German 354

       During week 7, we began our exploration of philosophers who have dealt with enlightenment, Adorno, Kant, and Kafka. Kant describes enlightenment as becoming released from a self-imposed dependency on others for direction so one can find the mental maturity to forge a path for himself or herself. Kafka relates Kant’s ideas of enlightenment back to Ovid and claims that Ulysses, Odysseus in the Greek form of the myth, is not an enlightened individual like he is classically portrayed to be, but rather that Ulysses is a childish self-deceiver. Adorno, however, asserts that Odysseus is representative of the bourgeois individual, a person who is of the middle class, and late romantic German interpreters of antiquity draw parallels of the bourgeois enlightenment from his character. In most traditional tales, the hybrid figure is not enlightened because they do not follow their own path, rather they follow the paths of others. In Undine, the titular character is never really enlightened because she has to rely on the love of a man to obtain a soul, which she states is a wish that her uncle has for her, rather than a wish of her own. All pre-Andersen hybrid figures follow this unenlightened path because of Paracelsus’ concept of the soul and how it is obtained by those who do not descend from Adam. Although, in Anderson’s 1837 rendition of the tale of the water being, “The Little Mermaid”, his titular character can become enlightened because she is able to transcend from water to air and forge her own path toward gaining a soul instead of relying on a path that causes her to be dependent on another person.