Il romanzo e la repubblica alla prova dei filosofi. Percorsi e progetti dello spirito critico nel "Socrate delirante", nella "Storia degli Abderiti" e nell'"Aristippo" di Christoph Martin Wieland

There is hardly any other writer within German late Enlightenment discourse who has put forward the image of non-conformist philosophers as prominently as Christoph Martin Wieland did. In several of his novels, he engages a fight with anti-intellectualism, mocking those who smugly despise unconventional ideas. Ancient Greek republics provide the scenery. By means of irony, Wieland’s witty philosophers attack forms of quaint old morality and indifference to new civic and aesthetic values. Uncouth bourgeois, lacking curiosity or delicacy, are targeted and satirised. Their narrow-minded assertions on life and politics are smilingly debunked and outwitted. This paper takes a sample of Wieland’s critique and is conceived as a foray into three of his novels, i.e. ‘Socrates Out of His Senses’ (1770), ‘History of the Abderites’ (1781) and ‘Aristippus and Some of His Contemporaries’ (1800-1801). In these novels, forward-looking cosmopolitans and politicized philosophers develop intriguing new projects in the fields of politics and aesthetics which in many respects are still to be charted.