Prestige, Criticism, Education: Conduct Norms for Handling Knowledge in European Comparison

Prof. Dr. Heinz Thoma (Romance Languages and Literature)

Prof. Dr. Daniel Fulda (German Studies),
Prof. Dr. Sabine Volk-Birke (English Studies)

The project field takes its impetus from the DFG Research Group 'Self-Enlightenment of the Enlightenment' (1998-2005, Director: Heinz Thoma) and focuses on the behavioural norms of dealing with knowledge. The specification concerns research on behavioural norms which result from relationships between knowledge and power in the fields of scholarly learning, science and criticism which undergo different developments in their respective proto-national public spheres as caused by the semantic restructuring of scholarly culture through the shift from Latin to national languages. In the German context, an arch of transmission can be traced via France to Halle, where the ideal of a political-gallant scholarship that emphasized performance was introduced by Christian Thomasius in the early Enlightenment, to popular philosophy which produced specific cognitive and medial forms, to the development and the consequences of the Kantian concept of criticism, up to the research ideal of new humanism based on education and 'pure' science (without practical application). The privileged field here is the university, a specifically German phenomenon in the general field of research on performance and knowledge. In the French context, where the Sorbonne remains strongly committed to its traditions and does not open itself to the Enlightenment, the path travels first via the ideal of methodological doubt combined with historical research as well as the intent to mediate a connection between common sense and logic (Pierre Bayle: Dictionnaire historique et critique), as well as sophisticated or gallant forms of knowledge mediation, as a further growth of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' and its association with the social elite (Fontenelle). This development leads around 1750 to the ideal of a system-critical eclecticism (Diderot), a diffusion and popularization of knowledge for the elite (Encyclopédie, Voltaire), as well as activities in provincial academies aimed at educating the general populace. In England, where (similarly to Germany and France) oppositions between pedantry and specialists (gentleman, connoisseur) form, the segregation of patrons from the structures of the Royal Academy indicates a heightened degree of scientification. Particularities develop through a differentiation of confessions and the related religiously motivated separation of institutes of higher education, (such as the institutions of the dissenters which focus more on modern practices, foreign languages etc. and remain excluded from the university) finally through the resulting model of the moral weeklies with gender specific readerships in the field of knowledge mediation, and last but not least the ideal of a criticism which strives towards a balanced judgment of taste (Pope). The project demarks and confronts these various paths in the relationship between performance and knowledge and examines the hypothesis of the birth and formation of specific national styles and world views in handling knowledge at the close of an era of European scholarly learning and the demise of modes of knowledge transfer as determined by the courtly elite.