Performativity and “Poetic” Epistemology: Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten's Response to Moses Mendelssohn's Aesthetics

Summary

ALTHOUGH NOW ALMOST UNTOUCHED by scholarship, Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758–1818) was something of a household name in the late eighteenth century, associated mainly with Ossian and the island of Rügen, and known for his lyric poetry in the mode of sensibility, some of which was set to music by Schubert. Where Kosegarten's name is still mentioned, if at all, it is in reference to his reputation as a focal point of literary activity in Swedish Pomerania in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and also to his purported theological influence on the works of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. His literary oeuvre has been neglected, which can, in part, be traced to the mixed reception of Kosegarten throughout the nineteenth century. During that period, Kosegarten's poetry was included in handbooks, but extracts were also featured in grammars as negative examples of verse that did not adhere to the rules of German prosody. The kind of normative and qualitative judgments that shape Kosegarten's reception are concisely outlined in the second edition of Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus's important and influential encyclopedia of 1815. Kosegarten's at times bombastic and emotive style proved divisive among contemporaries: “Indeß sind die Stimmen über sein Verdienst doch sehr getheilt, denn während Einige ihm einen beträchtlichen Rang unter unsern vaterländischen Dichtern zugestehen, möchten Andere ihm lieber alle Ansprüche auf den Namen eines Dichters verweigern” (At the same time, opinions about his merit have been very much divided, for although some grant him a significant position among the poets of our nation, others would rather deny him any claim to being called a poet). Brockhaus's encyclopedia errs on the side of caution by stressing Kosegarten's alleged failings: “kurz, es gibt kaum eine ästhetische Sünde, die Kosegarten nicht begangen hätte” (in short, there is barely an aesthetic sin that Kosegarten has not committed).

Regardless of these qualitative judgments, Kosegarten's work is indeed worthy of critical re-examination. One of the central themes in Kosegarten's thought is the perception of beauty in nature, where beauty is understood as metaphysical and related to the divine, and this is where Kosegarten's dual roles as pastor and poet intersect. Kosegarten was famed for his Uferpredigten (Sermons on the Shore), the liturgically spare sermons held on the seashore on Rügen from 1792 onward.