Aufklärung als Praxis. Naturgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert

Summary This essay aims at widening the predominant image of the Enlightenment as an era focussed on ‚Enlightenment thinking‘, supplementing an intellectual history centred on the triad of ideas, authors and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective on agency. On the basis of natural history, Enlightenment is addressed as a repertoire of learned practices, which permitted and even called for the participation of a significantly larger group of people than has been assumed so far. First, it will be analyzed how a scientific project which aimed at a worldwide registration, description and classification of flora, fauna and minerals, involved innumerable actors in collecting, naming and describing mainly local natural objects. Doing natural history was not the same as writing natural history. This „grassroots learnedness“ rooted in the very objects of nature was a crucial factor in turning natural history into a movement which saw itself as Enlightened. Secondly, the communicative dimension of natural his...