Theorizing Visual Language in George Berkeley and Jean Paul

Theorizing Visual Language in George Berkeley and Jean Paul1 BEATE ALLERT Farther, there lies a mistake in our imagining that the pictures of external objects are painted on the bottom of the eye. It hath been shewn there is no resemblance between the ideas of sight and things tangible.2 As there is no absolute sign—for each sign is also a thing—there is in the finite realm no absolute thing, but each has meaning and signifies something .3 The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, that is posed here.4 /. Introduction The reception of the Irish philosopher and theologian George Berkeley (1685-1753) by the German fiction writer and metaphor expert Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) marks a point in history where trains of thought from Empiricism to Phenomenology and from Idealism to Surrealism seem interchangeable for a moment in a peculiar way. This essay is an 307 308 / ALLERT examination of an intersection of lines of thought in the European tradition, which are normally considered only as discrete entities or in mutually exclusive oppositional terms. When Charles Sanders Peirce reviewed Fraser's 1871 edition of Berkeley, he wrote: We ought to say one word about Berkeley's theory of vision. It was undoubtedly an extraordinary piece of reasoning, and might have served for the basis of modern science. Historically it has not had that fortune, because the modern science has been chiefly created in Germany, where Berkeley is little known and greatly misunderstood.... Professor Fraser admits that it has attracted no attention in Germany, but thinks the German mind too a priori to like Berkeley's reasoning.5 Peirce's dictum that Germany is a country "where Berkeley is little known and greatly misunderstood" and Fraser's reasoning behind this have never been seriously challenged, even though the few scholars who have evinced interest in the subject have shown the situation to be more complex.6 While Berkeley was more often known in Germany through reviews of his work rather than through acquaintance with his actual publications and often simply labeled as "idealist" in German literary circles,7 Eugen Stäbler and Wolfgang Breidert show that Berkeley's work played an important role in the heated debates between Christian Wolff (1679-1754),8 who was familiar with Berkeley's work, and his opponents, Daniel Stähler and Joachim Lange, who criticized Wolff's philosophy for sustaining idealism, which was to their assessment not compatible with the Christian religion. As a result of their attacks, Wolff was expelled from his post as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Halle in 1723 under penalty of hanging.9 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the strongest defender of Berkeley in Germany was, next to Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88),10 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who after an initial period of skepticism, became a fervent supporter, especially against the dismissive attitude of Immanuel Kant. ' ' Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is not mentioned by Breidert in his survey of Berkeley's influence in Germany. But Jean Paul refers to Berkeley in his Vorschule der Ästhetik l2 and there is every reason to believe that he had access to Joseph Stock's 1784 edition of Berkeley's works.13 Jean Paul's Vorschule der Ästhetik addresses poetic language as a medium to cross borders of perception, and attempts to use it as a political counter-strategy against the stagnation he diagnoses as a cunent fading of images and a general desensualization—a loss of the visual and the tactile.14 While he questions the limitations of usual sense perceptions as they are inscribed in the normal use of language, Jean Paul addresses culturally imposed norms but does not consider them to be insurmountable. Theorizing Visual Language in George Berkeley and Jean Paul / 309 In the fourth program of the Vorschule, Jean Paul diagnoses a problem with seeing and a loss of immediacy that characterizes modem culture. He is not interested...