Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment by T. J. Reed

Abstract

T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. xi + 284 pp.This lucid study aims to shed light on a ostensibly shrouded in obscurity. Yet in question is in fact mainstream thought: Kant, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, with briefer discussions of figures like Herder, Wieland, Georg Forster, Karl Philipp Moritz, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Alexander von Humboldt. In Reed's understanding, this vibrant and vital corpus of thought remains to educated nonspecialists and historically literate people for many reasons (2). The first is a moral darkness that retroactively pervades Germany's history: the atrocities of twentieth century cast a long shadow over its whole political and cultural past (here Reed raises, but does not address in any depth, controversial concept of a Sonderweg [1]). The second reason that thought remains in dark, as it were, is impenetrability of its philosophical writing: It can be difficult for light to break through thickets of a sentence (1), Reed observes. No wonder, then, that Enlightenment, [i]f people have even heard of such a thing, has been outshone to point of invisibility by what went on elsewhere in Europe and America (2). Finally, there are attacks on from within culture itself: a right-wing rejection of and its thought in favor of a more profoundly German spirit, dating from Romantics; a neglect, and indeed erasure, of by certain historians of ideas (Friedrich Meinecke serves as an exemplar); and much overrated sniping from Left (Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was directed at modern phenomena that have questionable connection to Enlightenment and which has licensed iconoclasm from any quarter [3]). Hence, Reed sets out to reclaim an unknown and demonstrate its profound relevance to present, maintaining that subtitle of his study is only a slight exaggeration (2).If Reed overstates his case in introduction, he succeeds admirably well in providing concise, instructive, eminently readable overviews of select seminal writings in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. Kant forms backbone of study. The opening chapters are largely devoted to excellent discussions of An Answer to Question: What Is Enlightenment? …