CHAPTER 1

From Traditional to Modern ScholarlySpeech and Kant's Provocation

From the perspective of the early or even mid-eighteenth century, it wouldhave seemed unlikely that groundbreaking developments in scholarly lifewould occur in Germany in less than fifty years. The middle of the centurywas a period of relative stagnation for universities: enrollment wasdown, critiques of scholarly pedantry were growing louder, and scientificinnovation was occurring largely outside of the universities. Like mostinstitutions of higher learning throughout Europe, German-speaking universitieswere still quite tradition oriented and placed little premium onnew knowledge production. Against this backdrop, "the story of howGermany led the world into the age of modern scholarship" appears as"one of the most stunning reversals in the history of knowledge." Theobvious question arises of why late eighteenth-century Germany becamethe center of such an important period of transformation. Historians arestill in the process of uncovering more about this dynamic era, but ageneral consensus about certain key features has emerged. On the onehand, this was a time when increasingly proactive segments of the middleclass attempted to cultivate public voices. German-speaking lands stilllagged relative to the commercial and industrial achievements of Britainor France, and a life as a professor, writer, and lecturer still representeda central mode of social advancement for the lower and middle classes."Opportunities for careers as culture producers were expanding, if spartanand competitive," and many of the era's most talented and ambitiousindividuals sought to excel in and through the life of the scholar. Thesenew professional chances went hand in hand with an upswing in printmedia and growth in reading audiences. Emergent print genres andformats occasioned reflections on print and other media and on theirrelation to older modes of scholarly publicity. Finally, this was also atime of growing professional consciousness, as scholars gradually wentfrom viewing themselves as civil servants providing useful professionaltraining for the absolutist state to defining themselves (alternately as wellas at times concomitantly) as specialists in pursuit of new, systematicknowledge (Wissenschaft) and as public intellectuals capable of addressingmore general, "popular" audiences. To be sure, this process wasalso taking place in Britain and France, but the German articulation ofspecific disciplinary structures in philosophy, ancient philology, anthropology,history, and psychology had an unusually significant effect onthe subsequent development of higher learning around the world. Withoutaspiring to tell this entire story anew, this book's study of scholarlyinstruction, publication, and self-presentation assumes the unique importanceof the German context and draws on valuable recent studies of theperiod by Clark, Stichweh, Fohrmann, La Vopa, and others.

This first chapter serves as background and point of departure for subsequentchapters. In it I outline features of traditional university life fromwhich later scholars would differentiate themselves, and I present the philosopherand university professor Immanuel Kant as a point of contrastboth to traditional and to Romantic visions of scholarly speech. In particular,I track a shift from a model of speech embedded in the hierarchicalsociety of the ancien régime and structured around the scholarly canonto a model of the scholar as original author, producer of new knowledge,and public figure capable of addressing broader audiences. Kant is a keyfigure of transition, not only because he helped to articulate modern idealsof new knowledge production and the print public sphere. As I show, Kantis an excellent example of how eighteenth-century scholars found themselveson shifting ground, with one foot in an outmoded system of highereducation and the other in an ideal, imaginary community called "thepublic" where scholars addressed other scholars or broader lay publics.

The lecture is a felicitous lens through which to view this transition,not only because of its longevity as instructional form but also becauseit paradigmatically negotiates print and oral media. The first part of thischapter explores medial practices of reading, speaking, and listening at theheart of traditional instruction and oratory. I examine the use of printedlecture aids, or compendia, as well as how models of print circulationwere seen both to complement and rival sites of oral speech. The lectureprovided a remarkably robust way of transmitting the authorities of thepast, of remediating the written and printed word sanctioned by scholarlytradition and social norms. Kant serves as an interesting point of contrastto traditionalist medial practices, for he both continued key featuresof conventional scholarly instruction, such as the use of sourcebooks,and at the same time articulated visions of critical reading, nonimitativeknowledge, and scholarly publication that departed considerably fromearlier pedagogical and medial landscapes.

The second part of the chapter examines how models of the print publicsphere challenged the traditional authority of scholarly orators bypresupposing competing models of authorship and reception. Scholarlylife was deeply implicated in the representation of the state and its institutionsqua "public power" (öffentliche Gewalt), but it also frequentlyserved as an important site for experiments with new forms of socialinteraction that undermined the political and social hierarchies of theancien régime. Again I turn to Kant as a point of contrast to older visionsof scholarly publicity. In imagining an independent realm of scholarlydiscourse that transcends political and geographical borders, Kant putsforth characteristically modern notions of individual freedom of thoughtand the "public" use of reason that informed subsequent Romantic andpost-Romantic experiments with scholarly personality.

Kant is a fascinating figure not only due to his transformative notionsof new knowledge production and public debate, but also because of hisreflections on the lecture form. In particular, I argue that Kant uses the universitylecture as an essential foil for his transformative paradigm of the"free" public use of reason. Kant's programmatic writings on the scholarand the university deal "at bottom with ... the institutionalization of apublic sphere," and yet they expressly avoid considering oral communicationas part of that public realm, heralding print publication as a realm ofdebate free from state control. It is telling that Kant's theory of the printpublic sphere (Öffentlichkeit) goes hand in hand with an absolutist conceptionof oral university instruction qua civil service. This ambivalenceabout the lecture's publicness seems all the more peculiar after recognizingthat the model of critical reading undergirding Kant's own universitylecturing broke with earlier ideals of instruction as commentary and imitation.In conscious opposition to the rhetorical tradition, however, Kantdoes not promote himself as a public lecturer. Along with exploring Kant'sprovocative reconceptualization of the scholar, this chapter concludes bycontrasting Kant with two of his contemporaries and their views of thelecture; these figures point both backward to more traditionalist modelsand forward to later Romantic models of scholarly oratory.

Kant has remained a crucial figure for much recent scholarship onEnlightenment culture, the history of the public sphere, and the history ofmedia, but few scholars attend to the lecture's programmatic importancein Kant's thought. Taking Kant's philosophy as an attempt "to explain theplurality, and not simple univocality, of the forms that rationality took inhuman behavior," it becomes necessary to examine how and why Kantdifferentiated between scholarly functions. Though the thesis of Kant'snineteenth-century editors that he led a "double life"—split between hiscritical writings and a form of "self-denial" in the lecture hall—hascome under serious revision, Kant's differentiation between civil serviceand participation in public life nonetheless stands out. I approach thisfeature of Kant's thought not only as a point of comparison to accountsof publicity and media immediately before and after him, but also as acatalyst for a set of questions that continue to organize contemporarydebates. Commentators still disagree about the university's relationshipto broader society and politics: some such as Henry Giroux or MarthaNussbaum see university instruction as entirely of the same piece with thescholar's participation in broader public debate through publication andextra-academic appearances, treating the classroom as a training groundfor social and political participation, as "one of the very few remainingdemocratic public spheres in the United States today." In contrast, otherssuch as Stanley Fish take a more differentiational approach to theclassroom, viewing instruction as a limited, professional activity distinctfrom other forms of public participation. As I argue, Kant maps a considerableportion of the conceptual and rhetorical terrain upon which thesediscussions occur, yet another sign of Kant's essential modernity. Lookingahead to the rest of this book, I am especially interested in how Kant'spositive concept of scholarly publicity served as a point of departure forlater Romantic and idealist thinkers, even while these thinkers took asecond look at the lecture as public form.

Reading, Speaking, and Listening

My story picks up with instructional scenes of reading, speaking, and listening,fundamental components of scholarly life since the Middle Ages.Traditional academic training initiated the student into the social standingof the scholar by acquainting him with canonical knowledge andenabling his facility in Latin—litteratus, the Latin term for scholar, namedexactly this facility. Instructional and ceremonial speech modeled howfuture members of the scholarly class (Gelehrtenstand) were to manifestscholarly competence (Gelehrsamkeit) as pastors, lawyers, doctors,or teachers. In comparison to later specialization, competence with thecanon displayed little disciplinary consciousness. The traditional universitywas organized into the three higher faculties and one so-called lowerfaculty. The higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine offered pathsof professional training sanctioned and regulated by the state, while thephilosophical faculty introduced students to the building blocks of scholarlydiscourse, including rhetoric, grammar, logic, and mathematics. Eachfaculty's legitimacy was inseparable from the interdependence of textualauthority and oral instruction: scholarly speech first and foremost remediatedcanonical texts through commentary and elaboration. Universitieswere "speaking libraries, stagings of knowledge traditionally compiled inbooks, temples of scholarship." Canon transmission remained a centralpart of scholarly practice into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,even as notions of new knowledge production gained in importance.

Early modern humanism understood scholarly excellence as the expressionof eloquentia (usually translated in German as Beredsamkeit). Thepublic persona of the scholar was deeply implicated in rhetorical display,which was conceived of as the culmination of scholarly knowledge, not theresult of separate rhetorical instruction: "the highest goal of humanisticeducation is eloquence, all other objects of study are subordinate to it."A certain circularity inhered in this understanding, with eloquence andscholarly excellence being defined in terms of each other. Facility withthe canon linked the scholar's public self-presentation to the medial economyof the res publica litteraria, creating a feedback loop between readingand writing: reading prepares for oral speech that in turn recirculates writtenworks through citation and commentary. Crucial to this pedagogy ofreworking and reproducing the past was the concept of imitation, whichpresupposed the student encounter with exemplary scholarship in theauditorium or in books. The prominent early eighteenth-century Leipzigprofessor of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics Johann Christoph Gottschedreinforced this central presupposition in a rhetoric handbook:

There is no way of overstating what kind of power imitation possesses....A superior orator who stands up at a specific locationoften awakens uncountably many lively souls who would not haveotherwise known that they had an orational talent if they had notbeen stimulated to emulation by the example and the glory of sucha predecessor.

This pedagogy of exposure and imitation cut across printed worksand oral oratory alike, with the example of other speakers and writersintended to lead future scholar-orators to sanction existing modesof thought. The more students are inspired by an orator's example, themore they aspire to become a scholar, and this aspiration in turn leadsthem back to the canon, creating a highly productive circuit between pastand present, between oral speech and textual sources. The proliferationof scholarly speech thus relied on a basic homology between occasionaloration (presented orally or in print) and instruction in the classroom—inboth situations the adept scholar manifests imitable eloquentia.

Student and professorial experiences of listening and speaking weredefinitive of university life, where "'listening' took on the sense of 'listeningto a lecture' and ultimately became a synonym for 'studying' ingeneral." Here the etymology of the auditorium or Hörsaal also comesto mind. At the same time, the initial bond of the oral lectio to a writtentext is preserved in its etymological origin in the realm of reading:while the auditor "listens," the lecturer "reads." The practice of readingand commenting on a textual source originated in Christian liturgy—oneneed only recall that the traditional university first and foremost producedfuture priests and pastors. The historically variegated dynamicbetween orality and literacy is definitive of all pedagogy that partakesof written or printed language; the further back in time one looks, themore important oral communication is in institutions of higher learning,and yet the more a textual canon undergirds the authority of theacademic class. In the medieval university, lectio could mean both Biblecommentary and instruction more generally; the lecture "consisted ofthe master or professor reading a certain book aloud, section by section,glossing and commenting on the individual statements." Dictation andelaboration in the lecture stood in close relation to the main form ofstudent examination, the disputation; lectures of old were structured sothat students could adapt logical maneuvers heard there to the discursivepatterns of the disputation. Scholarly activity thus occurred acrossa continuum of written and spoken communication, and the differencebetween print and orality was often viewed as one of degree rather thanof kind or category, something apparent in the traditional use of the termspeech (Rede) as an umbrella term for all scholarly discourse, whetherspoken, written, or printed.

But how exactly were printed texts employed in the lecture hall? Hereit is important to mark certain stages in the interrelated development oflecture practices and media technologies. The textual basis for lectureaids and student "reading along" shifted over time. If copies were rare,as in the early stages of the university, texts would be dictated verbatim.When it was still uneconomical for students to have personal printedcopies, professors would read from editions of classical texts with broadmargins to enable instructor note taking in the books themselves. Thestudents would transcribe their content, making handwritten copies thatwould circulate among their peers. More common was the annotativeenterprise where students were required to possess or share a copy of thetext being glossed by the lecturer. As it became more financially feasibleto publish student copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, differentcompilational forms entered into wider use. Chresthomaties, forexample, collected exemplary passages from multiple authors and wereused in universities as well as in primary and secondary schools.

A constant throughout the rise and fall of various philosophical, medical,juridical, and theological paradigms, the lecture remained as a siteof textual commentary long into the eighteenth century and beyond.This period saw a relative increase in textbooks, with most lecturesbeing based on "ordered, but relatively condensed abstracts of availableknowledge," or what were called compendia. The compendium was atextbook that compiled basic knowledge to be elaborated upon in thelecture hall, aiming at overview rather than innovation: the term connotesweighing together (com-pendere), sparing, saving, or abbreviating.Lecturers would be granted a certain amount of freedom in choosingwhich authors to use in the classroom, though "radical" authors such asSpinoza were obviously off limits. Docents often listed the sourcebooksthey used in the lecture catalogue, allowing for supervision by universityand state authorities and helping students prepare for the course content;a Prussian decree from 1781 stated that all lecturers had to read fromcompendia. From the perspective of the absolutist state, professors werecivil servants responsible for training future professionals, and compendiaserved as a material reminder of state-sanctioned doctrines.