The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment 20
wrong (Stirling did not use enlightenment “to designate the spirit and aims of the French
philosophers of the 18th c., or of others whom it is intended to associate with them in the implied
charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and
authority, etc.”) the error is a trivial one from the standpoint of the history of concepts. 75 For
while Stirling did not use the word enlightenment to designate the concept that we have come to
designate as the Enlightenment, he had another word that performed the same function:
illumination. Once we make the necessary translations, it could be argued that it is clear enough
what Stirling was up to.
Yet in one essential respect, such a translation fails to capture what Stirling was doing: it
pays insufficient attention to the degree to which the choice of one word rather than another
sometimes matters. Skinner has suggested that the best evidence that “a group or society has
entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary
has been developed, a vocabulary that can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept in
question with consistency.” 76
The reverse would also appear to be true. The plethora of
alternative terms that Stirling employed to designate what we now term the Enlightenment
should be enough to warn us that perhaps he did not understand the period in the same way as we
do. His vacillation about how to designate the period that preceded him was very much in
keeping with the way in which that period talked about itself. Indeed, one of the most striking
features of late eighteenth-century texts is their almost obsessive concern that certain terms have
been misused, their conviction that certain words can no longer be used in the way in which they
would like to use them, and the zeal with which they attempt to draw connections between the
different words that are in play.
For one striking example, let us briefly consider a passage from Johann Georg von
Zimmermann’s Fragmente über Friedrich den Grossen zur Geschichte seines Lebens, seiner
Regierung, und seines Charakters (1790). 77
The work is (as advertised) a collection of
anecdotes about Frederick the Great, with little tying them together beyond their interest in
illuminating various aspects of the monarch’s life and reign, as they appeared to a man who had