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Posts Tagged ‘Counter-Enlightenment’

Article on Counter-Enlightenments

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , on April 6, 2016| 1 Comment »

thinking-about-the-enlightenment

The volume Thinking about the Enlightenment: Modernity and its Ramifications, edited by Martin L. Davies of Leicester University has now been published by Routledge.

My chapter,

Multiple Counter-Enlightenments: The Genealogy of a Polemics from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

the penultimate in a very diverse series of perspectives on the various dimensions of the relationship between Enlightenment and the present, takes up the issue of counter-enlightenment(s). It asks how various criticisms of ‘the’ Enlightenment gradually came to be viewed as constituting a singular tradition of thought, constitutive of Western reflection upon or own place in history.

[Edit: The text is now available online here.]

Volume Introduction

Thinking about the Enlightenment looks beyond the current parameters of studying the Enlightenment, to the issues that can be understood by reflecting on the period in a broader context. Each of the thirteen original chapters, by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, illustrates the problematic legacy of the Enlightenment and the continued ramifications of its thinking to consider whether modernity can see its roots in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Drawing from history, philosophy, literature and anthropology, this book enables students and academics alike to take a fresh look at the Enlightenment and its legacy.

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Articles on Freidoks

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Some of my writing has been made available online through the Freidoks server at Freiburg University.

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Conference “Declines and Falls” – Budapest, May 15 – 17

Posted in Conference, Presentation, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

On May 15th to 17th of next year, I will be attending a conference titled “Declines and Falls: Perspectives in European History and Historiography” organized at the Central European University in Budapest.

My presentation – which draws upon my dissertation research – will address the complex interrelations between the concepts of progress and decadence in the long eighteenth century. Often, these two concepts are understood as mutually exclusive counter-concepts, epitomizing a forward-looking ‘Enlightenment theory of progress’ on the one hand and the backward and ultimately futile ‘complaints’ of conservatives and reactionaries on the other.

A closer look at the semantic structure of debates about the development of civilization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals, however, that to contemporaries, these concepts were not usually counter-concepts at all. Rather, they were regularly understood as linked, or even interdependent. To understand this paradox, my paper addresses the various ways in which ‘the culture/civilization as a whole’ was conceptualized in these discourses.

Joining the analysis of the semantic structure of contemporary narratives of cultural decline with their pragmatic interpretation as speech acts in public interaction, I identify three different types of interpretation of the ‘whole’ in which ostensibly monistic claims about civilization in toto were linked to a differentiated understanding of its plural nature. In this way, the common view of narratives of progress and decadence as mutually exclusive discourses – at worst resulting in a general narrative of modern intellectual history as an eternal struggle between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment – may make way for a more detailed understanding of the complexities of the debates about the character and development of civilization that have been so very important to public discourses of self-reflection in the modern age.

Update: a conference report has been published on the CEU website.

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Article on the Concept of Counter-Enlightenment

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , on December 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

An article I wrote on the concept of Counter-Enlightenment has been published in the proceedings of a conference I attended last year in Bern, Switzerland.

My contribution takes its starting point from the observation that a large part of the debate about the meaning(s) of Enlightenment in the present is structured around a pair of mutually exclusive counter-concepts: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Tracing this opposition back to its most influential proponent, Isaiah Berlin, and ultimately to its emergence in the Eighteenth Century itself, I argue for a less schematic approach taking into account recent historical research especially in the field of historical semantics. Thus, a better understanding of the different meanings and uses of the concepts of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in the past may also shed light on our current debates about the relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to our own culture today.

The volume also includes interesting contributions by (among others) Claudia Honegger, Urs Stäheli, Hartmut Rosa and Andreas Langenohl. For more information, please click here and here.

Theo Jung, Gegenaufklärung. Ein Begriff zwischen Aufklärung und Gegenwart, in: Dietmar J. Wetzel (Hg.), Perspektiven der Aufklärung. Zwischen Mythos und Realität (= Laboratorium Aufklärung, Bd. 12), München 2012, S. 87–100.

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Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

Posted in Conference, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2010| 1 Comment »

I’ve been invited to speak at the conference Perspektiven der Aufklärung (Enlightenment Perspectives) to be held in Bern on September 16th and 17th of this year. The event is organized by Dietmar Wetzel and Aleksander Zieliński, both from the University of Bern. Other participants include Sabine Maasen (Basel), Evelyn Gröbl-Steinbach (Linz), Claudia Honegger (Bern), Urs Stäheli (Hamburg) and Hartmut Rosa (Jena).

Most of these are sociologists, so that I’ll  have the opportunity to discuss a few of my more wide ranging hypotheses with a group of people specifically trained to grapple with general questions and models. Since many historians are – to say the least – less inclined to leave their sources behind to address more theoretical and abstract questions, I am confident this will be a very useful experience.

The program can be found here, and the call for papers (with a description of the themes under discussion) here.

My topic will be one that I have spoken about before, in Wolfenbüttel last year: the concept of Counter-Enlightenment. More specifically, I will address three questions.

  • In what way and to what purpose was the concept of Counter-Enlightenment (anti-philosophie) used in the Age of Enlightenment?
  • What role did the concept play in historiographical traditions about the Enlightenment?
  • And finally: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the concept of Counter-Enlightenment as an analytical tool to understand the Enlightenment both as a historical phenomenon and as a general characteristic of modernity?

My specific goal is to address the links between the concept of Counter-Enlightenment as an analytical tool and as a historical concept used in historical contexts.

In my opinion it is too easy to just declare a clean break between the source language and the analytical framework, between the tools of the historian and his object. Whereas this can certainly be a viable goal, it will never be fully attainable. The reason for this lies in the fact that the language we use as historians to write about, but also to understand our source material as well as the world at large, is itself historically determined. The very same linguistic structures that are the subject of historical semantics still shape the semantical horizon within which this study is carried out. Therefore, self-reflection has to be an integral part of any study within the field of discourse analysis. This is all the more true in the case of the study of Enlightenment, the period in which our modern consciousness took shape.

Later this year, I will address these same questions in a seminar at the University of Bielefeld.

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Report on a Graduate Course in Wolfenbüttel

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2010| 1 Comment »

September 28-29, I attended and presented my current project at a graduate course organized by the German Society for the Investigation of the Eighteenth Century (DGEJ) at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. The course was organized and lead by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Sauder (Universität des Saarlandes). Under the title “Late Enlightenment – Counter-Enlightenment” the concept of Enlightenment, its limits and boundaries, both in contemporary debates and in historical research, were discussed.

Now, a short report I wrote about the course – outlining its main questions and results as well as its place in current Enlightenment research – has appeared in the Journal of the society, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert.

‘Spätaufklärung – Gegenaufklärung. Graduiertenkurs der DGEJ an der Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, 28. und 29. Sept. 2009’ Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 33, Nr. 2 (2009) 169-170.

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