Max Deeg presents a paper on 'Multiple Individualities – The Many Identities of the Chinese Buddhist Monk Xuanzang'

This paper tries to bring into conversation the results and ideas of the KFG „Religöse Individualisierung in historischer Perspektive“ and the material and the sources I am working with. I changed the structure and content of the original draft I had in the light of the discussions in the plenary session and some of the colloquia which had a direct impact on my material and my approach. I found the framework of individualisation particularly helpful for my attempts to de-historisize the biographical material, i.e. to move it away from the positivist reading which is still very much en vogue in the academic field I am working in. I read the biographies as expressions of narrative individualisation through which the same „individual“ can be imagined and appropriated in different ways with different intentionalities and purposes for which I tentatively introduce the term „function“ (to be developed, if feasible at all, into a concept). The paper is therefore a combination of information and material from my „database“ and some deliberations about how this could fit into the wider discourse about individualisation.
The wider project which leads to a series of sub-projects is a new English translation and extensive historical commentary of and to Xuanzang’s „Record of the Western Regions“ written in the 7th century and having had a huge impact in East Asia and on western historical scholarship of Asia. The present paper is part of this main project insofar the latter will include all the relevant material and its analysis and discussion that is connected with Xuanzang and his text, particularly the various biographical traditions and the author’s and the text’s reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) which have to be analyzed in their respective contexts. The paper was originally conceived as a to be modified chapter for a monograph on Xuanzang and his wider context requested by Oxford University Press India which can also be used as an introductory complement to the rather bulky and specialized translation cum commentary, meant to be published in installments.

Knud Haakonssen presents a paper on 'To know yourself – that’s a whole crowd! Ludvig Holberg as a case study of multiple authorial personae'

This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave at the Gotha Forschungszentrum in January. The reason for reviving the paper is that it addresses central issues discussed in the KFG plenaries preparing for the end time (cf. the theses from Martin Mulsow and me). The paper is thus not part of my project on natural law. Nor is it theoretical, or methodological, in character; rather, it provides a case study of multiple authorial personae, namely, the work of the Danish polymath Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). I show how Holberg uses the techniques of contemporary eclecticism in a wide variety of works and genres of works. I suggest that this goes along with an espistemic attitude that is somewhat different from the usual moderate scepticism often associated with eclecticism. And I indicate how a many-sided ambiguity about the supposedly ‘real’ author is effected in order to secure space for a basic, somewhat simplistic but earnest religiosity without jeopardising the pervasive pluralism. A key factor here is the ‘creation’ of the audience, including the scholars who nearly three centuries later pursue the real Holberg. But he, too, is always a persona for an audience. The conclusion – if any – is that it is a kind of category mistake to ask what ‘he’ really believed.