Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
7
result(s) for
"Humanism -- Germany -- History -- 18th century"
Sort by:
Forming humanity : redeeming the German Bildung tradition
Kant's proclamation of humankind's emergence from \"self-incurred immaturity\" left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities? Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God. Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God. While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition. Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.
Book
Forming humanity : redeeming the German Bildung tradition
Now in paperback, Forming Humanity reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought.
Kant's proclamation of humankind's emergence from \"self-incurred immaturity\" left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities? Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God. Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God. While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition. Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.
eBook
Classical Humanism and the Challenge of Modernity
In scholarship, classical (Renaissance) humanism is usually strictly distinguished from 'neo-humanism', which, especially in Germany, flourished at the beginning of the 19 th century. While most classical humanists focused on the practical imitation of Latin stylistic models, 'neohumanism' is commonly believed to have been mainly inspired by typically modern values, such as authenticity and historicity.
Bas van Bommel shows that whereas 'neohumanism' was mainly adhered to at the German universities, at the Gymnasien a much more traditional educational ideal prevailed, which is best described as 'classical humanism.' This ideal involved the prioritisation of the Romans above the Greeks, as well as the belief that imitation of Roman and Greek models brings about man's aesthetic and moral elevation.
Van Bommel makes clear that 19 th century classical humanism dynamically related to modern society. On the one hand, classical humanists explained the value of classical education in typically modern terms. On the other hand, competitors of the classical Gymnasium laid claim to values that were ultimately derived from classical humanism. 19 th century classical humanism should therefore not be seen as a dried-out remnant of a dying past, but as the continuation of a living tradition.
eBook
The Art of History and Eighteenth-Century Information Management: Christian Gottlieb Jöcher and Johann Heinrich Zedler
In the eighteenth century there were enough printed sources and archival materials to challenge or even overwhelm historians of that day. Two productive editors of lexicons and information management were Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, who taught history at the University of Leipzig and became the chief librarian at his university, and Johann Heinrich Zedler, an eminent collector of biographical data. Jöcher published his multivolumeAllegemeines Gelehrten Lexiconin 1750–51. Jöcher’s chief rival and competitor, Zedler, published and finished his 64-volumeUniversal-Lexiconin 1732–50. Both Jöcher and Zedler claimed much networking among other scholars. Some questions treated in this essay include the following: What characterized Jöcher’s and Zedler’s library and source management? In what ways is their viral work still of use and value to librarians and other scholars? Does revisiting old and dusty scholarship help us understand our own information jam?
Journal Article
Shakespeare under Different Flags: The Bard in German Classrooms from Hitler to Honecker
This article contributes to the study of Shakespeare's appropriation in Germany during the twentieth century, with a particular focus on its two authoritarian regimes: the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic. Germans have had their very own 'German' Shakespeare since the eighteenth century. Goethe and Schiller, among others, claimed the playwright for their projects of literary (and national) self-assertion. Ideologues in the Third Reich and the GDR conscripted this already 'naturalized' Shakespeare for the purposes of ideological education, and even hailed a new era in the appreciation of his work. Under the swastika, teachers were encouraged to study Shakespeare's Führerfiguren, as well as his anticipation of the racial concerns of National Socialism. In classrooms of the GDR, the emphasis shifted to Shakespeare's humanism and realism, from which, students learned, contemporary socialist literature had evolved. The plays were now read as critical and optimistic responses to a social and political reality defined by class struggle.
Journal Article
Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe
Eclectic is, in fact, an apt descriptor for the essays in this volume, which, despite their semi-chronological arrangement by author, could just as easily have been ordered by any number of rubrics. Readers will note, for example, that the section on Hölderlin and [Kleist] might just as well be regarded as an extended reflection on Roman Catholicism in the Age of Goethe: Lisa Beesley has written a cogent essay on the pathological discourses surrounding eighteenth-century conversions to Catholicism; Helmut Schneider and [Patricia Anne Simpson], meanwhile, explore the aesthetic significance of a Marian Catholicism for Kleist and Hölderlin. In their essays on Schiller and Goethe, on the other hand, Jeffrey High and Jane Brown offer perceptive considerations of the phenomenon of Kunstreligion. High, for example, reads the Ästhetische Briefe as a philosophy of art that is grounded in Schiller's philosophy of religion as it emerges in the 1780s, while Brown-in a meticulous exploration of the traces of Mozart's Zauberflöte in Goethe's oeuvre-reads Goethe's Novelle as a consecration of art according to a philosophy of \"secular humanism.\" One might note, too, that Tom Spencer's focused essay on \"Personal Impersonalism in Herder's Conception of the Afterlife,\" though paired with [Claire Baldwin]'s piece on [Wieland], engages with Mendelssohn and the legacy of rationalism in a way that links it to the volume's final section, where John Smith has written an important essay that situates Leibniz next to Herder as a pivotal figure in the infusion of vitalism into Spinoza's mechanistic physics. Frederick Amrine closes the collection with an ingenious essay that unearths a Fichtean vein in the otherwise Spinozist intellectual genealogy of Gilles Deleuze; the takeaway from its argument, however, renders it a rather unexpected inclusion in the volume.
Book Review
Creating German communism, 1890-1990: from popular protests to socialist state
It is probably impossible to determine exactly the degree of rank-and-file enthusiasm for the intransigent inanities of the \"Third Period,\" but I would suggest that it is exaggerated in this account. It may well be that at the Zeitz and Leuna works Social Democrats and Communists had separate changing rooms and ate in different sections of the canteen, but there were many instances of solidarity between workers of these two passionately hostile parties. The experience of Austria and France are heartening reminders that many communists refused to swallow the party line in the face of an obvious common danger, but on the other hand the KPD was a party made up largely of unemployed workers under the bone-headed leadership of Ernest Thalmann and was capable of any absurdity. Thus in 1934 many German Communists joyfully awaited an imminent communist revolution. It is very skilfully shown how the combination of Stalinist ideology and the specific experience of the KPD went to make up a particularly noxious brew, but then we are told that the party members' \"emancipatory convictions connected them to the long trajectory of German humanism that stretched back to the eighteenth century.\" In much the same tone, reminiscent of Wilhelm Pieck's musings on \"J.S. Bach and the Working Class,\" we are reminded that by appropriating bourgeois culture socialism was moved beyond the class-specific to the universal.
Book Review