Materialism in late Enlightenment Germany: a neglected tradition reconsidered

ABSTRACT

Late Enlightenment German materialism has hardly attracted any scholarly attention in the past, in spite of the fact that there were quite a few exponents of it. In this paper, I identify the philosophically most important ones and examine to what extent they were connected with each other. In fact, there are local concentrations of materialists at universities and academic circles in Göttingen, Halle, and Gießen. I then discuss the spectrum of materialist positions held by them, from empiricist naturalism in the case of Michael Hißmann to emergentism and Spinozism in the case of Karl von Knoblauch. Finally, I examine how German materialists conceived of the nature of soul and its immortality. It turns out that most of them were mortalists, with the exception of August Wilhelm Hupel, and some of them also endorsed Socinianism.

KEYWORDS:

• German enlightenment
• materialism
• Spinozism
• soul
• mortalism

Notes

¹This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant WU 695/1-1. I wish to thank DFG for their generous funding, as well as two anonymous referees for the British Journal for their helpful comments.

²Detailed studies by Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund, and Schröder, Spinoza in der deutschen Frühaufklärung, Ursprünge des Atheismus, have concentrated on early Enlightenment materialism. Exceptions concerning late Enlightenment are a few older works published in the 1960s (Stiehler, Bei-träge zur Geschichte des vormarxistischen Materialismus, Finger, Von der Materialität der Seele, Gulyga, Der deutsche Materialismus am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts), and more recently Mass, ‘Französische Materialisten und deutsche “Freygeisterei”’, Thiel, ‘Varieties of Inner Sense', and Rumore, Materia cogitans. Cf. also Klemme, Stiening and Wunderlich, Michael Hißmann (1752–1784).

³Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart. Krauss (Studien zur deutschen und französischen Aufklärung, 455) explicitly denies the existence of a strong materialist tradition in Germany before the end of the eighteenth century. It is also telling how materialism is represented in the recent Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: whereas the volumes on English and French philosophy include systematic discussions of materialism (Berman, ‘Die Debatte über die Seele’, Mensching et al., ‘Der Materialismus und die Natur des Menschen’), the volume on Germany has only five references to materialism in the entire work, according to the index (Holzhey and Mudroch, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1650). Four of these references deal with critics of materialism and only one with an actual materialist, Michael Hißmann.

⁴Marino (Praeceptores Germaniae, 251) mentions this notion critically; cf. also Thoma, ‘Matérialisme’, 771–772, and Bönig, ‘Spazier, Johann Gottlieb Karl’, 1105.

⁵A distinction G.F. Meier has introduced is particularly helpful here: he distinguishes between ‘psychological materialism’ that is restricted to finite spirits and ‘cosmological materialism' that denies any immaterial substance in the world (Metaphysik, vol. 1, 142).

⁶Cf. the intellectual biography by Jürjo (Aufklärung im Baltikum).

⁷For a more detailed account of Hupel, cf. Wunderlich, ‘The “subtle” materialism of August Wilhelm Hupel'.

⁸Cf. Schmitt, Melchior Adam Weikard, 39–46; on Weikard in general see also Finger, Von der Materialität der Seele, 52–68.

⁹‘ …  but where these simultaneous impressions excited at multiple locations in our nervous system terminate: whether in one or in multiple fibres, or whether they converge in one inseparable particle of a fibre, my inner feeling does not indicate anything to me’ (Meiners, Vermischte philosophische Schriften, 25).

¹⁰On this, cf. Spazier, Carl Pilger's Roman seines Lebens, vol. 3, 285–6, and Mulsow, ‘Karl von Knoblauch und Georg Friedrich Werner als Materialisten. Eine Gießen-Dillenburger Konstellation’, 92.

¹¹Schulz, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Sittenlehre für alle Menschen, cf. Menk (‘Johann Heinrich Schulz') for a recent account of his work; Kemme, Beurtheilung eines Beweises vor die Immaterialität der Seele aus der Medicin.

¹²Einsiedel writes about a letter recently received from Hißmann in a letter to Herder from 1 January 1783 (Düntzer and Herder, Von und an Herder, vol. 2, 377–8).

¹³Mulsow (‘Karl von Knoblauch und Georg Friedrich Werner als Materialisten. Eine Gießen-Dillenburger Konstellation’) gives a detailed account of the Gießen connections, in particular about Knoblauch and Werner, cf. also McKenzie-McHarg, ‘Überlegungen zur Radikalaufklärung am Beispiel von Carl Friedrich Bahrdt'. Knoblauch, ‘Ueber körperliche und unkörperliche Substanz', for example, praises Werner's Aetiologie (1792).

¹⁴Mentioned in a letter from Knoblauch to Jakob Mauvillon, 14 June 1792 (Mauvillon, Mauvillons Briefe, 217).

¹⁵Examples of an empiricist grounding would be Hobbes’ insistence that all mental content is caused by the sense organs (Leviathan, 6–7), or Priestley's Lockean substance agnosticism (e.g. Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 26). At the same time, this does not prevent Priestley, for instance, from extensive discussions of metaphysical issues such as the nature of God. There are also more ambitious materialist metaphysicians such as Baron d'Holbach, cf. in particular the first 13 chapters of his Système de la nature (vol. 1, 1–342).

¹⁶Hißmann, Briefe über Gegenstände der Philosophie, an Leserinnen und Leser, 43; on this aspect, cf. also Thiel, ‘Hißmann und der Materialismus’. Almost the same wording can be found in Meiners’ Revision der Philosophie that was in many ways programmatic for Göttingen philosophy, although he does not elaborate on materialist themes here (Revision der Philosophie, 206).

¹⁷There is hardly a philosopher whom Hißmann praises more than Locke (Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 93–6, 270, e.g.).

¹⁸‘All proofs of the possibility of immaterial, spiritual beings are insufficient, as much as it is impossible to prove the contrary, since we have no experiential idea of spirits.’ (Hißmann, Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 262)

¹⁹Cf. Thiel, ‘Varieties of Inner Sense. Two Pre-Kantian Theories'. Hißmann argues that the proponents of the feeling of self, though allegedly grounding their theories on reflection, were biased in favour of immaterial souls: ‘They studied themselves; but with an unexpected partisanship that is normally avoided when the natural history of other beings is studied. They searched, they observed; but always with the desire to find something specific’ (Hißmann, Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 247).

²⁰Hißmann does not mention this coincidence with La Mettrie.

²¹Hißmann, Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 247. He frequently emphasizes that proper philosophical psychology directly depends on medicine and physiology, cf. Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 22; Anleitung zur Kenntniß der auserlesenen Litteratur in allen Theilen der Philosophie, 150.

²²Cf. ‘Whether the power of thought could originate from simple, non-thinking elements cannot be answered without having recourse to experience. Who knows the very peculiar kind of matter the brain is composed of?’ (Hißmann, Psychologische Versuche, ein Beytrag zur esoterischen Logik, 276).

²³This is a very common argument among the materialists, cf. Hupel, Anmerkungen und Zweifel über die gewöhnlichen Lehrsätze vom Wesen der menschlichen und der thierischen Seele, 281–2, Spazier, Anti-Phädon, oder Prüfung einiger Hauptbeweise für die Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, 54–56, Knoblauch, Die Nachtwachen des Einsiedlers zu Athos, 38.

²⁴In one of the few references to Spinoza, Hißmann (Briefe über Gegenstände der Philosophie, an Leserinnen und Leser, 37) maintains that his system has a weak foundation despite the appreciation for its proof structure.

²⁵The main source for early modern emergentism is Anthony Collins, who develops such a theory in his exchange with Samuel Clarke (published in Clarke, The Works of Samuel Clarke, vol. 3, 719–913).

²⁶Cf. Broad (The Mind and its Place in Nature, 43–94) as the most comprehensive version of classical British emergentism; on the development of it cf. MacLaughlin, ‘Emergence and Supervenience', and Stephan, Emergenz.

²⁷Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 359. Knoblauch's reading of Kant is problematic, to say the least, since he only refers to a rather speculative passage from the paralogism chapter that cannot be read in isolation from its broader context. How Knoblauch understood Kant in general is a complex issue that cannot be dealt with here in a satisfactory manner.

²⁸‘As much as it is impossible to deny the infinity of matter because of its divisibility, it is impossible to deny that it belongs to the essence of God on these grounds. In the same way, one cannot deny matter the capacity of thought on the grounds that it has extension and composition (divisibility)’ (Knoblauch, ‘Ueber das Denken der Materie', 189–90).

²⁹There is not enough space here to discuss Knoblauch's relation to Spinoza in more detail, but see Nadler (Spinoza's Ethics, 146–9) for a discussion of potential materialist resources in Spinoza.

³⁰In the Nachtwachen (1790, 37–47), Knoblauch is even bolder in his rejection of any kind of afterlife and argues, for instance, that death is not an evil at all but rather a dreamless sleep we never awake from.

³¹An example of the first version is Hobbes (Leviathan, 6–11), whereas Priestley more often seems to put forward less ambitious, causal claims (e.g. Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas, XX).

³²This presumed heterogeneity is the basis of, for instance, Leibniz’ mill argument in section 17 of the Monadology (Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 6, 609). On the mill argument, see, for example, Duncan, ‘Leibniz's Mill Arguments Against Materialism'.

³³‘Everything in the universe is linked not only by resemblance but also by effect; nothing is isolated, nothing is superfluous, all things are interwoven; even the smallest substance is a cause and contains the ground of numerous effects that are necessarily based on the first arrangement’ (Hupel, Anmerkungen und Zweifel über die gewöhnlichen Lehrsätze vom Wesen der menschlichen und der thierischen Seele, 30; cf. also 80–125).

³⁴Spazier, Anti-Phädon, oder Prüfung einiger Hauptbeweise für die Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, 90; he is not entirely consistent on whether the material soul is immortal by its own nature or by grace, as Section 4 will show. The notion of subtle matter is based on the contemporary physics of imponderables that explained phenomena such as electricity, heat, and light by specific subtle, imponderable kinds of matter. Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler in his widely used Physikalisches Wörterbuch for instance calls the ether ‘a subtle matter that is distributed through space and the intermediate spaces within the bodies’ (vol. 1, 83). Imponderable matter was thus available as a well-founded explanatory resource to materialist metaphysics.

³⁵This reading of Locke has been controversial but seems to be the one given preference now, cf. Wood, ‘On Grounding Superadded Properties in Locke'.

³⁶See Hupel (Anmerkungen und Zweifel über die gewöhnlichen Lehrsätze vom Wesen der menschlichen und der thierischen Seele, 202–10) for his further discussion of weak emergentism. Selle also provides an exhaustive discussion of emergentism (Philosophische Gespräche, vol. 2, 196–223).

³⁷Cf. in particular Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 97–134, and Dempsey, ‘A Compound Wholly Mortal'; concerning early German Enlightenment cf. Salatowsky, Die Philosophie der Sozinianer.

³⁸In fact this is a more complex issue since also some opponents of mortalism such as Calvin argued that the soul is not immortal as such but due to divine grace, cf. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton, 12.