Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Therapeutics of Solitude in the German Enlightenment

Abstract This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The draws but also challenges recent historiography two counts. First, it situates discourse solitude in context of early modern cultura animi tradition, which philosophy provided a cure for soul perceived as diseased perturbed by passion desire. Placed this context, comes into view not primarily passive state rest tranquillity connected to rural life, active, therapeutic exercise-oriented self. Second, argues that Zimmermann shaped his relation increasingly radical late exploration subjectivity selfhood, an reflects emergence conception unique individual autonomous