Hume is here, of course, rewriting the history of English sectarianism and simultaneously marking his solidarity with the anticlerical spirit of the French philosophes. But we are on our way to the more thoroughgoing re-evaluation of enthusiasm that will occur in England and in Germany during the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. We have seen the beginning of the movement in England, although in very divergent sites. On the one hand, Hume sees in the English sectarian spirit demands for independence from external authorities. On the other, Wesley suggests that enthusiasm, rightly understood, is true religion. At the turn of the 18th century, English literary critics begin to argue for what John Dennis calls “poetic Enthusiasm.” Although for Dennis, poetic enthusiasm remains deeply religious, the slide from God to nature as the site of enthusiastic poetic rapture will occur very soon after.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as Anthony J. La Vopa has demonstrated, a host of German philosophers, poets, and critics also attempted to deploy the distinction between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus in order to allow for a revaluation of the latter. In the process, Enthusiasmus would be deprived of much of its religious content. It would become, instead, a site of human imagination and the animating force behind human creative projects. Yet for the philosopher Immanuel Kant, at least, the sticky relationship between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus will be very hard to shake. This is the reason, perhaps, for the three terms available in German, for there are places in Kant’s work, particularly in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where English erupts into his German—hence Kant’s Enthusiasm.
This is a story to be continued–and to be set beside another project in linguistic genealogy, one that examines the terms mysticism, mystical, and mystic as they continue to capture the strong spirits and an individual’s pursuit of them.
Page 3 of 3 | Previous page