Subversive Sublimities: Undercurrents in the German Enlightenment (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

This anthology of critical essays pursues a field of scholarship that has only recently caught fire: the dark side of the German Enlightenment. The most prominent of German enlightened poets and thinkers - Goethe, Schiller, Lichtenberg, Tieck, among others - were conspicuously prone to the ideology of shamans, occultists, and charlatans of modern science and psychology. And yet the studies published here for the first time argue that the fascination with magic and the occult are not symptoms of a dying age but subversively productive elements, so that the subversiveness of irrationalism may be said to have become a progressive rather than a reactionary force.

Lewis White Beck was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester and one of the foremost scholars on the life and writings of Immanuel Kant.