What is it about?
This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The essay argues that Zimmermann's discourse took form both in relation to the early modern conception of solitude as an active, therapeutic and exercise-oriented work on the self and in relation to the increasingly radical late eighteenth-century exploration of subjectivity and selfhood, an exploration that reflects the emergence of the modern conception of the unique individual and autonomous self.
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Why is it important?
The article provides perspective on the modern concept of loneliness by examining a thinker who stood with one foot in the early modern discourse on solitude and the other in the modern conception of the unique, autonomous and to some extent very lonely individual.
Perspectives
The article is part of the growing field of research that studies early modern philosophy and science not as abstract theories but as practices and exercises pursued to therapeutically temper and cure the soul from passion and desire.
Andreas Rydberg
Uppsala Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Therapeutics of Solitude in the German Enlightenment, Emotions History Culture Society, December 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/2208522x-02010130.
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