History of Modern Philosophy The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy byFalckenberg, Richard
After a demand for the union of Leibnitz and Locke, of rationalism and
empiricism, had been raised within the Wolffian school itself, and still
more directly in the camp of its opponents, under the increasing influence
of the empirical philosophy of England,[1] eclecticism in the spirit of
Thomasius took full possession of the stage in the Illumination period.
There was the less hesitation in combining principles derived from entirely
different postulates without regard to their systematic connection, as
the interest in scholastic investigation gave place more and more to the
interest in practical and reassuring results. Metaphysics, noëtics, and
natural philosophy were laid aside as useless subtleties, and, as in the
period succeeding Aristotle, man as an individual and whatever directly
relates to his welfare--the constitution of his inner nature, his duties,
the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God--became the exclusive
subjects of reflection. The fact that, besides ethics and religion,
psychology was chosen as a favorite field, is in complete harmony with the
general temper of an age for which self-observation and the enjoyment of
tender and elevated feelings in long, delightfully friendly letters and
sentimental diaries had become a favorite habit. Hand in hand with this
narrowing of the content of philosophy went a change in the form of
presentation. As thinkers now addressed themselves to all cultivated
people, intelligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites;
the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and
often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers
proper--who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i. p. 563), did not
seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and
desired only to disseminate it; who did not aim at the promotion of
investigation, but the instruction of the public--but to a certain extent,
also, of those who were conscious of laboring in the service of science.
Among the representatives of the more polite tendency belong, Moses
Mendelssohn[2] (1729-86); Thomas Abbt (On Death for the Fatherland 1761;
On Merit 1765); J.J. Engel (The philosopher for the World 1775); G.S.
Steinbart (The Christian Doctrine of Happiness 1778); Ernst Platner
(Philosophical Aphorisms 1776, 1782; on Platner cf. M. Heinze, 1880);
G.C. Lichtenberg (died 1799; Miscellaneous Writings 1800 seq; a
selection is given in Reclam's Bibliothek; Christian Garve (died 1798;
Essays 1792 seq.; Translations from the Ethical Works of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Ferguson; and Friedrich Nicolai[3] (died 1811). Eberhard,
Feder, and Meiners will be mentioned later among the opponents of the
Kantian philosophy.
[Footnote 1: The influence of the English philosophers on the German
philosophy of the eighteenth century is discussed by Gustav Zart, 1881.]
[Footnote 2: Mendelssohn: Letters on the Sensations 1755; On Evidence
in the Metaphysical Sciences a prize essay crowned by the Academy, 1764;
Phaedo, or on Immortality 1767; Jerusalem 1783; Morning Hours, or on
the Existence of God 1785; To the Friends of Lessing(against Jacobi),
1786; Works 1843-44. Cf. on Mendelssohn, Kayserling, 1856, 1862, 1883.]
[Footnote 3: Nicolai: Library of Belles Lettres from 1757; Letters on
the Most Recent German Literature from 1759; Universal German Library
from 1765; New Universal German Library 1793-1805.]
Among the psychologists J.N. Tetens, whose Philosophical Essays on Human
Nature 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1]
takes the first rank. The two thinkers evidently influenced each other. The
three fold division of the activities of the soul, "knowing, feeling,
and willing," which has now become popular and which appears to us
self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in
opposition to the twofold division of Aristotle and Wolff into "cognition
and appetition," he established the equal rights of the faculty of
feeling--which had previously been defended by Sulzer (1751), the aesthetic
writer, and by Mendelssohn (1755, 1763, 1785). Besides Tetens, the
following should be mentioned among the psychologists: Tetens's opponent,
Johann Lossius (1775), an adherent of Bonnet; D. Tiedemann (Inquiries
concerning Man from 1777), who was estimable also as a historian of
philosophy (Spirit of Speculative Philosophy 1791-97); Von Irwing
(1772 seq; 2d ed., 1777); and K. Ph. Moriz (Magazin zur
Erfahrungsseelenlehre from 1785). Basedow (died 1790), Campe (died 1818),
and J.H. Pestalozzi (1745-1827) did valuable work in pedagogics.
[Footnote 1: Sensation gives the content, and the understanding
spontaneously produces the form, of knowledge. The only objectivity of
knowledge which we can attain consists in the subjective necessity of the
forms of thought or the ideas of relation. Perception enables us to cognize
phenomena only, not the true essence of things and of ourselves, etc.]
One of the clearest and most acute minds among the philosophers of the
Illumination was the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus[1] (1694-1768), from
1728 professor in Hamburg. He attacks atheism, in whatever form it may
present itself, with as much zeal and conviction as he shows in breaking
down the belief in revelation by his inexorable criticism (in his
Defense communicated in manuscript to a few friends only). He obtains
his weapons for this double battle from the Wolffian philosophy. The
existence of an extramundane deity is proved by the purposive arrangement
of the world, especially of organisms, which aims at the good--not merely
of man, as the majority of the physico-theologists have believed, but--of
all living creatures. To believe in a special revelation, i.e. a
miracle, in addition to such a revelation of God as this, which is granted
to all men, and is alone necessary to salvation, is to deny the perfection
of God, and to do violence to the immutability of his providence. To these
general considerations against the credibility of positive revelation
are to be added, as special arguments against the Jewish and Christian
revelations, the untrustworthiness of human testimony in general, the
contradictions in the biblical writings, the uncertainty of their meaning,
and the moral character of the persons regarded as messengers of God, whose
teachings, precepts, and deeds in no wise correspond to their high mission.
Jewish history is a "tissue of sheer follies, shameful deeds, deceptions,
and cruelties, the chief motives of which were self-interest and lust for
power." The New Testament is also the work of man; all talk of divine
inspiration, an idle delusion, the resurrection of Christ, a fabrication of
the disciples; and the Protestant system, with its dogmas of the Trinity,
the fall of man, original sin, the incarnation, vicarious atonement, and
eternal punishment, contrary to reason. The advance of Reimarus beyond
Wolff consists in the consistent application of the criteria for the divine
character of revelation, which Wolff had set up without making a positive,
not to speak of a negative, use of them. His weakness[2] consists in the
fact that, on the one hand, he contented himself with a rationalistic
interpretation of the biblical narratives, instead of pushing on--as Semler
did after him at Halle (1725-91)--to a historical criticism of the sources,
and, on the other, held fast to the alternative common to all the deists,
"Either divine or human, either an actual event or a fabrication," without
any suspicion of that great intermediate region of religious myth, of the
involuntary and pregnant inventions of the popular fancy.
[Footnote 1: H.S. Reimarus: Discussions on the Chief Truths of Natural
Religion 1754; General Consideration of the Instincts of Animals 1762;
Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshipers of God Fragments of the
last of these works, which was kept secret during its author's life, were
published by Lessing (the well-known "Wolffenbüttel Fragments," from
1774). A detailed table of contents is to be found in Reimarus und seine
Schutzschrift 1862, by D. Fr. Strauss, included in the fifth volume of
his Gesammelte Schriften]
[Footnote 2: Cf. O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion vol. i. p. 102,
p. 106 seq]
The philosophico-religious standpoint of G.E. Lessing (1729-81), in whom
the Illumination reached its best fruitage, was less one-sided. Apart from
the important aesthetic impulses which flowed from the Laocoon(1766) and
the Hamburg Dramaturgy(1767-69), his philosophical significance rests
on two ideas, which have had important consequences for the religious
conceptions of the nineteenth century: the speculative interpretation of
certain dogmas (the Trinity, etc.), and the application of the Leibnitzian
idea of development to the history of the positive religions. By both of
these he prepared the way for Hegel. In regard to his relation to his
predecessors, Lessing sought to mediate between the pantheism of Spinoza
and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter
showed himself far superior to the Wolffians. He can be called a Spinozist
only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone
who expresses himself against a transcendent, personal God, and the
unconditional freedom of the will. Moreover, in view of his critical and
dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard
against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.[1]
[Footnote 1: A caution which Gideon Spicker (Lessings Weltanschauung
1883) counsels us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of
determinism, "I thank God that I must, and that I must the best." Among the
numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G.E. Schwarz (1854), and
Zeller (in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift 1870, incorporated in the
second collection of Zeller's Vorträge und Abhandlungen 1877); and on
his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing's Nathan der
Weise 1864, as well as J.H. Witte's Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen
vol. i. (Lessing and Herder, 1880. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877,
and Encyclopedia Britannica vol. xiv. pp, 478-482.--TR.]]
Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-comprehensive, living
unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a
certain kind of change; without life and action, without the experience of
changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome. Things are
not out of, but in him; nevertheless (as "contingent") they are distinct
from him. The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent
distinctions. God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold
manner: he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he
conceived them as single. Now God's thinking is creation, his ideas
actualities. By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal
image, the Son of God; the bond between God representing and God
represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit. But when he
conceived his perfections singly he created the world, in which these
manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of particular beings.
Every individual is an isolated divine perfection; the things in the world
are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature,
though in different degrees. Development is everywhere; at present the soul
has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in
the future it will have more. At first the actions of men were guided by
obscure instinct; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will,
and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct
cognitions. Thus freedom is attained in the course of history--the rational
and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he
who is unfree obeys unconsciously.
Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of
reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality; but he
rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not
as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive
religions as necessary transition stages in its attainment. As natural
religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers,
without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in
religious matters. Nevertheless the statutory and historical element is
not a graft from without, but a shell organically grown around natural
religion, indispensable for its development, and to be removed but
gradually and by layers--when the inclosed kernel has become ripe and firm.
The history of religions is an education of the human race through divine
revelation so teaches his small but thoughtful treatise of 1780.[1] As
the education of the individual man puts nothing extraneous into him, but
only gives him more quickly and easily that which he could have reached of
himself, so human reason is illuminated by revelation concerning things
to which it could have itself attained, only that without God's help the
process would have been longer and more difficult--perhaps it would have
wandered about for many millions of years in the errors of polytheism, if
God had not been pleased by a single stroke (his revelation to Moses) to
give it a better direction. And as the teacher does not impart everything
to the pupil at once, but considers the state of development reached by him
at each given period, so God in his revelation observes a certain order and
measure. To the rude Jewish people he revealed himself first as a national
God, as the God of their fathers; they had to wait for the Persians to
teach them that the God whom they had hitherto worshiped as the most
powerful among other gods was the only one. Although this lowest stage in
the development of religion lacked the belief in immortality, yet it must
not be lightly valued; let us acknowledge that it was an heroic obedience
for men to observe the laws of God simply because they are the laws of God,
and not because of temporal or future rewards! The first practical teacher
of immortality was Christ; with him the second age of religion begins: the
first good book of elementary instruction, the Old Testament, from which
man had hitherto learned, was followed by the second, better one, the New
Testament. As we now can dispense with the first primer in regard to the
doctrine of the unity of God, and as we gradually begin to be able to
dispense with the second in regard to the doctrine of the immortality of
the soul, so this New Testament may easily contain still further truths,
which for the present we wonder at as revelations, until the reason shall
learn to derive them from other truths already established. Lessing himself
makes an attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the dogmas of the
Trinity (see above), of original sin, and of atonement. Such an advance
from faith to knowledge, such a development of revealed truths into proved
truths of reason, is absolutely necessary. We cannot dispense with the
truths of revelation, but we must not remain content with simply believing
them, but must endeavor to comprehend them; for they have been revealed in
order that they may become rational. They are, as it were, the sum which
the teacher of arithmetic tells his pupils beforehand so that they
may guide themselves by it; but if they content themselves with this
solution--which was given merely as a guide--they would never learn to
calculate. Hand in hand with the advance of the understanding goes the
progress of the will. Future recompenses, which the New Testament promises
as rewards of virtue, are means of education, and will gradually fall into
disuse: in the highest stage, the stage of purity of heart, virtue will
be loved and practiced for its own sake, and no longer for the sake of
heavenly rewards. Slowly but surely, along devious paths which are yet
salutary, we are being led toward that great goal. It will surely come, the
time of consummation, when man will do the good because it is good, this
time of the new, eternal Gospel, this third age, this "Christianity of
reason." Continue, Eternal Providence, thine imperceptible march; let me
not despair of thee because it is imperceptible, not even when to me thy
steps seem to lead backward. It is not true that the straight line is
always the shortest.
[Footnote 1: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlects]
With the thought that every individual must traverse the same course as
that by which the race attains its perfection, Lessing connects the idea
of the transmigration of souls. Why may not the individual man have been
present in this world more than once? Is this hypothesis so ridiculous
because it is the oldest?
If Lessing abandoned the ranks of the deists by his recognition of the
fact that the positive religions contain truth in a gradual process of
purification, by his free criticism, on the other hand, he broke with
the orthodox, whose idolatrous reverence for the Bible was to him an
abomination. The letter is not the spirit, the Bible is not religion, nor
yet its foundation, but only its records. Contingent historical truths can
never serve as a proof of the necessary truths of reason. Christianity is
older than the New Testament.
Already, in the case of Lessing, we may doubt, in view of his historical
temper and of certain speculative tendencies, whether he is to be included
among the Illuminati. In the case of Kant a decided protest must be
raised against such a classification. When Hegel numbers him among the
philosophers of the Illumination, on account of his lack of rational
intuition, and some theologians on account of his religious rationalism,
the answer to the former is that Kant did not lack the speculative gift,
but only that it was surpassed by his gift of reflection, and, to the
latter, that in regard to the positive element in religion he judged very
differently from the deists and appreciated the historical element more
justly than they--if not to the same extent as Lessing and Herder. We
do not need to lay great stress on the fact that Kant had a lively
consciousness that he was making a contribution to thought, and that the
Illumination contemplated this new doctrine without comprehending it, in
order to recognize that the difference between his efforts and achievements
and those of the Illumination is far greater than their kinship. For
although Kant is upon common ground with it, in so far as he adheres to its
motto, "Have courage to use thine own understanding, become a man, cease
to trust thyself to the guidance of others, and free thyself in all fields
from the yoke of authority," and, although besides such formal injunctions
to freedom of thought, he also shares in certain material tendencies and
convictions (the turning from the world to man, the attempt at a synthesis
of reason and experience, and the belief in a religion of reason); yet in
method and results, he stands like a giant among a race of dwarfs, like one
instructed, who judges from principles, among men of opinion, who merely
stick results together, a methodical systematizer among well-meaning but
impotent eclectics. The philosophy of the Illumination is related to
that of Kant as argument to science, as halting mediation to principiant
resolution, as patchwork to creation out of full resources, yet at the same
time as wish to deed and as negative preparation to positive achievement.
It was undeniably of great value to the Kantian criticism that the
Illumination had created a point of intersection for the various tendencies
of thought, and had brought about the approximation and mutual contact of
the opposing systems which then existed, while, at the same time, it had
crumbled them to pieces, and thus awakened the need for a new, more firmly
and more deeply founded system.