Georg Friedrich Meier and the promotion of the philosopher in the German civic Enlightenment

This article contributes to the analysis of the persona of the early modern philosopher by focusing on the eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier. The article pursues three lines of argument. First, it argues that Meier’s work took form in relation to the decades-long early Enlightenment debate regarding philosophy and the philosopher that is sometimes referred to as the Wolff affair. Second, it shows that Meier belonged to a new generation of intellectuals, poets and writers, who steered philosophy towards the exploration of identity and selfhood. As this happened the figure of the philosopher and of philosophy became part of a broader moral-educational project, where norms and patterns of behaviour were communicated in a light-hearted literary style, often by using the infotainment genres of the emerging public sphere. Third, underlying Meier’s sometimes humorous and satiric account of the philosopher was a serious message regarding philosophy as a methodological and partly therapeutic regimen for a soul perturbed by passion and desire. While this aspect of early modern philosophy has received increasing scholarly interest, the case of Meier offers a glimpse of how it fed into and became part of a broader middle-class identity.