“Hear him! hört ihn!”: Scholarly Lecturing in Berlin and the Popular Style of Karl Philipp Moritz

In a 1779 letter, Immanuel Kant congratulates his former student Marcus Herz on the success of philosophical lectures held in his own home, on achieving, as Kant puts it, “durchgängiges Ansehen . . . im berlinischen Publico.”¹ Herz was one of Kant’s favorite pupils and even served as a respondent at his second dissertation disputation in 1770, a rarity for a Jewish student. Alongside a prominent medical career in Berlin, Herz held lectures on experimental science, electricity, and philosophy, the latter based on his study with Kant.² Enjoying renown amongst audiences mixed in gender and social position, Herz made the most of demographic opportunities rarer in provincial Königsberg.³ Here, Kant is nonetheless somewhat unsure about Herz’s success in this urban setting:

Das Unerwartete steht hier aber nicht in [Ihrer] Geschicklichkeit und Einsicht, auf die ich ohnedem alles Vertrauen zu setzen Ursache habe, sondern in der Popularität, in Ansehung deren mir bey einer solchen Unternehmung würde bange geworden seyn. Seit einiger Zeit sinne ich, in gewissen müssigen Zeiten, auf die Grundsätze der Popularität . . . vornemlich in der Philosophie und ich glaube . . . eine ganz andere Ordnung bestimmen zu können, als sie die schulgerechte Methode, die doch immer das Fundament bleibt, erfodert. Indessen zeigt der Erfolg, daß es Ihnen hierinn gelinge und zwar sogleich bey dem ersten Versuche.

(Kant 247)

Kant associates broader, non-academic listening audiences with a feeling of anxious apprehension (“mir würde bange”). Admitting to entertaining the possibility of such popularity, he notes that these thoughts came more from “müssig” speculation than from a concerted effort to spread his influence through lectures for more general audiences. Kant associates the popular and its potential for entertainment with the meandering what-if’s of idle free time: potentially fruitful but not related to the heart of serious scholarly activity.

Gaining in centrality the more the semantics of Bildung were uncoupled from traditional Gelehrsamkeit, the notion of popularity or the popular articulated a conspicuous ambivalence in the mid- and late-eighteenth century for it connoted the attempt to engage non-academic, often mixed gender audiences in both positive and pejorative senses. The target of popular discourse was sometimes figured as the common people (das gemeine Volck) or the mob (der Pöbel), other times as broader publics interested in and deserving of actively engaging in enlightenment. Christian Garve testified to this term’s multiple meanings in his essay “Über die Popularität des Vortrags,” defining popular material either as that which is understandable and enjoyable to “dem größeren Publikum und nicht bloß den Gelehrten . . .; oder das, welches für die niedern Volksklassen bestimmt und deren Fassung angemessen ist.”⁴ Mid- to late-eighteenth-century Popularphilosophen such as Garve used the term in a decidedly positive sense; in many cases, self-described “popular” literary works or lectures corresponded more to the first meaning (as in Kant’s usage of the term), engaging middle- and upper-middle-class lay audiences much more than the lower classes.⁵ The term popular indexed a changing landscape of public discourse, as scholars and writers courted new kinds of audiences, attempting to involve broader publics in the process of knowledge production and dissemination.⁶

For Kant, his former student’s immediate success manifests the very ambivalence between positive and pejorative senses of popularity; as he offers, Herz’s lectures might exemplify a viable discursive form that serves enlightenment well. At the same time, his carefully phrased apprehension seems to condition any optimism: this non-academic social setting runs the risk of straying from the firm foundations of rational scholarly method, of simply entertaining audiences rather than engaging their rational faculties. Manifested here are Kant’s hesitations about addressing popular audiences that recur throughout his understanding of scholarly profession and publicity;⁷ in his 1784 Beantwortung der Frage: Was heißt Aufklärung?, for example, Kant famously limits the scholar’s autonomous use of reason to addressing reading audiences in print, arguably denying that public oratory and literary publication are continuous or entirely homologous manifestations of...