The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public by Dorothea von Mücke (review)

In this ambitious new monograph, Dorothea von Mücke argues that Enlightenment ideas about authorship and the public sphere were profoundly shaped by both religious thought and the natural sciences. Her volume thus seeks to trace their evolution within a broader network of intellectual and cultural influences. "The discourse of philosophy alone," she argues, "does not suffice to understand the trajectory of these concepts." Von Mücke is interested in describing the kind of "cultural work" through which an autonomous domain of aesthetic perception and creativity was developed and populated by its own newly stylized audiences, critics, and practitioners (123–24)—a domain that, in turn, shaped the Enlightenment more broadly.

For this, von Mücke understands the Enlightenment not so much as an array of concepts, but as a set of habituated practices: of contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, and public deliberation. The goal of her volume is to reveal "where such practices [were] articulated, maintained, and promoted" (xiv). She works to trace how practices of observation, confession, and public debate migrated between different discursive contexts and took on new meaning. One is struck, on the one hand, by how highly portable and adaptable such practices could be—the way that they could be transplanted, repurposed, and transformed in different contexts. On the other hand, in von Mücke's view, these practices retain a trace of their origin. They are often borrowed precisely for their aura (72). If practices of confession, for example, were secularized through this process of migration, they served at the same time to provide secular discourses with new meaning and with greater stature (123). This shift of habituated practices from one context to another could, von Mücke notes, even come about unintentionally, almost in spite of itself. Von Mücke cites the work of Martin Gierl, who has shown that theological debates around the beginning of the eighteenth century helped to establish a set of secular norms of public deliberation and fairness—a set of neutral criteria according to which one might evaluate doctrinal claims (xxiv).

In Part I of her book, von Mücke focuses on how practices of contemplation, developed through both spiritual exercises and the natural sciences, provided the basis for a new conception of aesthetics centered around the idea of a disinterested observer. This section includes an especially inspired reading of the use of naturalist emblems in seventeenth century editions of Johann Arndt's influential True Christianity. In Part II, von Mücke turns to the connection between religious practices of confession and the secular genre of autobiography, primarily through readings of Rousseau's Confessions of a Savoyard Vicar and Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit. She argues against a direct lineage between conversion narrative and autobiographical memoir, instead focusing on the ways that, across these different discourses, authors developed strategies to justify their perspective and assert their subjectivity. It was ultimately, in her view, not the sense of "confession" as an account of one's conversion but rather the sense of confession as a profession of faith or a statement of one's convictions that had the greater influence on the Enlightenment. In Part III, she works to contextualize Kant's famous essay on the Enlightenment within other discussions of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, including debates about patriotism in the midst of the Seven Years' War.

In being willing to consider religious influences on secular Enlightenment thought, von Mücke sees her study as an intervention into a field of Enlightenment research still dominated in North America by the militantly anti-religious French philosophes (xviii). It would have been interesting, in the context of considering the role of religious "practices" in the evolution of Enlightenment thought, for von Mücke to include a discussion of the concept of "spiritual exercises," as it was developed in the work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. This would have offered an especially robust conceptual understanding of the...