Society and the reason of language
Part of : Balkan studies : biannual publication of the Institute for Balkan Studies ; Vol.40, No.1, 1999, pages 57-90
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57-90
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A combination of circumstances occurring in western Europe and theBalkans and eastern Europe alike during the second half of the eighteenthcentury favored the eastward and southeastward diffusion of certain aspects ofEnlightenment thought. If there was a supply of new ideas in western Europe,however, what facilitated their southeastward diffusion was the existence,along the maritime fringes of the Ottoman Empire and in the Habsburgfrontiers adjacent to the Ottoman, of a growing demand for appropriate newideas. One important event in western Europe was the publication ofMontesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), which redefined Europe —partly interms of geography and climate but even more in terms of law, moderation,commerce, and the circulation of goods and ideas, so that Europe’s otherbecame Oriental despotism. Once admired as the “new Romans”, the OttomanEmpire became an object of criticism. Europe itself came to be understood asthe territories in which a demand for an unimpeded circulation of goods andideas existed or could be created. In other words, the extent of Europe could be said to coincide with territories in which there were elites with Enlightenment goals.At about the same time, in response to the growth of the commerce ofGreeks and Macedo-Vlachs with western Europe and Russia, of the growth ofthe commerce of Greeks and Serbs and of the church and educational reformsof Maria Theresa in the Habsburg Monarchy, of study by Greeks in Italianmedical schools and other faculties and of Serbs in German and Hungarianhigher schools, and of the rise in the Austrian territories of a Serb burgherclass, a growing number of Serbs and Greeks began to identify after 1770 withsome of the Enlightenment goals. By and large, the Greek and Serb exponentsof the new ideas did not seek a rupture with their own past but only with apast that they did not regard as their own. The acceptance of Enlightenmentideas thus was generally not an act of “de-Byzantinization”. On the otherhand, under the influence of German pietism, whose center was the Universityof Halle but which was also propagated by German merchants who went to theLeipzig fairs, it could take the form of attachment to such ideas as rationalpiety and enlightened virtue.By the 1780s, there was the beginning among Serb and Greek writers ofwhat, in another connection, Fernand Braudel has called a “verbal inflation”,and which I myself associate with what I call the Third Axial Age. Clearlyevident in the work of one of the most admired Serb authors, DositejObradovic, that verbal inflation was the result of his quest for “clear, definite,and constant ideas”. To identify the art of communication, he borrowed aRussian term, slovesnost, whose purpose he understood as enlightening theunderstanding, pleasing the imagination, moving the passions, and influencingthe will, an activity that western Europeans commonly called rhetoric. Amongthe words that he borrowed from the western European languages or coinedby analogy were the terms for fashion (moda), capital (kapital), nation (nacija),and public sphere (opstestvo).Among Greek and Serb writers alike, there was, by the 1780s, a linguisticturn, a shift from a discourse of philosophy under which language was subsumedto a discourse of language under which philosophy was subsumed. Anexamination of the work of Condillac, Volney, Noah Webster, and JohannGeorg Hamann indicates that a similar turn began somewhat earlier inwestern Europe and at about the same time in the United States. One mayassociate this turn with certain writers but also with certain areas —with theIonian Islands, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thessaly among the Greeks and withKarlovac (Carlstadt) and other western regions among the Serbs, with areasdistant from centers of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, such as Constantinople andSremski Karlovci. The turn further reflected the simultaneous movement fromconceptions of “universality” to conceptions of nationality, both of which differ,however, from conceptions of locality. They were, therefore, also an affirmation by the new elites of their own identification with Europe and the ideaof a culture of dialogue.
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