Vorurteil—Anthropologie—Literatur. Der Vorurteilsdiskurs als Modus der Selbstaufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert (review)

This is a substantial and demanding contribution to the historiography of the German Enlightenment from which even specialists will come away with a set of fresh and powerful new conceptions and questions. Indeed, were it not already so substantial and so thoughtfully situated in its specifically German context, one might wish the author had considered the relevance of his findings to a wider, transnational notion of the Enlightenment. That should not be taken as a serious criticism; rather, it betokens the prospect that his findings do have this wider resonance. This book takes up the "Enlightenment project" at its very heart and demonstrates its grandeur by highlighting precisely its candor in recognizing its own limitations, and its struggle to come to terms with them.

Godel's project is to find the linkage between the three terms in his main title: prejudice, anthropology, and literature. His thesis is expressed in the subtitle: he finds in the "discourse regarding prejudice" a "mode of self- enlightenment." Drawing deftly on the theoretical framework of Foucault's "archaeological" works—The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge—Godel contends persuasively that the discourse concerning prejudice in the Enlightenment exceeded the disciplinary (concept-oriented) limits of philosophy, so that it could most effectively be pursued through the greater resources of literary form. If the Enlightenment saw itself as essentially invested in the debunking of prejudices (Vorurteilskritik), it also came swiftly to the realization that this was no easy matter, and that a strictly conceptual-philosophical invocation of "truth" against "bias" or "error" could not overcome the various entrenchments of—and the potential utility or even validity nested in—"prejudice." Strictly logical formulations of the issue proved inept. It appeared less a matter of the objective falsity of a specific prejudice (Vorurteil) than of the "formal" intricacies, if not aporias, of judgment (Urteil) itself. Prejudice came to appear more a condition of truth-seeking rather than its other, and coming to terms with it became a matter of deepening awareness of these entrenchments and far more sophisticated strategies for coping with them: a matter of reflexivity, of self-enlightenment, of "modal" rather than object-oriented considerations. That is to say, the problem of "prejudice" revealed itself to concern not so much any particular claim or belief as an object of consideration, but rather the very nature of considerations themselves. Through the decisive "anthropological turn" of the second half of the 18th century such powerful complications of knowledge-construction came to be acknowledged that attention perforce turned from the products of knowledge-construction to the process itself. But as this complexity of self-reflection evolved in the thematic of combating prejudice, the very normative force which animated the Enlightenment project seemed to become attenuated: whence, if not from "truth," could Enlightenment draw the authorization to repudiate the now so ineradicable traces of "prejudice"?

Godel acknowledges the contributions above all of Werner Schneiders in developing this topos, though from a strictly philosophical or conceptual-historical viewpoint (see Schneiders, Aufklärung und Vorurteilskritik, Stuttgart 1983). He also sees Schneiders's work on the debate over "true" Enlightenment in the 1780s in Germany as betokening a decisive historical turning point (see Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklärung, Munich 1974). But Godel seeks to go beyond Schneiders by incorporating the fundamental new recognition of the "anthropological turn" in late 18^th-century German thought. Godel takes up Sergio Moravia's suggestion that beyond thematic considerations—which Godel elegantly summarizes under eight rubrics in his second chapter—the anthropological turn introduced methodological or theoretical-reflexive concomitants, "epistemological liberalizations" (see Moravia, "The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man," History of Science 18 [1980], 247–268). This opens the way for Godel to articulate the discursive space of late-Enlightenment engagement with prejudice. Thus, Godel identifies "sensualization," "naturalization," "socialization," "historicization," and "empiricizing" as modes of anthropological thinking which complicated, if they did not indeed undermine, strictly philosophical approaches. All conduced...