liberty, humanity, cosmopolitanism and freedom of speech, the literary genre of the Bildungsroman and the bourgeois institution of the public sphere – just to mention some elements of the Enlightenment heritage that I am working with. To view the secret primarily as a function not as a kind of content is an approach I


take from Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work Kritik und Krise from 1959, with the subtitle “the pathogenesis of the modern world”, in which the German historian discusses at length how freemasonry in general and the order of the Illuminati in particular can be seen as a social and political correlate to Enlightenment criticism, as practiced by thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller and Kant. According to Koselleck their thoughts on man, society and art pretend to be concerned only with morality and not with politics, but in fact their arguments have radically political and even revolutionary implications – implications that need to be hidden from political authorities. Koselleck then, in his brilliant, but singularly one-dimensional work acknowledges only one possible function of secrecy, what he calls a “protective function”, “eine schützende Funktion”. Hence, the sole function of the Masonic secret is to protect the lodges, their members and their rituals from control and censorship by the absolutist state, or more precisely to hide the fact that their allegedly moral practices, their education and ideology, their focus on man not as a subject, but as an autonomous human being, in


reality presents a highly political and even revolutionary attack on the absolutist regime – a strategy that Koselleck terms “hypocritical”. In the following I will try to show that there might be other functions of secrecy as well, that become effective in different parts of the textual culture of the Enlightenment as well as in different parts of Herder’s work.


II. I shall start by giving you a brief overview of Herder’s dealings with Freemasonry.


In 1766, during his time in Riga, Herder joined the lodge “Zum Nordstern”, where he, according to his wife Caroline, came to hold the office as secretary. After having moved to Weimar he became a member of the order of the Illuminati that had formed around Johann Cristoph von Bode and that counted prominent people like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, prince Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar and Freiherr von Knigge, only to mention a few. As W. Daniel Wilson has shown Herder – whose name in the order was “Damasus Pontifex” – seems to have been a rather passive member. Furthermore, in a letter from 1786, Herder gives the following – rather crushing – summary of his experiences as a freemason and a member of different secret societies: Ich hasse alle geheime Gesellschaften auf den Tod


dell’Ordine degli Illuminati 49


und wünsche Sie nach den Erfahrungen, die ich aus und in ihrem Innersten gemacht Adam Weishaupt – fondatore


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