Abstract

During the Enlightenment the meaning and value of enthusiasm become a renewed source of dispute. Caught between extremes of religious fanaticism and moral excitation, while also evoking a Platonic possibility of transcendent insight, the notion of enthusiasm enters into a peculiar relationship with the concept of Aufklarung: behind the mask of enlightened reason one finds the experience, and the language, of the mind enthralled with itself. However, no contemporary study has been dedicated to the function of enthusiasm in Enlightenment philosophy and poetics. This dissertation develops enthusiasm as a critical category for analyzing those discourses that seek to articulate extreme possibilities of human thought. Concentrating primarily on the early writings of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock , the study investigates Kants essays on psychology, aesthetics, religion and cosmology, and Klopstock's developing program of a "sacred" poetics and poetry, as parallel attempts to discover and render productive the essential excess of the cogito at its intersection with feeling and language, pathos and logos---to find a principle, that is, of pure enthusiasm. ;After an introduction discussing the problem of defining "enthusiasm," the chapters on Kant examine how enthusiasm is delineated against other extraordinary mental states: in the first chapter, psychological concepts of derangement and Schwarmerei; in the second, notions of mystical revelation, self-evidence and enlightenment; and in the third chapter, interplaying ideas of absolute necessity and absolute irony. Turning to Klopstock, the fourth chapter examines hymnic speech and poetic questioning in Klopstok's free-rhythm religious hymns; the fifth chapter analyzes the function of enthusiasm in his ideals of "sacred poetry" and "presentation" , "deception" and "participation"; and the sixth chapter applies this poetics to an "enthusiastic" close-reading of the poets early "triumph"-chorales from Canto XX of Der Messias. Finally, an epilogue reflects on the aftermath of enthusiasm in Kants and Klopstock's respective responses to the French Revolution, which reveal the opposed trajectories of enthusiasm in modernity: as moral-historical transcendentalism and as catastrophic triumphalism