Edition of the Collected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer

Both scientifically and institutionally, Johann Georg Sulzer (1720-1779) is a nexus in the intellectual history of the C18th. As a member of the philosophical section of the Berlin Academy he is primarily known as the as the author of A General Theory of the Beautiful Arts (1771-1774; Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste), a major contribution to the theory of art and aesthetics of the Enlightenment, which was read widely well into the C19th. Alongside his work on art and art anthropology, Sulzer also authored pedagogical writings, travel reports, literary criticism, literary works and scientific investigations.

In Berlin, where Sulzer settled permanently in 1747 after intermediary periods in Zurich, Maschwanden and Magdeburg, he cultivated many contacts amongst intellectuals and scholars. He could thank their support to no small degree on his being accepted as a full member of the Academy. In a letter to Maupertuis from 1747, Friedrich II had considered accepting Sulzer to the Académie royale des Sciences et Belle-Lettres as a specialist in “algebraic equations.” Nonetheless, Sulzer was accepted to the Academy three years later not as a mathematician, but a philosopher. His membership in the section for “speculative philosophy” (philosophie spéculative) led him to focus his intellectual activities on psychology, aesthetics and ethics. First as a member, and from 1776 as the director of the philosophical section, Sulzer exercised an important influence on the Academy. His significance lay not only in his intellectual activities, which can be judged by the number of his publications in its yearbooks, but also in his active participation in the Academy's admissions procedure and its distribution of prizes.

Johann Georg Sulzer made a decisive contribution to the theory of art of the C18th, the importance of which is based on the number and scale of the works he dedicated to the field. From the Study of the Origin of Pleasant and Unpleasant Feelings (Recherche sur l'origine des sentimens agréables et désagréables, 1751-1752) to the The Concept of Genius (Analyse du génie, 1757), On Energy in Works of Fine Art (De l'énergie dans les ouvrages des beaux-arts, 1765) and the General Theory of the Beautiful Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 1771-1774), Sulzer produced a corpus of writings that was viewed as an essential, if somewhat disputed, source of art-theoretical thought well into the C19th. His contemporary admirers included, amongst others, Herder, who celebrated him as a ground-breaking pioneer of aesthetics; Friedrich Schlegel mentioned him respectfully many times, his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel referred to him and Gottfried Keller's Heinrich Lee reads the General Theory of the Beautiful Arts reverently, a book that "must have enjoyed an enormous circulation in its time, since it can be found in nearly ever old bookcase." Even the highly critical review of the essay on the "Beautiful Arts" published by Goethe in 1772 in the Frankfurt Scholarly Notices (Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen) can, for all its vehemence - or perhaps on account of this vehemence - be read as a testimony to the importance of the text it attacks. That Sulzer's major work, the General Theory of the Beautiful Arts, was composed in the form of an encyclopaedia made no small contribution to the endurance of its influence.

The first volume of our edition, which was published in April 2014, presents Sulzer’s first important publication: A Concise Notion of All Sciences and Other Aspects of Learning (Kurzer Begriff aller Wissenschaften und andern Theile der Gelehrsamkeit), which appeared in many editions. With it, Sulzer contributed to the genre of “Kompendien-Literatur” – that is, the “sort of books that want to create order within the highly complex terrain of knowledge." (Hans Adler in the volume's introduction, p.lxi). Since the text was completely changed between the first and second editions, the first (Leipzig 1745) and the reworked and expanded second (Leipzig 1759) are edited critically here. Across the different editions of this work we see, amongst other things, how the new science of aesthetics, which in 1745 still played a secondary role, came to take a central place within Sulzer's panorama of the sciences.

Johann Georg Sulzer played a central, but scarcely editorially tapped, role in the network of Enlightenment correspondence. Here, Sulzer was an active and well-connected letter writer. The collection of letters he left behind is correspondingly extensive. It includes, amongst other things, correspondences with Jakob Bodmer, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Jean Henri Samuel Formey, Friedrich Nicolai, Hans Caspar Hirzel, Johann Georg Zimmermann, Martin Künzli, Wilhelmine Keusenhoff and Philipp Erasmus Reich.

Letters from and to Sulzer can be found in various European archives. The most important institutions with Sulzer collections are, amongst others, the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, the Freie Deutsche Hochstift Frankfurt am Main, the Biblioteka Jagiellońska Kraków, the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Bibliothek Hannover and the Gleimhaus Halberstadt. So far, only a small part of Sulzer's correspondence has been published. Publications have primarily appeared in collections of letters and biographical treatises from the C18th and C19th such as Hirzel's biography Hirzel to Gleim via Sulzer the Sage (1779; Hirzel an Gleim über Sulzer den Weltweisen) and Letters from the Swiss: Bodmer, Sulzer, Gessner (1804; Briefe der Schweizer Bodmer, Sulzer, Gessner), edited by Wilhelm Körte from Gleim's literary remains. Körte's editorial practice, which included numerous cuts, changes, omissions and even expansions, certainly does not hold to today's philological and editorial standards.