civil and metaphysical philosophy in early modern...

RIVAL ENLIGHTENMENTS

Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

Rival Enlightenments is a major reinterpretaton of early modernGerman intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophicaldoctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historicalcircumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacral-isation. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasiusand the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intel-lectual cultures or paideia, thereby challenging all histories premisedon Kant’s supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field.This landmark study reveals for the first time in English the extra-ordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, whorepudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual for-mation of those administering desacralised territorial states. Thebook argues that the marginalisation of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuationof the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combiningcareful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic,Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and histori-ans alike.

is Professor of Humanities and Founding Director ofthe Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at GriffithUniversity, Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Culture andGovernment: The Emergence of Literary Education () and Rethinking theSchool (), as well as numerous articles dealing with the historicalconditions and roles of moral and political thought.

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RIVAL ENLIGHTENMENTSCivil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

IAN HUNTER






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Contents

Preface page ixAcknowledgements xivList of abbreviations and texts used xviNote on conventions xix

Introduction

University metaphysics . Introduction . Metaphysics as the philosophical subsumption of theology . The return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy . The metaphysical ethos . Political metaphysics

Civil philosophy . Introduction . Reductions of the civil: society and reason . Sources of the civil: politics and law . Civil philosophy and profane natural law

Leibniz’s political metaphysics . Introduction . From Protestant Schulmetaphysik to rationalist metaphysics . The subject of metaphysics . Philosophical theology . The metaphysics of law

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Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy . Introduction . Moral philosophy and political obligation . From moral personality to civil personae . From transcendent reflection to chastened observation . Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty

Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics . Introduction . Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy . The attack on metaphysical scholasticism . Detranscendentalising ethics . Natural law . From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists

Kant and the preservation of metaphysics . Introduction . The morals of metaphysics . Kant’s metaphysical ethos . Moral philosophy as metaphysical paideia . The metaphysics of law . The pure religion of reason

Postscript: The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom

List of references Index

viii Contents






Preface

The prime objective of this work is to reinstate a marginalised intellec-tual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modernGermany. Although the civil philosophy of Samuel Pufendorf andChristian Thomasius is not unknown in the modern humanitiesacademy, sympathetic treatment of their work is largely confined to thehistory of political philosophy, jurisprudence, and theology. To theextent that they feature in intellectual history and the history of philos-ophy more broadly, however, they appear as superseded figures, destinedto be absorbed by the great oscillations between rationalism and volun-tarism, idealism and empiricism which would reach their culminatingreconciliation in the epochal philosophy of Immanuel Kant. We shall seethat this reigning dialectical historiography is itself the offshoot of asecond, rival intellectual movement, centred in the culture of universitymetaphysics. In order to recover early modern civil philosophy, there-fore, it has proved necessary to criticise and reject a dialectical historiog-raphy designed to erase its historical existence and political significance.In place of this reconciliatory history, this book offers an account of twoindependent intellectual cultures – the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil andmetaphysical philosophy – which remain unreconciled today.

Retrieving civil philosophy from the all-assimilating, all-unifying millof dialectical philosophical history is no straightforward task. For, bydrawing its impetus from the arranged mutual deficiencies of opposedviewpoints, this historiography gives shape not just to history but also tothe historian. It treats history as the medium in which the unreconcileddimensions of human subjectivity move towards their harmonisation, inthe final recovery of the a priori conditions of experience and morality– the moment of Kant’s critical philosophy. Under these intellectual con-ditions, the historian views the past in terms of the unreconciled opposi-tions – between rationalism and voluntarism, intellectualism andempiricism – and finds his or her own ethical impulse in the need to

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repeat the moment of their Kantian reconciliation. This is the momentin which human subjectivity’s imagined journey towards self-knowledgeterminates, with the recovery of the cognitive and moral laws responsi-ble for the organisation of subjectivity itself. Considering that it was Kanthimself who first viewed the history of philosophy in these terms, dialec-tical philosophical history is uniquely suited to demonstrating theepochal significance of Kantian philosophy, and may indeed be regardedas a sub-species of that philosophy.

By showing that Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy didnot in fact undergo this dialectical assimilation – by uncovering its inde-pendent cultural basis and autonomous political viewpoint – this bookdeparts fundamentally from the post-Kantian intelligibility of earlymodern intellectual history. Many readers will no doubt find the intel-lectual terrain to be traversed unfamiliar and potentially hostile. Themoral world in which Pufendorf and Thomasius lived was not the onewhose laws Kant recovered. Further, the forms of personhood they cul-tivated were not ones governed by the norms of ‘pure practical reason’.Their world had its own moral cosmology, unlike the quasi-Platonic onethat organised Kant’s cosmos, yet one whose ‘Epicurean’ bleakness wassuited to a Europe still dealing with the aftermath of a period of pro-tracted religious warfare. Similarly, their sense of self was shaped by a‘pessimistic’ moral anthropology far removed from Christian–Platonicpursuit of pure rational being that drove metaphysical philosophy fromLeibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond. In sketching the relationbetween civil and metaphysical philosophy in these terms – in treatingthe worlds they envisaged and the persons they posited as grounded infree-standing rival anthropologies and cosmologies – we begin tomeasure the distance to be travelled from post-Kantian conceptions ofa unified ‘humanity’ or ‘reason’.

In recasting the landscape of early modern intellectual history intothese unreconciled and unfamiliar shapes, I have drawn on two mainintellectual instruments. Firstly, and fundamentally, I have drawn on aparticular approach to the history of philosophy. This is one whichfocuses on the ‘ascetic’ or self-transformative work that certain philoso-phies require their adherents to perform on themselves, only thenaddressing the objects of knowledge to which they promise access. Thisapproach holds the key to retrieving civil philosophy from its dialecticalassimilation, and to placing civil and metaphysical philosophy on thesame historical footing – as rival alternative modes of philosophical cul-tivation. It does so principally by treating their different anthropologies

x Preface






and cosmologies not in terms of the self they uncover or the cosmos theyreveal, but in terms of the self they seek to shape for a world they envis-age. The objective of this approach is not to explain the philosophies byreducing them to a different order of reality – to the structures of societyor the forms of subjectivity – but to redescribe the operations of thephilosophical discourses themselves, treating them as autonomous andirreducible ‘spiritual exercises’.

Secondly, I have made use of a particular view of the political andreligious history of early modern Germany. This is a view that focuseson the role of confessionalisation in precipitating the Thirty Years War(–); the role of the ‘deconfessionalising’ or ‘desacralising’ of pol-itics in ending this war; and the central role of ‘political law’ (Staatsrecht,jus publicum) and its jurisprudence in this process of deconfessionalisa-tion. I argue that the post-Westphalian ‘intellectual civil war’ betweenmetaphysical and civil philosophy – first encountered in Leibniz’s unre-strained attack on Pufendorf ’s natural law doctrine – is properly under-stood as a clash between rival ways of responding to this profoundhistorical process. Responding positively to the uncoupling of civil andreligious governance, Pufendorf developed a doctrine of natural law inwhich the exercise of political power (the ‘civil kingdom’) was segregatedfrom the sphere of life in which the pursuit of moral perfection tookplace (the ‘kingdom of truth’). He thus sought to reconstruct moral phi-losophy by replacing the unified moral personality with a plurality ofpersonae suited to the diverse ‘offices’ – religious and civil, private andpublic, ecclesiastical and political – of citizens in desacralised states.Leibniz, however, responded to the post-Westphalian separation of pol-itics and religious morality by seeking their reconciliation at a higherlevel, through metaphysics. Here it was envisaged that law and politicscould once again be grounded in the sacralising pursuit of moral per-fection, with all of life’s offices finding their point of unity in the meta-physical recovery of their transcendent intellection.

If these rival intellectual cultures were not destined for reconciliationin Kant’s discovery of ‘the subject’ – or in a ‘history’ tracing the dialec-tical patterns of such a discovery – then we must look elsewhere for theterrain on which they clashed. We find this in a cluster of religious, polit-ical, legal, and cultural institutions housed in the early modern GermanEmpire and the territorial sovereign states which were emerging from itsshell. For our immediate concerns, the early modern university plays thekey role here. It was responsible for articulating the rival cultures to thereligious, juridical and political institutions of Empire and state, through

Preface xi






the manner in which it formed particular intellectual elites. At the verycentre of this nexus, we find the competing anthropologies and cos-mologies of civil and metaphysical philosophy; for the personae theycultivated were those suited to the moral callings of a particular institu-tional array, even as the profound differences between their modes ofcultivation bear witness to the deeply divergent ways in which they envis-aged this institutional world.

Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy thus sought to complete the desacralisa-tion of civil governance by transforming the pedagogies through whichyoung Protestant intellectuals – jurists in particular – acquired theirsense of self and relation to the world. His Epicurean anthropology wasdesigned to form civil intellectuals who would confine the pursuit ofmoral truth to a private domain, while placing their political rights andexpertise at the disposal of a sovereign who governed without regard forsuch truth. Conversely, Leibniz’s (Platonic) metaphysical anthropologyenvisaged a person whose self-perfecting ascent to the domain of tran-scendent concepts (‘perfections’) qualified them to exercise an integralmoral–civil authority, in the persona of the sage–prince. In other words,if early modern civil and metaphysical philosophy were not conflictingtheories destined to be reconciled and superseded in Kant’s discovery ofthe transcendental conditions of subjectivity, that is because they wereindependent rival intellectual cultures. Each represented a programmefor reconfiguring the relations between religious and civil governance inits own way, through the ‘ascetic’ fashioning of the personages it deemedsuited to the world it envisaged. Rather than reconciling and supersed-ing these conflicting cultures, Kantian philosophy may be regarded asan extension of the metaphysical one – offering its own ‘critical’ versionof the ascent to the domain of transcendent perfections.

In recasting the topography of early modern German intellectualhistory in this way, this book does not of course pretend completeness.It is rather a sketch of an alternative kind of historical intelligibility forthe period, an essay in reinterpretation and redescription. TheIntroduction offers further clarification of our points of departure fromexisting accounts, while the two chapters of Part provide overviews ofthe available ways of approaching Schulmetaphysik and civil philosophy.In Part we offer detailed reconstructions of the major civil philoso-phers, Pufendorf and Thomasius, and their metaphysical rivals, Leibnizand Kant. Here of course we are not referring to personal rivalrybetween the philosophers – although that perspective partially applies tothe relationship between Pufendorf and Leibniz – but to the cultural

xii Preface






rivalry between the philosophical styles they personified. In exploringthis rivalry through the work of some of its central protagonists, ouressay takes an interdisciplinary form, centred in intellectual and philo-sophical history, but drawing on the history of politics, jurisprudence,and theology, with excursions into the history of religion and church law.Although this essayistic strategy might bring discomfort to specialists inthese fields, no disrespect for their work is intended. On the contrary, inbringing their several domains together, in order to refashion a part ofintellectual history too long under the domination of a particular view-point, I pay homage to them. Should this book be regarded as seeing anyfurther than those it challenges, that would be due to the stature of theworks on whose shoulders it stands.

Preface xiii






Acknowledgements

Thanks to the award of a Queen Elizabeth II research fellowship, I havebeen able to devote four years’ undistracted labour to the research andwriting of this book. I therefore gratefully acknowledge the generoussupport of the Australian Research Council, without which such a long,intensive, and single-minded project would have been difficult to con-template and impossible to complete in a reasonable period of time. Iam also pleased to acknowledge the continuing support of GriffithUniversity’s School of Humanities, where I have worked for so long andso happily, and to thank the staff of the University’s Inter-Library Loanservice for their tireless searching after obscure volumes. My final insti-tutional appreciation is for the hospitality of the English Department ofJohns Hopkins University, where I spent an enjoyable and productivesemester in the spring of .

During the writing of this work many colleagues were interestedor kind enough to discuss its contents and read sections for me. I haveprobably not mentioned all of them if I offer my thanks in this regardto Tony Bennett, Natalie Brender, John Frow, Stephen Gaukroger,Wayne Hudson, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Mautner, Alec McHoul, DouglasMagendanz, David Owen, and Dugald Williamson. I am also indebtedto Dieter Freundlieb, who offered me both philosophical conversationand linguistic expertise, when my grasp of seventeenth-century Germanreached its limits. During my visit to Johns Hopkins I was fortunateenough to share the company and conversation of William Connollyand Jane Bennett, enjoying their hospitality and insights in equalmeasure. At that time I was also fortunate in meeting John Pocock,enjoying one of his seminars on Edward Gibbon and later a conversa-tion on the ‘varieties of Enlightenment’, both memorable occasions forme. Among the colleagues with whom I have worked closely, I owespecial thanks to Denise Meredyth and to Jeffrey Minson and BarryHindess, both of whom have read several chapters, responding with

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unfailingly helpful commentary and advice. Finally in this regard I takespecial pleasure in tallying the debt of gratitude owed to my colleagueand friend of many years, David Saunders. He has been a constant dis-cussant throughout the development of this project, providing unerringguidance on everything from basic intellectual premises to the transla-tion of early modern academic Latin.

In addition to these friends and colleagues, I owe thanks to severalscholars whom I first encountered through their published works, butwho were kind enough to offer advice and encouragement to an acade-mic stranger. In addition to all I have learned from their writings, JamesTully and Knud Haakonssen have been very helpful in allowing me tosee the project from the perspective of the international community ofscholars working on similar issues. I owe a similar debt of thanks toHorst Dreitzel, who went out of his way to provide me with extensiveand bracing commentary on the Thomasius and Kant chapters, and toJerome Schneewind, with whom I had several memorable discussions inthe northern spring of , even if these resulted in both of us realis-ing how differently we approached the question of Kant. Finally, during, I was fortunate in meeting several scholars who have recently com-pleted doctorates or books on topics closely associated with the subjectof this book. Although the revision process has not permitted me to takefull advantage of it, I should nonetheless like to record my appreciationfor the work of Thomas Ahnert, Robert von Friedeburg, Frank Grunert,Timothy Hochstrasser, Michael Seidler, and Peter Schröder.

Needless to say, few, if any, of these colleagues and friends agreed witheverything they encountered in my arguments, and none of them isresponsible for the errors that remain in this book, which are all my owndoing.

Acknowledgements xv






Abbreviations and texts used

KANT

Except for the Critique of Pure Reason, for which I use the standard A and B pag-ination of the first and second editions, all references to Kant are to KantsGesammelte Schriften, edited by the German (formerly the Royal Prussian)Academy of Sciences in twenty-nine volumes (Walter de Gruyter, –). Inreferencing Kant’s texts I have adopted the convention of first citing the rel-evant passage in the Akademie edition, by volume and page number, pairingthis with the relevant reference to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of ImmanuelKant. I have adjusted the Cambridge translations wherever this seemed nec-essary. Abbreviations of the relevant volume titles from the Cambridge Editionfollow.

CPR Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, .

LE Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, .

LM Lectures on Metaphysics, ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

PP Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, .

RRT Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George DiGiovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

TP Theoretical Philosophy –, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

LEIBNIZ

CP Confessio Philosophi/Das Glaubensbekenntnis des Philosophen. (KritischeAusgabe mit Einleitung, Ubersetzung, Kommentar von Otto Saame.)nd edn. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, .

DM Discourse on Metaphysics, in Lm, pp. –.Ge C. I. Gerhardt (ed.) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm

Leibniz. vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

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Gr Gaston Grua (ed.) G. W. Leibniz: Textes Inédits. vols. Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, .

Gu G. E. Guhrauer (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Deutsche Schriften. edn, vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

Lm Leroy E. Loemker (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers andLetters. nd edn. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, .

Mo The Monadology, in Lm, pp. –.PW Political Writings, ed. Patrick Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, .Th Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of

Evil, ed. Austin Farrer. La Salle: Open Court, .TS Theologisches System/Systema Theologicum, ed. C. Haas. Hildesheim:

Georg Olms,

PUFENDORF

DJN De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo/On The Law of Nature and of Nationsin Eight Books. Trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather. Oxford:Clarendon Press, .

DOH De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo/On the Duty ofMan and Citizen According to Natural Law. Trans. Michael Silverthorne,ed. James Tully. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

DHR De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem/Of the Nature andQualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. London: Roper andBosvile, .

DSH De Statu Hominum Naturali/Samuel Pufendorf ’s On the Natural State of Men,the Latin Edition and English Translation, ed. Michael Seidler.Lewiston N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, .

GW Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Berlin: AkademieVerlag, –.

THOMASIUS

ADS Auserlesene deutsche Schriften (Selected German Writings, vols.). AW, vols.‒.

ASL Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics). Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .AW Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Werner Schneiders. Hildesheim: Georg Olms,

–EHP Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie (Introduction to Court Philosophy). AW, vol. .ESL Einleitung zur Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics). AW, vol. .FJN Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium ex sensu communi deducta, /

Grundlehren des Natur- und Völker-Rechts, nach dem sinnlichen Begriff allerMenschen vorgestellet (Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations, Deducedfrom Common Sense). Halle: Rengerischer Buchhandlung, .

IJD Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae, / Drey Bücher der Göttlichen

List of abbreviations and texts used xvii






Rechtsgelahrtheit (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence). Halle: RengerischerBuchhandlung, .

KPK Kurzer Entwurf der politischen Klugheit, sich selbst und andern in allen men-schlichen Gesellschaften wohl zu Raten und zu einer gescheiten Conduite zu gelan-gen (Brief Outline of Political Prudence, for the good counsel and sensible conductof oneself and others in all human societies, ). Frankfurt am Main:Athenäum, .

KTS Kleine Teutsche Schriften (Shorter German Writings). AW, vol. .PD Preliminary Dissertation (to the Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae), in IJD,

pp. –.RFM Vom Recht evangelischer Fürsten in Mitteldingen oder Kirchenzeremonien (Of the

Right of Protestant Princes in Middle-Things/Adiaphora or Religious Ceremonies,), in ADS, AW, vol. , pp. –.

RFS Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (The Right ofProtestant Princes in Theological Controversies). Halle: Christoph SalfeldVerlag, .

SEG Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem Studioso Iuris zu wissen undauf Universitäten zu Lernen nötig sind (Summary Outline of the Basic DoctrinesNecessary for a Student of Law to Know and Learn in the Universities, ).Aalen: Scientia Verlag, .

VG Vorrede (Foreword to Grotius), in Hugo Grotius: De Jure Belli ac Pacis LibriTres/Drei Bücher vom Recht des Krieges und des Friedens Paris , ed. WalterSchätzel. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, , pp. –.

VKR Vollständige Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit oder GründlicheAbhandlung vom Verhältniß der Religion gegen den Staat (Complete Explanationof the Jurisprudence of Church Law or Fundamental Treatise on the Relation ofReligion to the State), nd edn. . Aalen: Scientia Verlag, .

WOLFF

GE Vernünftige Gedanken von der Menschen Tun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrerGlückseeligkeit (German Ethics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint,Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

GL Vernünftige Gedanken von den Kräften des menschlichen Verstandes (German Logic), ed. H. W Arndt. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

GM Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allenDingen überhaupt (German Metaphysics ), ed. C. A. Corr. Reprint,Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

GP Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und inson-derheit dem gemeinen Wesen (German Politics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint,Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

VRW Von den Regenten die sich der Weltweisheit befleistigen, und von den Weltweisen diedas Regiment führen (On Princes who Cultivate Philosophy, and Philosophers whoDirect Government), in Gesammelte Kleine Philosophische Schriften .Hildesheim: Georg Olms, , pp. –.

xviii List of abbreviations and texts used






Note on conventions

The word economics is spelled in two different ways: ‘oeconomics’ indi-cates the early modern discipline concerned with household manage-ment, while the standard spelling ‘economics’ is used for more generalreference.

Where bracketed interpolations occur in quoted text, round bracketsindicate the original author’s or translator’s interpolations, square brack-ets indicate mine.

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