Abstract

Dilettantism or “Nebenwerk”?

A Gotha Proposal on the Position of Science at the Courts in the Late 18th Century

This essay discusses the contents of a presumably collective program that Gotha intellectuals published in 1776. In the text under study, “Von der spielenden Gelehrsamkeit”, they seek to legitimate their scientific and scholarly part-time work in addition to their employment as court officials or professionals in the ducal residence. The text is polyphonious and seems to be based on compromises between different authors. Accordingly, it does not present a consistent argument. For the historian, the consistency of the text is less relevant than what it reveals about the precarious status of part-time science and how it was viewed by contemporaries. The authors of the proposal argue that a self-confident form of patriotism – a patriotism that is related to the princely territory – and the emphasis on practical applications could help to prevent science and scholarship from sliding into pedantic specialization. For the authors, however, this did not mean rejecting the micrology, the collection of seemingly insignificant individual observations. On the contrary: micrology should be possible precisely because the part-time scholars – through their work for the principality at court – would never lose sight of the big picture. In the previous research discussion about the role of dilettantism in the genesis of science, the question of the relationship between the main activity at court and the secondary activity, the Nebenwerk, as a scientist has so far been neglected. The text under discussion therefore throws an important light on the coupling attempts that have been made here between different social subsystems.