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, Reed handily “rescues” Kant “from himself and his interpreters” [31]); and to the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Subsequent chapters expand on this basic Kantian framework and examine Enlightenment critique in its diverse articulations: literature as sociopolitical commentary, geographical and anthropological exploration, historiography, ethics, religion and theology, science, education, publishing, and “the full earth” (175), that is, Goethe’s lyric poetry. Reed does a masterful job of presenting succinct discussions of individual texts, deftly delineating important resonances in cognate Enlightenment projects and demonstrating their enduring relevance to twenty-first-century thought. Well structured, informative, and written in an engaging, incisive, and at times edgy style, the book is a pleasure to read.

To be sure, one might take issue with certain aspects of Reed’s argument, as well as his selection of primary texts and authors. To cite but a few examples: Goethe’s Faust is given surprisingly short shrift and dismissed in the context of a discussion of theology as “the most grandiose mistake in literary history” (113); with the exception of a cameo appearance by Madame de Staël (2), female authors play no role in Reed’s Enlightenment; early German Romanticism, chronologically and epistemologically an outgrowth of the Enlightenment in general and of Kantian philosophy in particular, is accorded no mention whatsoever; yet in his concluding consideration of whether the Enlightenment...