The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

Chapter 7 explores ugliness and disgust (Ekel). In providing an overview of the third Critique position, the chapter argues that there cannot be pure aesthetic judgments of the ugly. In his early accounts, Kant views the responses to ugliness and disgust as unpleasant and therefore as (what Kant would call) “interested.” He typically discusses ugliness and disgust in connection with a teleological perspective of the whole of nature and of natural purposes. The ugly is disagreeable, since it is dysfunctional or asymmetrical (or both). A version of this view carries over into the third Critique. The ugly, if and when it is judged by the principle of nature’s purposiveness, would be contrapurposive and therefore disagreeable.

Chapter 10 shows that Kierkegaard develops his views on faith and reason by using classical German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant. Specifically, he develops the much-discussed category of the leap by making creative use of Jacobi and Lessing. The result is an original account of the leap relevant to both philosophy of religion and more general debates concerning rationality, incommensurability, and noncommensurability. Specifically, the “leap” concerns both general transitions between different normative standards and religious conversions in particular. Even when different standards diverge and conflict, such leaps need not be blind or irrational, if one abandons standards that collapse internally, and the new standards hold up. This general approach allows Kierkegaard to sketch a Kantian reductio of religious nonbelief. However, he appears to follow Schelling in taking Kant’s critique of the ontological argument for God’s existence to show that being is not a predicate, and that thought and being, possibility and actuality, are therefore heterogeneous. Whether or not something exists is then a contingent matter that cannot be known a priori.

Kant is critical of many of the practices of Christianity in his time. But when we appreciate the dynamic relation between rational and revealed religion as Kant conceives them, the apparent opposition becomes more questionable and raises more questions than it answers. Kant’s project in the Religion bears important affinities with the religious philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s philosophy of church and state and their relation involve a number of radical proposals expressive of Enlightenment religious consciousness. Mendelssohn’s concept of enlightened Judaism bears interesting comparison to Kant’s enlightened reflections on Christianity. Mendelssohn defends a form of evidentialism even more radical that Clifford’s. He also defends a conception of the freedom of religious conscience that inspires Kant’s treatment of that topic in part four of the Religion. Conscience is an important theme in Kant’s moral philosophy, which has special application to religious conscience and the freedom of conscience Kant and Mendelssohn both defend.

The ancient concept of ‘gesture’ had no place in the brave new world of Stanislavskian naturalism. Rhetorical gesture was understood as an adjunct of speech, hardwired to speech in the idiom of modern brain science. Classical gesture: refused to separate the physical person of the orator from his moral and intellectual capacities. The gestures of a Ciceronian speech were deemed to be implicit in the words. Renaissance gesture: raising the question of whether gesture is teachable. Shakespearean gesture: I focus on Bertram Joseph’s controversial research into gesture, and examine his work with Shakespearean actors presenting Macbeth at the Mermaid. Baroque gesture: contrasting Le Faucheur’s practice in the pulpit with the new approaches of Descartes and Le Brun. Enlightenment France: F. Riccoboni’s argument for an intelligent actor in control of his movements. Enlightenment Germany: Lessing’s desire for ‘individualizing’ gestures was not well received by actors. Engel followed Lessing in quest of detail, but Goethe return to tradition in order to find a language of the body that would support the delivery of verse.

In the period 1770-1830 the progressive dissolution of the antithesis between religious inwardness and Enlightenment critique gave rise to historically unparalleled creativity in German literature and thought. This is also the age in which human subjectivity was decisively redefined by critical and then post-critical Idealism in German philosophy. Between 1770 and 1830 the twin heritages of rationalism in German Idealist philosophy and Pietism in the beginnings of modern biblical criticism came together. In so doing, both decisively affected the vocabulary of German literature and its function as a mode of cultural critique in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany. The development in German writing from the literature of Empfindsamkeit (Sentimentality) and Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) to Romanticism reflects the evolution of a specifically literary idea of inwardness which variously expresses and challenges theological and political constructions of the subject.