Materialism in the mainstream of early German philosophy

ABSTRACT

Discussions of the reception of materialist thought in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century tend to focus, naturally enough, upon the homegrown freethinkers who advanced the cause of Lucretius, Hobbes, and Spinoza in clandestine publications and frequently courted the ire of the state for doing so. If the philosophers belonging to the mainstream of German intellectual life in that period are accorded a place in the story, it is only insofar as they actively set themselves against the materialist threat and, in the course of working to undermine it, actually only succeeded in inadvertently drawing more popular attention to it. By contrast, in this paper I will show that it was not just insofar as the thinkers of the early eighteenth century played the role of the diligent critic and unwittingly propagated the views of their opponents that materialism can be said to have penetrated into the very mainstream of the German Enlightenment. Rather, as I will argue, there was a striking degree of uptake of distinctively materialist claims even among its most vociferous mainstream critics, and that this is the case for thinkers in both the Wolffian and the Thomasian traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Materialism
• Pietism
• Wolff
• Meier
• psychology
• soul
• spirit
• Thomasian

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Falk Wunderlich, Paola Rumore, Paolo Pecere, and two anonymous referees for the Journal for their various contributions to improving this paper.

Notes

¹For discussion of these texts, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 634–5, and Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 180–2, respectively.

²For the availability of these texts, see Wolff, Christian Wolffs eigene Lebensbeschreibung, 141–2.

³On this, see Wilson, ‘Leibniz and Materialism', especially 496–502.

⁴A variety of possible interpretations are helpfully catalogued in Lodge (‘Leibniz's Mill Argument Against Mechanical Materialism Revisited').

⁵Wilson (‘Leibniz and Materialism') supplements Leibniz's argument in this way, though see Duncan (‘Leibniz's Mill Arguments Against Materialism') for some alternatives.

⁶For more details on Wolff's account of consciousness (and self-consciousness), see Wunderlich, Kant und die Bewusstseinstheorien, 18–31, and Thiel, The Early Modern Subject, 304–11.

⁷Wolff of course also disputes that there is some way in which the materialist can account for self-consciousness (like that involved in the perception of the unity of the subject) since as we have seen he takes all self-consciousness to be derived from consciousness.

⁸As Leibniz explains in a letter to Arnauld (Oct. 9, 1687), ‘[o]ne thing expresses another, in my usage, when there is a constant and regular relation between what can be said about one and about the other', where expression understood as such is ‘common to all the forms and is a genus of which natural perception, animal feeling, and intellectual knowledge are species' (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 339).

⁹For a discussion of the significance of this argument for rational psychology up to and including Kant, see Dyck, Kant and Rational Psychology, 113ff.

¹⁰Knutzen likely has Bayle in mind who, in note E in the entry Leucippus, claims that ‘if each atom had a soul and feeling, we could understand how collections of atoms might constitute a composite being capable of certain particular modifications, both with regard to sensations and knowledge and with regard to motion' (Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, 129).

¹¹As Thiel suggests, Meier seems to be influenced by Locke on this score (Thiel, The Early Modern Subject, 325).

¹²For presentations of these criticisms see Lange, Bescheidene und ausführliche Entdeckung, 177–80; Lange, Hundert und dreyßig Fragen, 8–9.

¹³On this point compare Watkins who notes that Crusius ‘denies that mind and matter are radically distinct, since they both have the power to move (in fact, necessarily) as part of their general essence' (Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, 91).

¹⁴See Pecere, ‘Monadology, Materialism and Newtonian Forces', for a similar claim.