Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Ideas in Context)

RIVAL ENLIGHTENMENTS: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany IAN HUNTER

Cambridge University Press

R I VA L ENL I GH TEN MENT S Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

Rival Enlightenments is a major reinterpretaton of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralisation. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideia, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant’s supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This landmark study reveals for the first time in English the extraordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralised territorial states. The book argues that the marginalisation of civil philosophy in postKantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike.   is Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education () and Rethinking the School (), as well as numerous articles dealing with the historical conditions and roles of moral and political thought.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

    Edited by Q S (General Editor), L  D , D  R, and J T 

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims, and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

RIVAL ENLIGHTENMENTS Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

IAN HUNTER

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org © Ian Hunter 2001 This edition © Ian Hunter 2003 First published in printed format 2001

A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 79265 7 hardback

ISBN 0 511 01358 2 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

Contents

page ix xiv xvi xix

Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations and texts used Note on conventions



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

vii

    

viii 

Contents 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

     

  

Preface

The prime objective of this work is to reinstate a marginalised intellectual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern Germany. Although the civil philosophy of Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius is not unknown in the modern humanities academy, sympathetic treatment of their work is largely confined to the history of political philosophy, jurisprudence, and theology. To the extent that they feature in intellectual history and the history of philosophy more broadly, however, they appear as superseded figures, destined to be absorbed by the great oscillations between rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism which would reach their culminating reconciliation in the epochal philosophy of Immanuel Kant. We shall see that this reigning dialectical historiography is itself the offshoot of a second, rival intellectual movement, centred in the culture of university metaphysics. In order to recover early modern civil philosophy, therefore, it has proved necessary to criticise and reject a dialectical historiography designed to erase its historical existence and political significance. In place of this reconciliatory history, this book offers an account of two independent intellectual cultures – the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil and metaphysical philosophy – which remain unreconciled today. Retrieving civil philosophy from the all-assimilating, all-unifying mill of dialectical philosophical history is no straightforward task. For, by drawing its impetus from the arranged mutual deficiencies of opposed viewpoints, this historiography gives shape not just to history but also to the historian. It treats history as the medium in which the unreconciled dimensions of human subjectivity move towards their harmonisation, in the final recovery of the a priori conditions of experience and morality – the moment of Kant’s critical philosophy. Under these intellectual conditions, the historian views the past in terms of the unreconciled oppositions – between rationalism and voluntarism, intellectualism and empiricism – and finds his or her own ethical impulse in the need to ix

x

Preface

repeat the moment of their Kantian reconciliation. This is the moment in which human subjectivity’s imagined journey towards self-knowledge terminates, with the recovery of the cognitive and moral laws responsible for the organisation of subjectivity itself. Considering that it was Kant himself who first viewed the history of philosophy in these terms, dialectical philosophical history is uniquely suited to demonstrating the epochal significance of Kantian philosophy, and may indeed be regarded as a sub-species of that philosophy. By showing that Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy did not in fact undergo this dialectical assimilation – by uncovering its independent cultural basis and autonomous political viewpoint – this book departs fundamentally from the post-Kantian intelligibility of early modern intellectual history. Many readers will no doubt find the intellectual terrain to be traversed unfamiliar and potentially hostile. The moral world in which Pufendorf and Thomasius lived was not the one whose laws Kant recovered. Further, the forms of personhood they cultivated were not ones governed by the norms of ‘pure practical reason’. Their world had its own moral cosmology, unlike the quasi-Platonic one that organised Kant’s cosmos, yet one whose ‘Epicurean’ bleakness was suited to a Europe still dealing with the aftermath of a period of protracted religious warfare. Similarly, their sense of self was shaped by a ‘pessimistic’ moral anthropology far removed from Christian–Platonic pursuit of pure rational being that drove metaphysical philosophy from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond. In sketching the relation between civil and metaphysical philosophy in these terms – in treating the worlds they envisaged and the persons they posited as grounded in free-standing rival anthropologies and cosmologies – we begin to measure the distance to be travelled from post-Kantian conceptions of a unified ‘humanity’ or ‘reason’. In recasting the landscape of early modern intellectual history into these unreconciled and unfamiliar shapes, I have drawn on two main intellectual instruments. Firstly, and fundamentally, I have drawn on a particular approach to the history of philosophy. This is one which focuses on the ‘ascetic’ or self-transformative work that certain philosophies require their adherents to perform on themselves, only then addressing the objects of knowledge to which they promise access. This approach holds the key to retrieving civil philosophy from its dialectical assimilation, and to placing civil and metaphysical philosophy on the same historical footing – as rival alternative modes of philosophical cultivation. It does so principally by treating their different anthropologies

Preface

xi

and cosmologies not in terms of the self they uncover or the cosmos they reveal, but in terms of the self they seek to shape for a world they envisage. The objective of this approach is not to explain the philosophies by reducing them to a different order of reality – to the structures of society or the forms of subjectivity – but to redescribe the operations of the philosophical discourses themselves, treating them as autonomous and irreducible ‘spiritual exercises’. Secondly, I have made use of a particular view of the political and religious history of early modern Germany. This is a view that focuses on the role of confessionalisation in precipitating the Thirty Years War (–); the role of the ‘deconfessionalising’ or ‘desacralising’ of politics in ending this war; and the central role of ‘political law’ (Staatsrecht, jus publicum) and its jurisprudence in this process of deconfessionalisation. I argue that the post-Westphalian ‘intellectual civil war’ between metaphysical and civil philosophy – first encountered in Leibniz’s unrestrained attack on Pufendorf ’s natural law doctrine – is properly understood as a clash between rival ways of responding to this profound historical process. Responding positively to the uncoupling of civil and religious governance, Pufendorf developed a doctrine of natural law in which the exercise of political power (the ‘civil kingdom’) was segregated from the sphere of life in which the pursuit of moral perfection took place (the ‘kingdom of truth’). He thus sought to reconstruct moral philosophy by replacing the unified moral personality with a plurality of personae suited to the diverse ‘offices’ – religious and civil, private and public, ecclesiastical and political – of citizens in desacralised states. Leibniz, however, responded to the post-Westphalian separation of politics and religious morality by seeking their reconciliation at a higher level, through metaphysics. Here it was envisaged that law and politics could once again be grounded in the sacralising pursuit of moral perfection, with all of life’s offices finding their point of unity in the metaphysical recovery of their transcendent intellection. If these rival intellectual cultures were not destined for reconciliation in Kant’s discovery of ‘the subject’ – or in a ‘history’ tracing the dialectical patterns of such a discovery – then we must look elsewhere for the terrain on which they clashed. We find this in a cluster of religious, political, legal, and cultural institutions housed in the early modern German Empire and the territorial sovereign states which were emerging from its shell. For our immediate concerns, the early modern university plays the key role here. It was responsible for articulating the rival cultures to the religious, juridical and political institutions of Empire and state, through

xii

Preface

the manner in which it formed particular intellectual elites. At the very centre of this nexus, we find the competing anthropologies and cosmologies of civil and metaphysical philosophy; for the personae they cultivated were those suited to the moral callings of a particular institutional array, even as the profound differences between their modes of cultivation bear witness to the deeply divergent ways in which they envisaged this institutional world. Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy thus sought to complete the desacralisation of civil governance by transforming the pedagogies through which young Protestant intellectuals – jurists in particular – acquired their sense of self and relation to the world. His Epicurean anthropology was designed to form civil intellectuals who would confine the pursuit of moral truth to a private domain, while placing their political rights and expertise at the disposal of a sovereign who governed without regard for such truth. Conversely, Leibniz’s (Platonic) metaphysical anthropology envisaged a person whose self-perfecting ascent to the domain of transcendent concepts (‘perfections’) qualified them to exercise an integral moral–civil authority, in the persona of the sage–prince. In other words, if early modern civil and metaphysical philosophy were not conflicting theories destined to be reconciled and superseded in Kant’s discovery of the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, that is because they were independent rival intellectual cultures. Each represented a programme for reconfiguring the relations between religious and civil governance in its own way, through the ‘ascetic’ fashioning of the personages it deemed suited to the world it envisaged. Rather than reconciling and superseding these conflicting cultures, Kantian philosophy may be regarded as an extension of the metaphysical one – offering its own ‘critical’ version of the ascent to the domain of transcendent perfections. In recasting the topography of early modern German intellectual history in this way, this book does not of course pretend completeness. It is rather a sketch of an alternative kind of historical intelligibility for the period, an essay in reinterpretation and redescription. The Introduction offers further clarification of our points of departure from existing accounts, while the two chapters of Part  provide overviews of the available ways of approaching Schulmetaphysik and civil philosophy. In Part  we offer detailed reconstructions of the major civil philosophers, Pufendorf and Thomasius, and their metaphysical rivals, Leibniz and Kant. Here of course we are not referring to personal rivalry between the philosophers – although that perspective partially applies to the relationship between Pufendorf and Leibniz – but to the cultural

Preface

xiii

rivalry between the philosophical styles they personified. In exploring this rivalry through the work of some of its central protagonists, our essay takes an interdisciplinary form, centred in intellectual and philosophical 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 in these fields, no disrespect for their work is intended. On the contrary, in bringing their several domains together, in order to refashion a part of intellectual history too long under the domination of a particular viewpoint, I pay homage to them. Should this book be regarded as seeing any further than those it challenges, that would be due to the stature of the works on whose shoulders it stands.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the award of a Queen Elizabeth II research fellowship, I have been able to devote four years’ undistracted labour to the research and writing of this book. I therefore gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Australian Research Council, without which such a long, intensive, and single-minded project would have been difficult to contemplate and impossible to complete in a reasonable period of time. I am also pleased to acknowledge the continuing support of Griffith University’s School of Humanities, where I have worked for so long and so happily, and to thank the staff of the University’s Inter-Library Loan service for their tireless searching after obscure volumes. My final institutional appreciation is for the hospitality of the English Department of Johns Hopkins University, where I spent an enjoyable and productive semester in the spring of . During the writing of this work many colleagues were interested or kind enough to discuss its contents and read sections for me. I have probably not mentioned all of them if I offer my thanks in this regard to Tony Bennett, Natalie Brender, John Frow, Stephen Gaukroger, Wayne Hudson, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Mautner, Alec McHoul, Douglas Magendanz, David Owen, and Dugald Williamson. I am also indebted to Dieter Freundlieb, who offered me both philosophical conversation and linguistic expertise, when my grasp of seventeenth-century German reached its limits. During my visit to Johns Hopkins I was fortunate enough to share the company and conversation of William Connolly and Jane Bennett, enjoying their hospitality and insights in equal measure. At that time I was also fortunate in meeting John Pocock, enjoying one of his seminars on Edward Gibbon and later a conversation on the ‘varieties of Enlightenment’, both memorable occasions for me. Among the colleagues with whom I have worked closely, I owe special thanks to Denise Meredyth and to Jeffrey Minson and Barry Hindess, both of whom have read several chapters, responding with xiv

Acknowledgements

xv

unfailingly helpful commentary and advice. Finally in this regard I take special pleasure in tallying the debt of gratitude owed to my colleague and friend of many years, David Saunders. He has been a constant discussant throughout the development of this project, providing unerring guidance on everything from basic intellectual premises to the translation of early modern academic Latin. In addition to these friends and colleagues, I owe thanks to several scholars whom I first encountered through their published works, but who were kind enough to offer advice and encouragement to an academic stranger. In addition to all I have learned from their writings, James Tully and Knud Haakonssen have been very helpful in allowing me to see the project from the perspective of the international community of scholars working on similar issues. I owe a similar debt of thanks to Horst Dreitzel, who went out of his way to provide me with extensive and bracing commentary on the Thomasius and Kant chapters, and to Jerome Schneewind, with whom I had several memorable discussions in the northern spring of , even if these resulted in both of us realising how differently we approached the question of Kant. Finally, during , I was fortunate in meeting several scholars who have recently completed doctorates or books on topics closely associated with the subject of this book. Although the revision process has not permitted me to take full advantage of it, I should nonetheless like to record my appreciation for 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 with everything they encountered in my arguments, and none of them is responsible for the errors that remain in this book, which are all my own doing.

Abbreviations and texts used

KANT Except for the Critique of Pure Reason, for which I use the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions, all references to Kant are to Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the German (formerly the Royal Prussian) Academy of Sciences in twenty-nine volumes (Walter de Gruyter, –). In referencing Kant’s texts I have adopted the convention of first citing the relevant passage in the Akademie edition, by volume and page number, pairing this with the relevant reference to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. I have adjusted the Cambridge translations wherever this seemed necessary. Abbreviations of the relevant volume titles from the Cambridge Edition follow. CPR LE LM PP RRT TP

Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Lectures on Metaphysics, ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Theoretical Philosophy –, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . LEIBNIZ

CP DM Ge

Confessio Philosophi/Das Glaubensbekenntnis des Philosophen. (Kritische Ausgabe mit Einleitung, Ubersetzung, Kommentar von Otto Saame.) nd edn. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, . Discourse on Metaphysics, in Lm, pp. –. C. I. Gerhardt (ed.) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.  vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . xvi

List of abbreviations and texts used Gr Gu Lm Mo PW Th TS

xvii

Gaston Grua (ed.) G. W. Leibniz: Textes Inédits.  vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, . G. E. Guhrauer (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Deutsche Schriften.  edn,  vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Leroy E. Loemker (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. nd edn. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, . The Monadology, in Lm, pp. –. Political Writings, ed. Patrick Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer. La Salle: Open Court, . Theologisches System/Systema Theologicum, ed. C. Haas. Hildesheim: Georg Olms,  PUFENDORF

DJN DOH DHR DSH GW

De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo/On The Law of Nature and of Nations in Eight Books. Trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo/On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Trans. Michael Silverthorne, ed. James Tully. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem/Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. London: Roper and Bosvile, . 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, . Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, –. THOMASIUS

ADS ASL AW EHP ESL FJN

IJD

Auserlesene deutsche Schriften (Selected German Writings,  vols.). AW, vols. ‒. Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics). Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Werner Schneiders. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, – Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie (Introduction to Court Philosophy). AW, vol. . Einleitung zur Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics). AW, vol. . Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium ex sensu communi deducta, / Grundlehren des Natur- und Völker-Rechts, nach dem sinnlichen Begriff aller Menschen vorgestellet (Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations, Deduced from Common Sense). Halle: Rengerischer Buchhandlung, . Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae, / Drey Bücher der Göttlichen

xviii

KPK

KTS PD RFM RFS SEG

VG VKR

List of abbreviations and texts used Rechtsgelahrtheit (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence). Halle: Rengerischer Buchhandlung, . Kurzer Entwurf der politischen Klugheit, sich selbst und andern in allen menschlichen Gesellschaften wohl zu Raten und zu einer gescheiten Conduite zu gelangen (Brief Outline of Political Prudence, for the good counsel and sensible conduct of oneself and others in all human societies, ). Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, . Kleine Teutsche Schriften (Shorter German Writings). AW, vol. . Preliminary Dissertation (to the Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae), in IJD, pp. –. 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. –. Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (The Right of Protestant Princes in Theological Controversies). Halle: Christoph Salfeld Verlag, . Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem Studioso Iuris zu wissen und auf Universitäten zu Lernen nötig sind (Summary Outline of the Basic Doctrines Necessary for a Student of Law to Know and Learn in the Universities, ). Aalen: Scientia Verlag, . Vorrede (Foreword to Grotius), in Hugo Grotius: De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres/Drei Bücher vom Recht des Krieges und des Friedens Paris , ed. Walter Schätzel. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, , pp. –. Vollständige Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit oder Gründliche Abhandlung vom Verhältniß der Religion gegen den Staat (Complete Explanation of the Jurisprudence of Church Law or Fundamental Treatise on the Relation of Religion to the State), nd edn. . Aalen: Scientia Verlag, . WOLFF

GE GL GM GP VRW

Vernünftige Gedanken von der Menschen Tun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrer Glückseeligkeit (German Ethics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Vernünftige Gedanken von den Kräften des menschlichen Verstandes (German Logic ), ed. H. W Arndt. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (German Metaphysics ), ed. C. A. Corr. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (German Politics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, . Von den Regenten die sich der Weltweisheit befleistigen, und von den Weltweisen die das Regiment führen (On Princes who Cultivate Philosophy, and Philosophers who Direct Government), in Gesammelte Kleine Philosophische Schriften . Hildesheim: Georg Olms, , pp. –.

Note on conventions

The word economics is spelled in two different ways: ‘oeconomics’ indicates the early modern discipline concerned with household management, while the standard spelling ‘economics’ is used for more general reference. Where bracketed interpolations occur in quoted text, round brackets indicate the original author’s or translator’s interpolations, square brackets indicate mine.

xix

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Introduction

I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with some remarks on metaphysics as a kind of magic . . . For, when once I began to speak of the ‘world’ (and not of this tree or table), what did I wish if not to conjure something of the higher order into my words . . . Of course, here the elimination of magic itself has the character of magic. Work in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one asks of it.) Ludwig Wittgenstein

Despite the recognition of different national, cultural, and religious enlightenments, and regardless of recurrent doubts about the utility of the concept itself, a dominant form of intellectual history remains committed to the reality of a single process or project of Enlightenment, even if this is something that has to be synthesised from diverse intellectual expressions, institutional settings, and historical locales. Horst Stuke offers a classic instance of this historiography in his Begriffsgeschichte of Aufklärung, written for that great encyclopedia of German conceptual history, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuke ). Despite his illuminating sketch of a variety of different forms of enlightenment – ranging from the Pietists’ doctrine of spiritual rebirth to the Wolffian conception of conceptual self-clarification – Stuke’s history is one of the progressive unification and conceptualisation of these ‘programmatic’ enlightenments. The key stages on the way are Kant’s ‘formalisation’ of the concept of Aufklärung – which treats it as human reason’s recovery of its own intellectual and moral laws – and Hegel’s dialectical historicisation of the concept, which allows reason’s self-clarification to occur in time, 



Introduction

as the transcending reconciliation of a series of fundamental historical oppositions. Not the least remarkable aspect of Stuke’s discussion is the manner in which it transforms the retrospective unification of early modern enlightenments into a methodological and theoretical imperative. For Begriffsgeschichte regards dialectical reconciliation and conceptual formalisation as the condition of human reason’s own historical selfclarification – the latest episode of which is in fact Stuke’s article. If, however, we wished to recover the early modern enlightenments in their full programmatic diversity – and were we to contend that two of the most important forms of enlightenment remain as unreconciled today as they did in early modernity – then our discussion would have to move in the opposite direction to Stuke’s. We would have to strip the Kantian formalisation and Hegelian reconciliation of Aufklärung from our historical imaginations, and plunge into the turbulence of bitterly opposed programmes for the cultivation of human reason. Norbert Hinske also presumes the existence of a single Enlightenment, arguing that the German Aufklärung was unified by a small number of ‘fundamental ideas’. According to Hinske, the fundamental character of these ideas means that they arose not from an historical ethos or mythos, an ideology or faith – and not from the theological, pedagogical, jurisprudential, and political disciplines in which they occasionally found expression – but from the ‘work of thought’ itself: philosophy (Hinske , ). This philosophical Aufklärung, Hinske argues, is characterised by three programmatic ideas. First is the idea of Aufklärung itself which, despite its varied formulations, is rooted in the doctrine of intellectual clarification – the recovery of the concepts underlying historical experience. This doctrine was formulated by Descartes and Leibniz, systematised by Wolff, and then given its definitive ‘critical’ form by Kant. Next comes a group of concepts – eclecticism, thinking for oneself, and maturity (Eklektik, Selbstdenken, Mündigkeit) – which finds its unity in the fact that those possessing enlightened intellects make their own judgments, thereby restricting the tutelage of the state to the provision of external security. Finally, there is the notion of perfectibility which, despite its several uses in various reform agendas, found its original expression in the Leibniz–Wolff doctrine of intellectual and moral perfection, and its final form in Kant’s conception of the never-ending pursuit of intellectual and moral purity. Hinske concludes his explication of a philosophically unified Aufklärung by arguing that its basic ideas

Introduction



‘are not simply a result of the great technical discoveries and improvements of modernity, or a mere consequence of the economic, social, political or religious changes, even if presumably the division of the confessions in Germany, with their irreconcilable controversies, contributed not a little to their articulation’ (Hinske , ). Instead, all of the programmatic ideas are grounded in a single basic idea, the idea of a universal anthropology – the end or destiny of man (Bestimmung des Menschen) – which, in its turn, is identified with a universal human reason. From this notion of human being as rational being – the notion of a reason that is self-grounding and self-acting in all spheres of life – Hinske derives what he regards as the fundamental rights and duties of a rational society: the right to publish one’s thoughts (Öffentlichkeit, pressfreedom), and the duty to respect the judgments of others (liberality, tolerance). Hinske’s conception of a philosophical Aufklärung certainly finds an historical correlate in the s’ debate over ‘What is Enlightenment?’, which had been sparked by articles in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, and selections from which have been republished by Hinske and James Schmidt (Hinske ; J. Schmidt a). But this correlation arises because only the philosophical contributions to this debate are now treated as significant, allowing the contributions of jurists and statesmen to drop from historical sight. The central doctrine of F. H. Jacobi’s intervention – that political and moral freedom have a common grounding in man’s spontaneous intellectual being – is typical of the philosophical essays, especially those by Kant, Reinhold, Tieftrunk, and Bergk. The conclusions that Jacobi draws from this doctrine are also broadly representative: ‘Where there is a high degree of political freedom in fact, not just in appearance, there must be no less a degree of moral freedom present. Both are grounded exclusively in the rational nature of man, and their power and effect is thus to make men ever more human, ever more capable of self-government, of ruling their passions, of being happy and without fear’ (Jacobi , ). No less significant in this regard is Jacobi’s Kantian affirmation that human reason and morality are realised through freely self-imposed laws. His adherence to Kantian autonomy means that Jacobi regards ‘externally’ prescribed laws – laws formulated by jurists and statesmen – as intrinsically corrupting of humanity. Displaying an uncanny gift for rewriting history in accordance with the Kantian spirit of his times, he asserts that it was not law and the state that put an end to the destructive wars of religion but ‘the ceaseless striving of reason’ (). Finally, in concluding his defence of



Introduction

society as a self-regulating organism of individual rights and duties, Jacobi pays a back-handed compliment to the monstrous mechanical states designed by Machiavelli and Hobbes; for they at least honestly show the political consequences of viewing man as a creature of passions requiring external juridical and political governance. The success of this rewriting of history can be measured not just in Hinske’s assumption of an anti-statist philosophical Aufklärung, but also in James Schmidt’s comment that Jacobi’s essay should be interpreted as part of a ‘liberal’ critique of enlightened absolutism ( J. Schmidt b, ). So well had the Kantian philosophers of the s done their work – burying all signs of the role of law and state in achieving a liberal settlement to the religious civil wars – that their descendants of the s no longer have to bother with any other enlightenment. It is, however, just this success of the philosophical Aufklärung in rewriting history in its own image that makes it unsuited to understanding a different conception of enlightenment, one which had emerged a century earlier and had never gone away. Christian Thomasius’ Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae had been published in , with the German translation appearing in  under the title Drey Bücher der Göttlichen Rechtsgelahrtheit (Three Books of Divine Jurisprudence), which is the edition I have used. In his Foreword to this translation, ‘On the Obstacles to the Spread of Natural Jurisprudence’, Ephraim Gerhard was also convinced that he stood on the threshold of a new enlightened epoch; yet his conception of the source and direction of enlightenment differs markedly from that of the philosophers of the s and their modern descendants: ‘We live in a time when, over the last several years, things in the empire of scholarship have so altered, that from now onwards those who served in it a hundred years earlier would scarcely find their right way – so different is the shape that the sciences have assumed since then . . . I believe, though, that this kind of transformation is to be remarked not just in the zones of philosophy, as some like to imagine, but also and in fact principally in our jurisprudence’ (IJD, Fwd, § ). For Gerhard it is not philosophy – in the line that would run from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – that is responsible for enlightenment, but the rebirth of jurisprudence and natural law, which he ascribes to a different intellectual trio: ‘Certainly those possessing a somewhat enlightened understanding [aufgeklährtern Verstand] could only take pleasure in the lights which Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius and others have displayed for us through their industry; because through this the true ground of all laws has been revealed to us much more clearly

Introduction



than before’ (§ ). In fact, Gerhard regards philosophy as impeding the spread of the new jurisprudence through the universities and courtrooms of Germany; for the academic moral philosophers teach the discipline of natural law in such a subtle and abstract manner that it becomes all but useless for the affairs of the state and the needs of daily life (§§ –). This problem, Gerhard argues, is compounded by the university’s curricular and faculty structure. In compelling law students to study moral philosophy before beginning their legal studies, this structure leads many to misunderstand the specific nature of the law, bringing forth instead ‘either mere philosophical and abstractive chimeras or a mish-mash of moral philosophy, decorum, and even theological principles’ (§ ). Gerhard’s Foreword belongs to the genre of ‘histories of morality’. As Timothy Hochstrasser has shown, this genre was intended to support the spread of the new doctrines of natural law – those of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Thomasius – by making them central to overturning Protestant neoscholasticism (Hochstrasser ). In his own Preliminary Dissertation to the Institutiones – another instance of this genre – Thomasius spells out the enlightening role of jurisprudence and natural law in more detail than Gerhard and with greater élan. Treating his own enlightenment as symptomatic of the new path, Thomasius recalls that during his student years at the University of Leipzig his theology and philosophy professors – Valentin Alberti in particular – had attempted to keep him in the dark, teaching their own metaphysical version of natural law, and warning him off the works of Samuel Pufendorf, whom they branded an innovator and heretic. Thomasius read Pufendorf anyway, and his account of the effect this had on him is worth quoting in full: At that time I began to dispel some of the dark clouds which had previously obscured my understanding. Before then I had imagined that all things commonly defended by the theologians were purely and simply good theological matters, which an honorable man must by all means hold in respect, so that noone would brand him as a heretic or innovator, honorifics which then amounted to the same thing. After I had rightly considered how theology differs from philosophy though, and also read with greater care that which was written about politics and political law [Fürsten Recht] ( jus publicum), I learned to recognise that commonly all kinds of things were unanimously defended by the theologians which have nothing to do with theology, but belong in ethics or jurisprudence. But these things were commonly passed off as theology because the philosophers make do with the number of their eleven Aristotelian virtues and the jurists with their glossing. And the theologians – first in fact the Catholics and then our [Lutheran] ones – gave cause and opportunity [for this], because no-one took



Introduction

responsibility for claiming this noble area of wisdom, just as if a thing had no owner. [I also recognised] that the power and right of someone to declare another a heretic belonged to no private person – even if they were great and famous – but only to the prince. Finally [I saw] that an innovator is no heretic, and that this title, like the name heretic, had suffered great misuse. And I saw that through these propositions Pufendorf convinced his opponents, who had not the slightest hope of basing their victory on their false principles. I therefore began to hesitate and to hold the moral philosophy of the academics [Sittenlehre der Schul-lehrer] in contempt. (PD, §§ –, –)

Thomasius’ sketch of his ‘civil’ enlightenment makes two points which are in fact symptomatic of a fundamental parting of the ways in the academic culture of early modern Germany. In the first place, Thomasius records that through his reading of politics and political jurisprudence (Fürstenrecht, Staatsrecht, jus publicum) he discovered that theologians and Christian natural jurists were guilty of mixing theology and ‘philosophy’ – that is, revealed and natural knowledge. In mixing revealed biblical truths and the naturally known truths of jurisprudence, ethics, and politics, they obscured the autonomy of jurisprudence and intruded on intellectual domains that were none of their business. We shall see that Thomasius laid this miscegenation of revealed and natural knowledge squarely at the door of university metaphysics – a discipline offering philosophical explication of religious doctrine and transcendent foundations for philosophical concepts, to the detriment of both faith and knowledge. Next, says Thomasius, he realised that, in laying the charge of heresy, university theologians like Alberti were claiming to exercise civil power on the basis of their religious capacity. This was completely unacceptable to Pufendorfian natural law and Staatskirchenrecht (the political jurisprudence of church law). For Pufendorf holds that all civil power and right belong solely to the prince – that is, to the secular state – and may on no account be shared with or exercised on behalf of the church. In Thomasius’ case, therefore, the divergence between Schulphilosophie and the civil sciences was marked not just by intellectual differences, but by his sense of their mutually opposed roles in the cultural politics of early modern Germany. Through his reading of Pufendorf ’s natural law and political jurisprudence, Thomasius had come to a conclusion that would prove decisive for his whole intellectual outlook: namely, that the mixing of theology and philosophy in university metaphysics was complicit with the disastrous mixing of religious and civil authority in the confessional state (Döring b, ). For such neoscholastic opponents

Introduction



as Alberti, the synthesis of theology and the civil sciences (ethics, politics, jurisprudence) in university metaphysics provided the institutional–intellectual basis for the church’s participation in civil authority. For this made it possible to argue that political power should be exercised to defend the purity of the moral community as well as to guard the security of the civil community. Conversely, the radical separation of moral theology from politics and law in Pufendorfian natural law was premised on the intellectual and institutional destruction of Schulmetaphysik. Nothing less was required if religion was to be denied all competence in the civil domain – to be transformed into a matter of private faith rather than public knowledge – thereby allowing the state to emerge as a desacralised exercise of sovereign power, concerned exclusively with the security of the citizen. The jurisprudential or civil enlightenment of the s thus differs in almost every regard from the (Kantian) philosophical enlightenment of the s which, in the s, Hinske characterises in terms of its philosophical basis; its subjection of politics, law, and theology to universal reason; and its absorption of mythos and ethos into the universal anthropology of rational being. In the first place – once we have set aside the question-begging claim that all knowledge is philosophical in the sense of being based on transcendental concepts – it is clear that Thomasius’ enlightenment is not grounded in a new form of philosophy (Leibniz– Wolff–Kant) but in a new ‘civil science’. This science is Pufendorf ’s natural law, with its component sciences of political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht), political history, and statist sovereignty doctrine. As we shall see (.), Thomasius was familiar with the new rationalist metaphysics, particularly in its Cartesian and Wolffian forms. But he regarded the notion of intellectual enlightenment – through recovery of the pure forms of thought – as committing the same cardinal error as scholastic metaphysics: the mixing of theology and philosophy. For Thomasius, synthetic metaphysical reflection on the intellectual forms had been discredited by its use in the defence of rival confessional theologies. It had to be replaced by the differentiated (‘eclectic’) mastery of specific civil sciences. Next we can observe that while Thomasius may be regarded as an eclectic and Selbstdenker, his conception of intellectual independence is not based on a notion of the primacy of the individual’s universal reason over the specific ‘reasons of state’. On the contrary, Thomasius’ Epicurean anthropology and statist (Bodinian–Pufendorfian) conception of sovereignty mean that he regards individuals as incapable of



Introduction

rational self-governance and sees the state as governing on the basis of reasons irreducible to those held by private individuals. For Thomasius, the state finds its limits not in the absolute moral and intellectual judgments of free rational beings – judgments whose democratic expression it might one day become – but in the fact that it cultivates a systematic neutrality with regard to such judgments. Despite Jacobi’s claim that it was not law and state but ‘the ceaseless striving of reason’ that had created a sphere of religious toleration and moral freedom, Thomasius was acutely aware that this domain had indeed been constructed by the state. Moreover, he knew that the state had secured this domain only by declaring itself indifferent to the private moral strivings of its citizens, thereby expelling religion from the political sphere. This transformation of political culture demanded intellectual independence in the sense that it required jurists and politici to detach themselves from all those ‘sectarian’ philosophies that insisted on unifying morality and politics, church and state, within a single moral philosophy. Despite Hinske’s claims to the contrary, it thus becomes clear that Thomasius’ civil enlightenment was indeed wedded to a particular ethos – the ethos of a caste of confessionally neutral political jurists – and, moreover, that he was developing this ethos precisely to cope with the circumstances of confessional division and religious civil war. For Thomasius and Pufendorf, the period of confessional conflict was something quite other than a theatre of the intellect in which reason could display its transcendence of historical conditions and passions. It was instead a theatre of social warfare, fuelled in part by a reason whose passion for transcendence made its claims non-negotiable (Koselleck ). This meant that the forms of reasoning themselves had to be modified in order to meet the catastrophic historical circumstances in which they participated. This is what animated Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ attack on university metaphysics and drove their elaboration of a new intellectual ethos for jurists and statesmen. Finally, for this reason, Thomasius’ jurisprudential enlightenment is not based in a universal anthropology assimilable to a universal human reason – the notion of man as a rational being (Vernunftwesen). On the contrary, Thomasius vehemently rejects the doctrine that human being is rational or intelligible being, correctly identifying this doctrine as a scholastic improvisation on Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, and regarding it as wholly unsuited to modelling the intellectual deportment of jurists and statesmen. For many of today’s intellectual historians, the metaphysical doctrine of man as a free rational being – refurbished in

Introduction



Leibniz’s monadology, systematised in Wolff’s metaphysics, and passed on to us in the form of Kant’s conception of autonomous reason – lies close to the process and goal of history as such. They therefore overlook the degree to which this doctrine was both highly polemical and itself the object of historical contestation. So conscious was Thomasius, though, of the intellectualist ethos contained in this doctrine, that he made it the central focus of his attack on ‘sectarian philosophy’ or Schulmetaphysik. In fact a curricular programme-statement of  – the Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem Studioso Iuris zu wissen und auf Universitäten zu lernen nötig sind (Summary Outline of the Basic Doctrines Necessary for a Student of Law to Know and Learn in the Universities) – he explicitly warns his students against the intellectualist anthropology, itemising its central doctrines for elimination: Regarding the first principles of all or most sectarian philosophy: () That God and matter were two co-equal principles. () That God’s nature consists in thinking. () That man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happiness of the whole human race depends on the correct arrangement of thought. () That man is a single species and that what is good for one [person] is good for another. () That the will is improved through the understanding. () That it is within human capacity to live virtuously and happily. (SEG, –)

In other words, far from pointing towards a single German philosophical Aufklärung that would eventually subsume Thomasius himself, the intellectualist anthropology of early modern metaphysics was something that Thomasius targeted for elimination, as inimical to the civil enlightenment that he sought to bring to his students. This enlightenment required a quite different anthropology, the Epicurean image of man as a dangerous creature of his uncontrollable passions. This is the anthropology that Thomasius deemed necessary to model the self-restrained intellectual deportment of those charged with clearing the confessional minefields. In seeking to comprehend the historical autonomy and ethical dignity of civil philosophy – in proposing to treat it as the unreconciled cultural rival and alternative to an anti-political and anti-juridical metaphysical philosophy – this book must find its place in a complex field of works moving in a broadly similar direction. In the world of Anglophone scholarship, Richard Tuck was one of the first to call for a renewed attention to the ‘modern theory of natural law’ – Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf – in order to overcome its marginalisation and assimilation in postKantian philosophical history (Tuck ; Tuck a; Tuck b).



Introduction

This call has in part been answered by important surveys undertaken by Knud Haakonssen and J. B. Schneewind, and by the work of a new generation of scholars, including Timothy Hochstrasser, Thomas Ahnert, and Peter Schröder (Ahnert ; Haakonssen ; Hochstrasser ; Schneewind ; Schröder ). It has also been answered by some revealing specialist studies, such as Steven Lestition’s account of the teaching of jurisprudence and natural law at Königsberg during the eighteenth century. Lestition’s study is particularly germane to this book as it reaches for a broad heuristic concept capable of capturing the cultural and political significance of early modern natural and political jurisprudence, finding this in the notion of a ‘juristic civic consciousness’. This term, says Lestition, ‘will be understood to refer to the way in which important elements of the educated and governing classes of th and th century Germany were able to derive a highly developed intellectual orientation, professional or corporate identity, and set of norms for their social and political behaviour, self-representation and self-understanding from their training or work as learned “jurisconsulates”’ (Lestition , ). We have already glimpsed the broad outlines of this orientation and identity, in Thomasius’ demand for an intellectual ethos suited to the jurists and politici of the desacralised state. Lestition sources this notion to J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. Closely identified with the ‘Cambridge-school’ history of political thought, their work provides the context for Tuck’s reinstatement of ‘modern’ natural law, although Pocock and Skinner typically tie early modern civic consciousness to a non-juristic ‘political’ tradition of civic republicanism and civic virtue, rather than to ‘continental’ natural law (Pocock , –; Skinner ). Hence, while Skinner’s studies of Hobbes treat his natural law as developing a ‘civil science’ in opposition to incendiary confessional political theologies, they derive the secular– pacificatory character of this science from humanistic–rhetorical sources rather than political–jurisprudential ones (Skinner ; Skinner ). In this regard, Donald Kelley’s jurisprudential genealogy of an early modern civil philosophy – which focuses on the non-theological construction of civil life offered by Roman or civil law – may be regarded as a counterbalance to Skinner and Pocock’s stress on non-juristic civic humanism (Kelley ; Kelley ; Kelley ). Nonetheless, Pocock’s recent work on Edward Gibbon is suggestive of the ways in which the present work intersects with the Cambridge school’s approach. For Pocock treats Gibbon’s anti-Platonic, antienthusiast civil history of religion as indicative of a distinctively English-

Introduction



Protestant variant among the ‘diversities of Enlightenment’. This was a variant whose moderate Arminian theology grounded a strategy for limiting the civil power of the clergy in order to avert the catastrophe of religious civil war (Pocock ). Even closer to our present concerns is an earlier essay on the conditions of early modern religious toleration; for here Pocock sees the ‘desacralisation of politics’ arising from an alliance between ‘latitudinarian’ Protestantism and ‘Erastian’ politics, held together by their common rejection of political ‘enthusiasm’ and sacerdotalism (Pocock ). Finally in this vein, we may mention James Tully’s important introduction to his new edition of Pufendorf ’s De Officio and Richard Tuck’s study Philosophy and Government –, whose discussion of Grotius and Hobbes integrates the perspectives of civic humanism and natural law (Tuck a; Tully ). These works may be seen as signs of the degree to which the Cambridge school’s initial focus on the civic republican sources of a ‘civic consciousness’ is being expanded through attention to the role of jurisprudence and natural law. This book, however, is also indebted to a distinctively German recovery of an early modern civil philosophy and political thought, one in which the disciplines of natural and political law (Naturrecht, Staatsrecht) play a central role. Perhaps the leading and certainly the most controversial representative of this school is Carl Schmitt, whose work is significant for our present concerns in a number of regards. First Schmitt provides an important account of the historical significance of political or ‘public’ law – ‘European jus publicum’ – whose restriction of sovereignty to the purely worldly domination of a territory he regards as effecting a fundamental ‘detheologisation’ of politics (Schmitt , –). Next, his discussion of the ‘autonomising of politics’ undertaken by the early modern political jurists – their separation of the ‘security state’ from the spheres of morality and economy – offers a further pointer to the central difference between the civil and metaphysical enlightenments (Schmitt ). Finally, Schmitt’s work is also symptomatically significant, for the way in which it continues the ‘intellectual civil war’ between civil and metaphysical philosophy. Here, Schmitt deliberately targets post-Kantian ‘political Romanticism’ for its treatment of historical politics as the manifestation of transcendental–subjective categories, thereby reducing the contestation between political enemies to an a-political debate over the good life (Schmitt ). Similar themes reappear in the work of Schmitt’s former student, Reinhart Koselleck. Koselleck argues that the detheologisation of politics brought



Introduction

about by early modern natural law and political jurisprudence meant that the state developed a ‘reason’ for its existence – the preservation of social peace – that floated free of the moral reason of its theological and philosophical elite. He thus treats the advent of the Aufklärung as indicative of cultural and political ‘crisis’. This is a crisis in which the state’s focus on worldly security renders it incapable of claiming a broadly acceptable moral legitimacy, and in which the Enlightenment intelligentsia’s pursuit of moral perfection pushes it beyond the detheologised political sphere. From here arises the anti-political enclave politics of the Aufklärung, dedicated to the moral delegitimation of the state (Koselleck ). In its treatment of early modern ‘statist’ jurisprudence as an autonomous and indispensable cultural response to the catastrophe of religious civil war, and in its uncompromising rejection of all postKantian attempts to ‘resacralise’ politics by turning it into rational debate over the good, Schmitt’s and Koselleck’s work is an important precondition of the present book. Adding a distinctively French perspective to the history of natural and political law, Blandine Kriegel has argued the need to renew political history through a recovery of early modern doctrines of law and sovereignty, as the only ones capable of dealing with the reality of the state (Kriegel ). Drawing on French work on the history of political thought, including studies by Michel Foucault, François Furet, and Alain Besançon, Kriegel’s work contains a timely polemic. She argues against social theories of the political – theories whose sociological character is a thin disguise for their moral zeal – and in favour of grounding political thought in the history of political institutions: the institutions of administration, law, and sovereignty. Despite her apparent antipathy to Schmitt, Kriegel’s work intersects with his on several axes: first, in her insistence that the political-juristic (Bodinian) concept of territorial sovereignty is a modern doctrine, developed as a weapon against the church, the Empire, and the estates; next, in her argument that this concept can only be understood through early modern political jurisprudence itself, which permitted power to be juridified (secularised and historicised) and the law to be turned into the key form in which sovereign power was exercised; and finally in her vivid polemic against the German Romantics. Like Schmitt, Kriegel regards the Romantics’ antipolitical and anti-juridical conceptions of society – as united by love not law, and governed by the people not the state – as secularisations of religious mysticism and eschatology, leading to a divinisation and totalisation of the state. We have already glimpsed these proto-Romantic views in

Introduction



Jacobi’s claim that it was the ‘ceaseless striving of reason’ – rather than law and state – that put an end to religious civil war. Finally I should mention the work of a group of German historians of political, juridical, philosophical, and religious thought which, while not officially dedicated to the recovery of an early modern civil philosophy or civic consciousness, has nonetheless proved helpful to my own efforts in this regard. While I presume this group to be assembled more by the needs of this book than by any objective affiliation, their specialist studies can be brought into a productive relation to the more general theses of Schmitt, Koselleck, and Kriegel. Like Blandine Kriegel, Horst Dreitzel stresses the (early) modernity of seventeenth-century theories of ‘absolute sovereignty’. Far from being throwbacks to feudalism or the ancien régime, these theories, Dreitzel argues, responded to a distinctively early modern set of circumstances: the need to defend the emergence of the ‘princely territorial state’ against the Empire above and the estates below. Dreitzel’s emphasis however falls more on the politicisation of law than the juridification of politics, particularly in his ground-breaking study of neo-Aristotelian political science (Henning Arnisaeus) (Dreitzel ). Here, it is the ‘scientific’ objectification of politics that plays the key role in the desacralising and instrumentalising of sovereign power. Despite his tendency to understate the role of natural and political law in this process, Dreitzel’s essays on this theme represent a decisive challenge to Habermasian attempts to locate a socio-moral basis for politics, in the debating contests of middle-class Öffentlichkeit (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel b). There is no understatement of the juridical in the work of Martin Heckel, the leading historian of that particularly German discipline, Staatskirchenrecht, or the political jurisprudence of church law. In a series of indispensable studies, Heckel has argued that the secularisation of politics in early modern Germany was not the reflex expression of an epochal philosophical breakthrough or general rationalisation of society. Rather, it arose when, under the circumstances of religious civil war, Protestant jurists, working within the framework of the Imperial legal apparatus, developed a series of crucial political–legal doctrines. The most important of these were civil parity between the three main confessions; primacy of the secular prince in religious affairs; and indifference to religious and moral truth in political settlements to confessional conflicts (Heckel ; Heckel ). These doctrines – embodied in the Peace of Augsburg in  and reiterated more successfully in the Treaty of Westphalia in  – made worldly political power



Introduction

supreme in all matters pertaining to social peace. They nonetheless preserved a free space for transcendent religions and philosophies inside the envelope of civil security, which now lay beyond their moral and theoretical reach (Heckel ; Heckel ; Heckel ). Although he does not speak of a jurisprudential or civil enlightenment, Heckel’s work clearly suggests that the core ‘liberal’ rights of religious freedom and toleration did not arise from a rationalist philosophy of intellectual selfclarification and self-governance. They emerged instead from the juridical desacralisation of politics, carried out in the domain of positive Staatsrecht and subsequently surfacing in practical philosophy as the ‘modern theory of natural law’ – Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius. Something like this view seems to inform Christoph Link’s treatment of the right to religious freedom as a right created by the state’s political–jurisprudential pacification of society in the seventeenth century. According to Link, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century – when its origins had been actively repressed by Kantian theories of inalienable subjective rights – that religious freedom came to be seen as a right of ‘society’ or the individual against the state (Link ). In this light, Jacobi, Kant, and the other philosophers of the s appear less like intellectual architects of the desacralised liberal state and more like belated political theologians seeking this state’s resacralisation. Writing in a similar vein, Diethelm Klippel takes us back to our point of departure, arguing that the eighteenth century witnessed the overlapping of two kinds of natural law and two conceptions of enlightenment: one associated with Pufendorf and Thomasius which operated through the enlightenment (juridifying and secularising) of the prince or state; and the other associated with Kant which came to see state power itself as the problem, relocating enlightenment in individual reason and freedom (Klippel ). Significantly, and unusually, Klippel argues that both of these conceptions of enlightenment passed into the nineteenth century, which means that if we are to avoid suppressing one or the other of them we must give up the idea of a single German Aufklärung (Klippel ). Our initial sketch of a ‘civil enlightenment’ – pre-dating the philosophical Aufklärung by a century or more, and arising from sources quite other than the ‘work of thought’ – would therefore seem to find its moorings in a substantial body of historical work. Here, there is a significant consensus that a civil enlightenment – that is, the first moves to establish religious toleration, detheologise politics, separate civil society from religious community – emerged as a response to the devastation of religious civil war. Further, despite significant disagreement over the primacy

Introduction



of law or politics in the process, and notwithstanding some unresolved questions regarding the contribution of ‘moderate’ Protestantism, there is broad agreement that the desacralisation of politics was formulated through an ensemble of ‘civil sciences’ – ‘modern’ natural law, political law, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Stoic political sciences, civic republicanism – rather than through university metaphysics or moral philosophy. Finally, although we might lose some members of the Cambridge school at this point, there is some agreement that this civil enlightenment, with its ‘juristic civic consciousness’, was grounded in something quite other than the self-governing individual or the moral community: namely, in the measures by which early modern political jurists sought to put an end to religious civil war, by restricting the ends of the state to security. From this broad body of works and themes this book thus draws important pointers to the historical autonomy of early modern civil philosophy. From here we learn that the pacification of the war-torn German states, and the appearance of the first liberal freedoms, were not the result of a politics grounded in the ‘ceaseless striving of reason’ or the sheer ‘work of thought’. The state envisaged by Pufendorf and Thomasius was one that pursued external security through diplomacy and war, and internal security through the development of a novel and powerful double strategy. This strategy required the state’s indifference to the transcendent values of its constituent moral communities – an indifference they would experience as civil freedom – and its readiness to suppress all conduct threatening social peace, no matter what its source. In proposing to return the civil enlightenment to the centre of our historical concerns and civic imaginations – and in treating it as a culture autonomous of and rival to the metaphysical Aufklärung – this book will thus be centrally concerned with Pufendorf and Thomasius as inheritors of the political-juristic desacralisation of politics. Given the prima facie existence of such a civil enlightenment, documented and discussed in a sizeable and diverse secondary literature, we must now confront the striking fact that it either remains largely invisible in post-Kantian intellectual historiography, or else appears there in a scarcely recognisable form. This historiography remains transfixed by the image of a single philosophical Aufklärung whose unity is secured through Kant’s philosophy of the subject, and whose central characteristic is the normative extension of rationally self-governing subjecthood into all areas of ‘society’ – religious, moral, political. Clearly, a self-governing society grounded in reason would have little need for a political



Introduction

state grounded in security, which, according to post-Kantian antipolitics, should be left to ‘wither away’. There can be little doubt that this image of the progressive social expansion of philosophical reason dominates arguments for and against ‘the Enlightenment’ in the humanities academies of Europe and America, forming one of the chief reasons why, in Kriegel’s words, ‘the history of political institutions must continually fight uphill battles against hostile attitudes’ (Kriegel , ). In the Anglophone scholarly world this conception of a philosophical or metaphysical enlightenment has provided the framing principle for such standard works as Henry Allison’s Lessing and the Enlightenment and Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy – aptly subtitled Kant and His Predecessors (Allison ; Beck ). It continues to inform recent work composed in the register of American Kantianism, such as J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Schneewind ). In Germany, the immediate context for Hinske’s conception of a philosophical Aufklärung is provided by such scholars as Michael Albrecht, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Werner Schneiders, and others now grouped around the journal Aufklärung (Albrecht ; Schmidt-Biggemann a; Schmidt-Biggemann ; Schneiders ; Schneiders ). But this work leads back, via such early-twentieth-century neo-Kantians as Heinz Heimsoeth and Max Wundt, to their nineteenth-century predecessors Kuno Fischer and Karl Rosenkranz (Fischer –; Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth a; Rosenkranz ; Wundt ; Wundt ; Wundt ). From here it is a short step to the philosophical histories of Kant’s contemporaries – J. G. Buhle, W. G. Tennemann, and C. F. Stäudlin – which, as Hochstrasser has argued, were the first to erase civil philosophy from the historical map, replacing it with the Leibniz–Wolff–Kant canon (Hochstrasser , –). This is the line through which today’s post-Kantian intellectual history has inherited its characteristic conception of a philosophical Aufklärung: the notion of enlightenment as the transcendental selfclarification of an intellectual being whose recovery of spontaneous rational self-governance forms the basis of a free society under moral laws (Ritzel ). Given the evident conflict between this conception and the prima facie existence of a very different civil enlightenment – grounded in juridical pacification rather than metaphysical selfclarification, and in the sovereignty of a morally indifferent state rather than that of a morally self-governing people – post-Kantian intellectual history has adopted two strategies, those of exclusion and assimilation.

Introduction



In seeking to exclude civil philosophy from their story of ‘Enlightenment philosophy’, post-Kantian intellectual historians have argued that it belongs to the history of law and politics. Wundt thus classifies Pufendorf ’s work as ‘jurisprudence’ while Beck treats it as ‘politics’, both writers admitting the great natural jurist to their work only fleetingly, as the precursor of Thomasius, whose work they can more easily treat as philosophy (Wundt , –; Beck , –). The effect of this, of course, is retrospectively to transform the history of philosophy into the history of metaphysics. ‘Philosophy’ comes to signify the particular line of metaphysical philosophy that runs from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant, and from Kant through the Romantics and Hegel into modern metaphysics, dialectics, and ‘critical theory’. The problem with this strategy is that in early modern German universities what was to count as philosophia – typically translated as Weltweisheit – was itself a matter of explicit and bitter contestation. We have already seen Thomasius warning his students off the intellectualist anthropology of university metaphysics, on the grounds that its pursuit of transcendent rationality is wholly unsuited to the formation of those destined for legal and political careers. Conversely, we shall see that in defending the metaphysical conception of natural law – as the transcendent recovery of the pure concept of justice – Leibniz’s ‘philosophy of law’ is no less a polemical attempt to capture the terrain of philosophy than Thomasius’. For modern historians to describe the civil sciences and their enlightenment as non-philosophical – in order to preserve the unity of a philosophical Aufklärung – is thus itself both anachronistic and polemical, symptomatic in fact of the continuing struggle to capture and configure the terrain of philosophy. It is, however, the tactics of assimilation employed by post-Kantian intellectual and philosophical history that are of more immediate concern to us. There are three of these, the first and most important of which is the dialectical method itself. By positioning metaphysical and civil philosophy as mutually opposed and mutually deficient ‘theories’ – intellectualism versus empiricism, rationalism versus voluntarism – this method uproots the conflicting intellectual cultures from their historical circumstances, transforming them into subjective ‘ideas’, and preparing them for absorption into Kant’s discovery of the transcendental grounds of subjectivity. If this method is definitive of the classic studies by Wundt and Beck, then it remains powerfully present in the most recent historiography of the Aufklärung, particularly in the work of Werner Schneiders, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, and many of the writers associated with the journal Aufklärung.



Introduction

For Schneiders, it is Thomasius and Wolff who are the bearers of the opposed styles of philosophy. Treating him as the harbinger of German Bürgerphilosophie, Schneiders characterises Thomasius as developing an ethical and existential style of philosophy, by limiting philosophy to knowledge beneficial to man’s civil life, and by grounding it in a practical knowledge of the good rather than a speculative knowledge of the truth (Schneiders b, –; Schneiders , –). Wolff, on the other hand, is (not inaccurately) treated as renewing the scholastic metaphysical conception of philosophy – as the recovery of the intelligible forms underlying empirical things – which he modernises using Leibniz’s ‘Scotist’ construction of possibility in terms of non-contradictory concepts. Wolff thus treats merely ‘historical’ (empirical) knowledge as vulgar, while regarding philosophy as a rational science of ‘the possible as possible’ (Schneiders b, –; Schneiders , –). Again, the mutually deficient philosophies are destined for reconciliation, at first in the Popularphilosophen – who mix Thomasian civics and Wolffian metaphysics without transcending them – and then in Kant, who transcends the oppositions by turning history itself into the ground of rational possibility (Schneiders b, –). At first sight, SchmidtBiggemann’s version of this history would seem closer to our own; for he treats the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff and the Bürgerphilosophie of Thomasius as indicative of rival conceptions of Aufklärung, the one oriented to intellectual self-clarification, the other to social improvement (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –). Such is the power of the dialectical method, however, that Schmidt-Biggemann is forced to treat these philosophies as mutually deficient – the former failing to ground reason in history, the latter failing to ground historical reform in reason – pointing towards Kant’s reconciliatory conception of history as the arena for reason’s unfolding in time. If the first tactic of assimilation thus involves converting civil philosophy into a subjective theory destined for absorption by the Kantian dialectic, then the second involves the deployment of an epochal periodisation based on this supersession. This periodisation identifies the leading figures of civil philosophy, Pufendorf and Thomasius, as representatives of the ‘early’ Enlightenment (Frühaufklärung) – rather than of a rival enlightenment – hence as destined to be eclipsed by or folded into an evolving mature, high, or late Enlightenment, identified with the advent of Kantian philosophy. In Schneiders’ standard version, the supposed dominance of Thomasian voluntarism in the first two decades of the eighteenth century characterises the Frühaufklärung. The

Introduction



eclipse of Thomasius’ Bürgerphilosophie by Wolffian rationalism in the s marks the onset of a middle Enlightenment, which peters out into the melding of Thomasian and Wolffian perspectives in mid-century Popularphilosophie. Finally, the ‘high’ or late Enlightenment emerges with Kant’s definitive reconciliation and transcendence of all prior opposed philosophies in the s (Schneiders b). Schmidt-Biggemann has recently improvised on this dialectical periodisation in order to provide a schema for the evolution of knowledge in the early modern German university, treating the sixteenth-century university as dominated by theology and the seventeenth by political jurisprudence (SchmidtBiggemann ). Following the standard dialectical schema, however, Schmidt-Biggemann treats the reciprocal deficiencies of these disciplines – theological dogmatism on one side, political utilitarianism on the other – as destining them for eclipse by the philosophical university of the eighteenth-century Aufklärung. The post-Kantian assimilation of civil philosophy is completed by a third tactic: the doctrine that in recovering the transcendental conditions of experience, Kantian philosophy floats free of historical conditions altogether, and represents in fact the transcendental conditions of historical reality. For, if Kantian philosophy has indeed recovered the forms of experience prior to the manifestation of experience as history, then we must accept Hinske’s claims that this philosophy depends on no historical mythos or ethos; that, as the pure ‘work of thought itself ’, it is the only true vehicle of enlightenment; and that the theological and civil sciences are themselves only empirical outworkings of Kantian philosophical concepts. It would of course be foolhardy to doubt the assimilative power of post-Kantian dialectical historiography, backed as it is by the widely held belief that Kant actually uncovered the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, or at least prepared the way for Hegel’s historicised version of them. Yet Thomasius’ attack on the intellectualist image of man contained in early modern metaphysics – his stigmatisation of the doctrine that ‘man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happiness of the whole human race depends on the correct arrangement of thought’ – already provides us with an historical anchor-point from which to preserve civil philosophy against its dialectical assimilation. For Thomasius’ polemical rejection of it enables us to formulate a fundamental conjecture regarding this intellectualist anthropology: namely, that this anthropology is central not just to early modern university metaphysics, but also to post-Kantian dialectical historiography. After



Introduction

all, in purporting to pre-empt pre-Kantian civil philosophy by positing Kant’s recovery of the conditions of subjectivity as such, it would seem that this historiography is also committed to the metaphysical image of man – as an intelligible being capable of pre-empting empirical history through transcendental self-reflection. We will return to this conjecture below. For the moment, we can use it to shed some light on the three tactics of assimilation just outlined. First, its indebtedness to this anthropology helps to explain the dialectical character of post-Kantian philosophical history. For in the fundamental oppositions required and imposed by this historiography, it is possible to discern a projection of the divided lineaments of the metaphysician’s homo duplex. Through its fundamental positing of man as a being of pure reason temporarily mortgaged to the experiences and inclinations of his sensible nature, university metaphysics sought to programme an ethos of intellectual self-purification and clarification. It is the normative lineaments of homo duplex that show through in the dialectical historians’ exemplary oppositions: between a pure intellectualism cut off from empirical experience, and a brute empiricism lacking insight into its transcendental conditions; between a pure rationalism incapable of providing sensible man with motivating norms, and an impure voluntarism incapable of providing such norms with a rational basis. Not only does this clarify why dialectical historiography is driven to treat metaphysical and civil philosophy as reciprocally deficient theories, it also illuminates the ‘subjectivising’ tendency of this historiography. For, in making the rival academic cultures go proxy for the intellectual and sensible natures of homo duplex, this method treats them as open to reconciliation ‘in thought’ – in fact in Kant’s thinking of the transcendental conditions of the empirical. We may propose, then, that in treating civil and metaphysical philosophy as reciprocally deficient theories, destined for reconciliation in the Kantian moment, post-Kantian dialectical historiography is less an account of the history of the rival cultures and more a practice of metaphysics by other means. There is thus good reason to suspend our commitment to the epochal periodisation based on this historiography. If civil and metaphysical philosophy are related not as reciprocally deficient ‘ideas’ but as independent cultural movements, then their history will not be a series of stages on the way to Kantianism. This applies no less to Schneiders’ division of eighteenth-century ‘enlightenment philosophy’ into an early, middle, and late Aufklärung, than it does to Schmidt-Biggemann’s allocation of theology, jurisprudence, and philosophy to the sixteenth, seventeenth,

Introduction



and eighteenth centuries, respectively. For, despite Schmidt-Biggemann’s attempt to confine natural and political law to the seventeenth century, and despite Schneiders’ claim that Thomasian Bürgerphilosophie underwent metaphysical eclipse during the s, Steven Lestition has shown that Pufendorfian–Thomasian natural law continued to function as a key academic discipline well into the second half of the eighteenth century. Moreover, he has shown that it maintained this role in the law faculty of Kant’s own university (Lestition ). It may indeed be that, with the Kantian capture of German philosophical faculties from the s, the teaching of civil philosophy was increasingly confined to the faculties of law and politics. But the fact that the civil sciences of natural and political law continued to play a key role in forming the ‘juristic civic consciousness’ suggests that the alleged eclipsing of these sciences reflects only the viewpoint of their metaphysical rival, now safely in possession of the Kantianised arts faculties. Lastly, this indicates that we should give up the view that in reconciling the oppositions between idealism and empiricism, rationalism and voluntarism, Kant’s philosophy broke the bonds of mythos and ethos tying thought to history, recovering the conditions of subjectivity itself. This will enable us to look for the mythos and ethos of Kantian philosophy itself, to investigate its anthropological commitments and its ethical demands. In this way we can begin to redescribe Kantianism, as a particular historical culture of the self, neither more nor less fundamental than the cultures of civil and metaphysical philosophy. It is in redescribing early modern civil and metaphysical philosophy as autonomous intellectual cultures that this book makes its own contribution to the body of works on whose shoulders it stands. For, in the course of this study I augment those political and juridical histories of the civil sciences with a particular approach to the history of philosophy. This approach investigates philosophies in terms of the ‘ascetic’ relation to the self they impose, and the ‘spiritual exercises’ that they require. In drawing sources for this kind of investigation one may range quite widely, from Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘work in philosophy . . . is really more work on oneself ’, to Foucault’s more historically oriented comment that philosophy may be regarded as ‘an “ascesis”, askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’ (Foucault , ; Wittgenstein , ). Here, rather than being restricted to the narrow meaning of self-denial, the term ascetic qualifies all those intellectual practices or ‘spiritual exercises’ whose special role is to permit attention



Introduction

to and transformation of the self. Characteristically, histories of philosophy in this manner focus on the anthropologies, psychologies, and cosmologies through which the members of specific intellectual elites acquire the capacity to take up a particular relation to themselves and their world. This is typically a relation that imbues such individuals with a conviction of their deviation from an ideal way of thought or life – a relation of self-problematisation. In this way they are inducted into a particular intellectual regimen or practice of self-cultivation, through which they may reshape themselves in the image of this ideal. In a recently translated work, Pierre Hadot provides a pointer to the investigation of philosophies in terms of the spiritual exercises they impose: We have seen that, at first glance, [the spiritual exercises] appear to vary widely. Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly the meditations of the Platonic tradition, demanded a high degree of mental concentration. Some, like the contemplation of nature as practiced in all philosophical schools, turned the soul toward the cosmos, while still others – rare and exceptional – led to a transfiguration of the personality, as in the experiences of Plotinus. We also saw that the emotional tone and notional content of these exercises varied widely from one philosophical school to another: from the mobilisation of energy and consent to destiny of the Stoics, to the relaxation and detachment of the Epicureans, to the mental concentration and renunciation of the sensible world among the Platonists.

Despite this variety, Hadot continues, the different modes of self-culture are joined by commonalities of form and function: Beneath this apparent diversity . . . there is a profound unity, both in the means employed and in the ends pursued. The means employed are the rhetorical and dialectical techniques of persuasion, the attempts at mastering one’s inner dialogue, and mental concentration. In all philosophical schools, the goal pursued in these exercises is self-realisation and improvement. (P. Hadot , )

While successfully applied to ancient philosophy (Annas ; Brown a; Brown b; Nussbaum ; Rabbow ), this approach has not been widely exploited in the broader history of philosophy. There is, however, at least one study of late medieval university metaphysics in these terms, which will constitute an important resource for us (Thomassen ). There are also some important kindred discussions of early modern Stoicism and Epicureanism (Kimmich ; Kimmich ; Osler ), and we might add Oestreich’s account of Lipsian neoStoicism to the same series (Oestreich ). Until now, this approach has not been applied to Kantian philosophy.

Introduction



Notwithstanding their disparate topics, and despite some significant differences in method and emphasis, these studies are joined by a common historiographic approach to the investigation of ‘school’ philosophies. They treat the anthropologies, psychologies, and cosmologies contained in such philosophies as reflexive ethical instruments – that is, as means by which individuals are inducted into new existential relations to themselves and their world – rather than as quasi-scientific theories of the subject or the cosmos. In short, these studies investigate philosophies as paideia rather than as theoria. As such, they open the door to a fundamentally non-Kantian approach to the self, treating this not in terms of a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but in terms of one historically cultivated to meet the purposes of a particular way of life. As a-rational modes of fashioning persons for envisaged circumstances, philosophical anthropologies formed the link between academic philosophies and the larger religious and political forces that converged on the early modern university. In attacking his metaphysical rivals, Thomasius thus focuses on their intellectualist anthropology. For he regards it as implicated in the sacerdotalism of the confessional state, and as inimical to the ‘juristic civic consciousness’ he sought to form via his ‘Epicurean’ anthropology. In focusing on the uncontrollable passions rather than a quasi-divine reason, Thomasius’ anthropology would allow man to be seen as a dangerous creature in need of civil restraint and political control. This cultural role of rival anthropologies is what Schmitt has in mind when, in the course of discussing competing ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ political anthropologies, he remarks that: ‘philosophy and anthropology, as specifically applicable to the totality of knowledge, cannot, like any specialised discipline, be neutralised against irrational life decisions’ (Schmitt , ). It is by attending to the selfformative functions of the rival philosophies and anthropologies that we shall thus come to understand the manner in which their rivalry was informed by larger historical conflicts, in particular that over the desacralisation and resacralisation of politics. This shifting of the methodological axis of the history of philosophy enables us to identify six themes that will be central to our study of the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy in early modern Germany. First and foremost, it enables us to place the rival moral anthropologies in a single space of historical description, thereby acquiring the neutrality needed to treat them as objects of historical investigation. We shall encounter several such anthropologies. In Pufendorf ’s natural law we discover a political anthropology of man as a creature whose violent



Introduction

passions threaten his capacity for sociality, thereby necessitating the creation of a sovereign power capable of imposing the rules of sociability as law. Leibniz’s practical philosophy, however, is grounded in his Platonic ‘monadology’, treating man as an intellectual soul capable of participating in the divine intellection of the substances, and thereby perfecting himself through contemplation. Following in Pufendorf ’s footsteps, Thomasius’ quasi-Epicurean anthropology of passional man necessitates an ethics of self-restraint and a jurisprudence of sovereign command. Finally, in Kant’s anthropology of man’s dual intelligible–sensible natures, we encounter a further elaboration of the metaphysical homo duplex, driving Kant to construct an ethics and politics in terms of man’s self-purifying recovery of his self-governing rational being. In none of these instances shall we be approaching the relevant anthropology as a philosophical theory that might be true or false to the moral nature of the human being. Rather, each anthropology will be investigated as an ethical instrument capable of impelling individuals to relate to themselves as beings possessing a particular nature – this being the precondition of their fashioning selves suited to differently envisaged worlds. By treating the various anthropologies as optional and equivalent means through which certain individuals forge the relation to the self – that is, as different forms in which individuals cross the threshold of subjectivity and learn to deport themselves as subjects of particular kinds – we suspend all normative commitment to them. Instead, we regard them as instruments for the cultivation of particular intellectual deportments, whose historical circumstances, purposes and distribution are matters of historical investigation and description. Second, by placing the notion of enlightenment in this methodological context we can provide an appropriate grounding for the theme of rival enlightenments. For this recontextualisation suggests that ‘enlightenment’ refers to a condition of the self attained and valorised through the spiritual exercises of a particular ethos. In this regard the worldly self-restraint and indifference to transcendence of the ‘Epicurean’ jurists has just as much claim to be considered enlightened as the exalted participation in divine intellection of the ‘Platonic’ metaphysicians. All notions of ‘the Enlightenment’ may be regarded as nominalisations of the adjective qualifying those who are deemed ‘enlightened’. In its turn, ‘enlightened’ is the self-valorising term that the members of a particular philosophical school apply to themselves – in honour of their attainment of a particular comportment of the self, regarded as an ideal way of thought or life. For this reason we must give up the post-Kantian

Introduction



notion of a true enlightenment, characterised by the ‘enlightenment of enlightenment’, or the recovery of a basic set of philosophical ideas absorbing and unifying the different forms of enlightenment (Hinske ; Schneiders ; Stuke ). In fact, this notion – which presumes that ‘the Enlightenment’ consists in rational being’s recovery of its own forms of intellection – may itself be regarded as a variant of the metaphysical enlightenment. For it is designed to drive scholars to dissatisfaction with diverse empirical-historical enlightenments, impelling them to posit a unifying origin in the ‘work of thought’, and thereby participate in a higher form of intellection. Since the s, having recognised that their central period-concept was too indebted to the vision and ethos of a particular group, the historians of religion have been relegating the concept of ‘the Reformation’ in favour of a history of multiple waves of ‘confessionalisation’ (Schilling ; Schilling ; Zeeden ). Perhaps it is time for intellectual historians to move in the same direction, to dissolve the monolithic Aufklärung into histories of the diverse enlightenments sought within particular early modern intellectual cultures. Third, attending to the self-formative functions of the enlightenment philosophies provides an appropriate setting for a theme long discussed by historians of theology and, more recently, by cultural and intellectual historians: namely, that there is no sharp break between these philosophies and Christian theology, and no epochal shift from a religious age to a secular ‘age of reason’ (Gründer and Rengstorf ). For a long time it has been held that the Aufklärung witnessed the progressive eclipsing of theology by philosophy – a progressive secularisation of thought and society – typically seen in Kantian terms as human reason’s recovery of its capacity for autonomous self-legislation. More recently, however, historians have begun to show how deeply enmeshed enlightenment thought remains in religion, both at the level of the problems it was confronted by, and the intellectual instruments it used to solve them. Challenging the view of Pufendorf and Thomasius as secular statists, Detlef Döring has renewed attention to them as lay theologians, preoccupied by the problems of confessional division, and deeply indebted to a certain kind of Protestant ‘spiritualist’ theology for their solutions to these problems (Döring ; Döring ). If the civil philosophers thus reveal an unexpected debt to a certain kind of theology, then the dependency of so-called early modern rationalism on a different kind of theology is perhaps even more surprising. Yet a number of studies suggest that metaphysical rationalism (Leibniz, Wolff, Kant) is inseparable from a



Introduction

specific theological anthropology (Honnefelder ; Kondylis ; Sparn ; Thomassen ). This is one that figures forth God as a pure mind spontaneously intelligising the conceptual forms of things, and man as the ‘sensibly affected’ rational being capable of partial participation in this intellection, giving rise to the figure of homo duplex. Rather than signifying an epochal break with religion and theology, therefore, the rival enlightenments represented two divergent attempts to reconfigure religion, using opposed theological means. In drawing on voluntarist theology to place the divine mind beyond human reason – hence beyond credal formulation and civil enforcement – the civil philosophers sought to confine salvific religion to private life. For their part, in offering ‘rational’ explications of the central Christian mysteries, the metaphysical philosophers regarded their ‘natural theologies’ as new moral theologies for public life, shifting the locus of salvation to metaphysics itself. The divergent ways in which the two intellectual cultures addressed the religious question were thus deeply informed by the opposed anthropologies in which they were grounded. Fourth, if, however, attending to the ‘ascetic’ grounding of the rival enlightenments reveals their theological dimensions, then it simultaneously holds the key to understanding their secularising roles. This is particularly the case for civil philosophy. Through its voluntarist–theological exclusion of transcendent intellection from the domains of ethics, politics, and jurisprudence, Pufendorfian natural law effected a profound ‘detranscendentalising’ of civil governance. For this allowed politics and the state to be conceived solely in terms of the worldly preservation of a being with man’s ‘empirical’ (social but vicious) nature, to the exclusion of all concern with his morality and salvation (Tully ). We have already indicated that in this profound reconstruction of practical philosophy, the civil philosophers were the bearers not of a general philosophical rationalisation of society, but of the specific kinds of secularisation effected by political science and political jurisprudence (Heckel ; Kriegel ). In this regard their kind of ‘secularisation’ differed decisively from that of the metaphysical philosophers. For, rather than restricting religion to the private sphere in order to effect the desacralisation of politics, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant all attempted to provide a secular equivalent for religion – in the form of their own natural theologies – through which they hoped to provide a moral basis for a resacralised state. Shocked by the central political construct of the early modern civil sciences – the secular security state – the metaphysicians sought to preserve their conception of a world still governed by the

Introduction



transcendent justice of the heavenly city. They did so by refurbishing a longstanding Christian conception of political order – the figure of the church as the ‘kingdom of God on earth’ – thereby initiating a powerful anti-political, anti-juridical theory of ‘society’. Fifth, we are now in a position to appreciate the key role played by the discipline of natural law (Jus naturae, Naturrecht) in organising the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy. As a sub-branch of theology – treating of man’s natural knowledge of the moral laws inscribed in human nature by the creator – natural law reached back to the great scholastic systems, yet had been refurbished by the early modern Jesuits, Vitoria and Suárez, as part of the ‘second scholasticism’ (Haakonssen , –). In the neoscholastic form imposed on it by Suárez, natural law retained most of its core Thomist features, in particular the conception of rights as arising from subjective moral capacities (man’s ‘rational and social being’) whose teleological completion forms the purpose of civil laws and the basis of political sovereignty (Tierney , –). In thus treating civil rule as if it were grounded in a higher moral order, neoscholastic natural law was perfectly suited to the political–theological conception of society as church, providing the basis, for example, of Suárez’s defence of the Pope’s power to determine the heretical status of Protestant princes. It was precisely this political–theological role of neoscholastic natural law that led Hobbes, Grotius, and Pufendorf to transform it from within. By replacing the Aristotelian anthropology of man’s rational and social being with an Epicurean conception of man as a passion-driven self-destructive being, and by using a voluntarist theology to exclude theo-rational conceptions of justice from the civil domain, the civil philosophers literally (Hobbes) or in effect (Pufendorf) identified natural law with the commands of the civil sovereign (Wyduckel ). Moreover, they did so not just in order to immunise Protestant princes against religious subversion by political Catholicism, but, more importantly, to allow the state to float free of all religious claims on its civil authority (Döring b). It was not only Catholic political theologians who therefore attacked the natural law of Pufendorf and his follower Thomasius. As we have seen, Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalised natural law provoked heresy accusations from Lutheran theologians such as Alberti, who continued to elaborate neoscholastic versions, not least to defend the civil powers of the church against the fundamental attacks of Hobbes and Pufendorf (Palladini ). As a result, seventeenth-century German universities provided the battle-ground for two ‘modern’ doctrines of natural law: the ‘civil’



Introduction

natural law of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius; and the ‘Christian’ natural law of Althusius, Alberti, Prasch, Veltheim, Placcius, Rachel, and, most famously (restrospectively), Leibniz, who attacked the civil philosophers from the high ground of Protestant scholasticism (Schneider ). This ‘intellectual civil war’ provides one of the central instances of the conflict between the two enlightenments. Finally, we are in a position to observe that if the rival enlightenments were not competing theories evolving towards their Kantian Aufhebung, that is because they were in fact competing ways of configuring the powerful religious and political forces that converged on the early modern university. Civil philosophy, we have noted, was not so much a philosophical doctrine as a series of attempts to provide a small group of civil sciences – political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht and Staatskirchenrecht), ‘Bodinian’ sovereignty doctrine, civil law – with a configuration suited to the formation of a ‘juristic civic consciousness’. For its part, university metaphysics may be regarded as a series of attempts to configure a largely different group of academic disciplines – theology, Roman law, logic, ethics – in accordance with the Christian metaphysical view of the world as a unity arising from its (divine) intellection; that is, to provide a configuration suited to the formation of a ‘metaphysical supra-civic consciousness’. In each case the cultivation of a specific academic ethos was central to the undertaking. Through the metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex – that permitted them to explicate the Christian mysteries and reveal the pure concepts of morality and justice underlying the civil order – the university metaphysicians cultivated a particular intellectual purity and prestige. On this basis, they claimed the authority to limit the governance of the earthly city in accordance with the laws of its divine archetype, thereby advancing the interests of the academic–clerical estate. The civil philosophers cultivated a different ethos in accordance with divergent ends. Through its anti-metaphysical voluntarism and Epicurean anthropology, civil natural law enabled its bearers to separate their own deepest religious and moral convictions from the formulation of laws aimed solely at civil security. It was thus instrumental in grounding the new doctrines of territorial sovereignty and desacralised politics in a specific intellectual deportment, one characterised by private piety and public acceptance of the civil sovereign’s political supremacy. If, therefore, metaphysical and civil philosophy came into profound conflict in early modern Germany – especially on the terrain of natural law – this was not because they represented reciprocally deficient epis-

Introduction



temologies or ethics, soon to be reconciled and transcended in Kantian critical philosophy. Rather, it was because they represented divergent cultures for configuring the relations between religious and civil governance. Each was grounded in a powerful ascetic philosophy, and each was dedicated to using this philosophy to place certain academic sciences at the disposal of the state – but in very different ways and in accordance with fundamentally different conceptions of politics. The studies of Leibniz and Pufendorf, Thomasius and Kant in Part  of our essay are not therefore intended as a narrative history of early modern philosophy, governed by the theme of the progressive discovery of the laws of human reason or the autonomy of the moral subject. Rather, they are to be viewed as a series of profiles outlining the manner in which these figures attempted to impose either a civil or a metaphysical signature on a specific array of academic sciences, each in accordance with a distinctive ethos, and as part of larger attempts to reconfigure early modern Germany’s religious and political culture. Before embarking on these particular studies, however, we require an overview of the role of metaphysical and civil philosophy in the early modern German university, which is the task of Part  of this book.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

 

Rival enlightenments

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

   

University metaphysics

 .             We have suggested that, rather than representing the path taken by human reason’s recovery of its own transcendental conditions, German university metaphysics was itself polemically enmeshed in the religious and political conflicts of the early modern period. This chapter provides an overview of this approach to the history of German university metaphysics. We argue that in its anthropology and cosmology Schulmetaphysik gave shape not to a universal rational being, but to a particular kind of moral personage. Through his self-purifying recovery of the pure concepts of things, this personage was groomed for the exercise of a quasisacral power in the civil domain. This spiritual grooming, carried out in the teaching of metaphysics itself, created the prestige and authority required to judge civil affairs in accordance with transcendent concepts – in particular, the concepts of man’s rational being and the natural laws required for its realisation. One of our central concerns will be to sketch a genealogy for the prestige of enlightenment metaphysics by showing its indebtedness to seventeenth-century Protestant Schulmetaphysik. The ‘enlightenment’ defence of the intelligible conditions of empirical experience, we argue, may be regarded as an historical improvisation on the neoscholastic defence of the divine intellection of the supersensible forms and substances. This lays the groundwork for our non-standard approach to the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant in Part . For here, rather than viewing them as moving ever closer to the recovery of human subjectivity’s transcendent(al) conditions, we treat the enlightenment metaphysicians as exponents of a quasi-religious ethos in which this recovery is the objective of a spiritual exercise. Needless to say, while the relation between enlightenment metaphysics and seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik remains under-researched, it has not gone unnoticed. With very few exceptions, however, this relation 



University metaphysics

is discussed in terms of metaphysics throwing off its theological past. This view of enlightenment metaphysics as the rational subsumption of its theological predecessor can take a negative or positive form. Beck, for example, treats the neoscholastic theory of being as too scholastic and dogmatic – as insufficiently ‘epistemological’ – to function as a vehicle for autonomous human reason, hence as destined to be eclipsed by the emergence of enlightenment epistemology (Beck , –). Petersen and Wundt, however, regard seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik as playing a key role in the emergence of enlightenment metaphysics, through the manner in which it preserved the doctrine of transcendent rational being against the threats of English empiricism and German Pietism (Petersen ; Wundt ; Wundt ). In both cases, however, enlightenment metaphysics is viewed as the rational transcendence of its theological predecessor – either as the emancipator of philosophy from theology, or as the means of their harmonisation in a rational theory of transcendent being. In other words, in both cases the history of metaphysics is seen in terms of the progressive rationalisation of human reason’s (initially theological) pursuit of its transcendent(al) conditions. Before discussing this view in a little more detail, we may observe that there are prima facie reasons for thinking that the history of metaphysics is far more turbulent – far more deeply enmeshed in the history of religious and political conflict – than such an account can allow. Here the crucial thing to observe is that with the onset of Lutheran confessionalisation (‘the Reformation’), university metaphysics was targeted for elimination. Pointers to this anti-metaphysical campaign can be found in Luther’s Disputation Against Scholastic Theology of , where we find his wholesale rejection of the Aristotelian way: It is false to state that the will can by nature conform to a correct precept. This is said in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel . . . Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace. This in opposition to the scholastics . . . It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle. Indeed, no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle. In vain does one fashion a logic of faith, a substitution brought about without regard for limit and measure. This in opposition to the new dialecticians. (Luther , , )

Luther’s hostility was driven in part by the key role that Scotist– Aristotelian university metaphysics had played in defining and defending Catholic orthodoxy against the first waves of reform (Shank ).

Introduction



But it was also driven by his Occamite repudiation of the ‘rationalist’ character of this metaphysics – that is, of its claims to provide natural knowledge of the Christian mysteries via transcendent concepts common to God and man. From Luther’s voluntarist perspective, the Thomist and Scotist programmes – teaching that man could accede to knowledge and love of God through cultivation of a quasi-divine (metaphysical) reason – were completely inimical to the true grounding of religion in a biblically based faith. Taken to its conclusion, Luther’s rejection of the metaphysical reconciliation of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, resulted in the ‘two truths’ doctrine. In elaborating this doctrine in his De Usu et Applicatione Notionum Logicorum ad Res Theologicus (On the Use and Application of Logical Concepts in Relation to Theological Matters, ), Daniel Hofmann argues that philosophy and theology give rise to irreconcilably different kinds of truth, on the basis of the difference between the ‘natural’ (corrupt) and ‘regenerate’ conditions of the intellect that accedes to truth. This doctrine is so hostile to the metaphysical reconciliation of philosophy and theology that even modern metaphysicians attack it on sight: ‘Common to all the scholastic metaphysicians was the rejection of a two-fold truth – in fact, the metaphysical movement arose to meet the theological irrationalism enshrined in this ancient bugbear’ (Beck , ). As soon, however, as we reinstate the specific anthropology underpinning Luther’s and Hofmann’s position – that is, the Occamite anthropology of fallen man’s corrupted intellect and his consequent incapacity for acceding to transcendent ideas – then the true character of the ‘two truths’ doctrine becomes apparent. In restricting knowledge of theological truth to an intellect regenerated through faith and grace, Hofmann was not irrationally rejecting philosophy. Rather he was attempting to exclude philosophers (university metaphysicians) from the role of mediating the Christian mysteries, treating their rationalist pursuit of salvation through ascent to transcendent knowledge as incompatible with the mode of acceding to salvation through biblical faith (Schorn-Schütte ). In other words, the battle over the ‘two truths’ doctrine is symptomatic not of the role of metaphysics in the emancipation of reason from religion, but of the quasi-religious role of metaphysics itself; that is, of its role as a mode of spiritual formation in competition with the voluntarist and fideist one that was central to early Lutheran confessionalism (Sparn ). This is the historical light in which we should view the exclusion of metaphysics from the curricula of Protestant universities in the first



University metaphysics

decades of the sixteenth century. The University of Wittenberg () proved to be the model in this regard, with the old scholastic curriculum grounded in logic and metaphysics being replaced by the Melanchthonian curriculum centred on rhetoric, ethics, natural law, biblical exegesis and the Aristotelian sciences (Kusukawa ). Far from representing an irrational cul-de-sac, Wittenberg was indicative of a new and far-reaching alliance between the state-building aspirations of territorial princes and the confessionalising objectives of religious activists (Heinrich ). In fact, Wittenberg broke with the old form of the university – that of an urban corporation under Imperial and Papal patent. Instead, it drew its legal form and funding from the territorial state, and its governance from a council of state officials and religious reformers – including Luther, Jonas, Melanchthon, and Bugenhagen (Scheible ). In this setting, Melanchthon’s model curriculum was required to fulfil the same key functions as its scholastic predecessor – to provide the religious and political elite with a suitably orthodox intellectual comportment (Kaufmann , –). Melanchthon, however, could not use the metaphysics of transcendent–rational being as his means of harmonising the theological and philosophical sciences into a single formative curriculum. Instead, as Kusukawa has shown, he harnessed the (Aristotelian) natural sciences themselves to this end, teaching them as the key to reading the signs of God’s ordering presence in nature, and thereby maintaining the normative unity of the Christian academic curriculum (Kusukawa ). It is all the more remarkable therefore that during the closing decade of the sixteenth century and the opening one of the seventeenth, the banished figure of the metaphysician suddenly reappeared in the philosophy and theology faculties of the Protestant academy. In the Lutheran universities we can mention Daniel Cramer (Wittenberg, ), Cornelius Martini (Helmstedt, ), Henning Arnisaeus (Helmstedt, ), Jacob Martini (Wittenberg, ), Johann Gerhard (Jena, ), Balthasar Meisner (Wittenberg, ), and Christoph Scheibler (Gießen, ). In the Calvinist world the most prominent of the new metaphysicians were Rudolf Goclenius (Marburg, ), Bartholomaeus Keckermann (Heidelberg, ), Johann Alsted (Herborn, ), and Clemens Timpler (Heidelberg and Steinfurt, ) (Sparn , ; Wundt ). Considering our larger concerns, the return of a fullblooded metaphysics to Protestant universities from the final decade of the sixteenth century presents us with an important historical–intellectual problem. Given that the central tasks of philosophia Christiana could,

Metaphysics as the subsumption of theology



apparently, be fulfilled by a non-metaphysical scholasticism, what was driving the return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy almost a century after Luther and Melanchthon had shown it the door? As we shall see, the answer to this question holds the key to understanding the relation between seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik and its enlightenment successor. .                       For a long time the standard answer to this question was Petersen’s (Petersen ). Identifying metaphysics with ‘Aristotelianism’, Petersen treats its expulsion from the Protestant academy as a religious aberration that would be reversed through human reason’s natural desire to uncover the transcendent–rational grounds of the empirical world. This is the desire that Petersen sees behind the return of Protestant Schulmetaphysik and as ultimately finding its full satisfaction in Leibniz’s metaphysical rationalism. In short, in ignoring the religious and political forces driving the banishment of metaphysics from the Protestant curriculum, and in presuming that its return represents the resumption of reason’s pursuit of its own transcendent conditions, Petersen’s account is a typical instance of the history of metaphysics as the rational subsumption of theology. We can identify two versions of this history. According to the first, metaphysics leads to the rational preservation of religious belief in the form of Kant’s recovery of the transcendental conditions of human experience and morality. Wundt and Beck offer classic histories of metaphysics written in these terms. While they differ over whether it is Lutheranism or Calvinism that contains the germs of a rational future, and while they disagree over whether reason is best served by metaphysics or epistemology, both of them treat Kant’s ‘critical’ metaphysics as preserving man’s longing for the transcendent in a rational form (Beck , –; Wundt , –). Similarly, Schmidt-Biggemann identifies two forms in which seventeenth-century metaphysics (natural theology) preserved man’s desire for the transcendent against theological dogmatism and juridical positivism. The first of these is the neoAristotelian metaphysics of Suárez, whose reduction of religious statements to a common language of ‘being’ made it possible to treat ‘Christ’s presence in the sacrament or . . . the incarnation of Christ, as problems of logic and metaphysics and in this way to show the scientific



University metaphysics

character of theology and its convergence with nature and reason’ (Schmidt-Biggemann , ). The second is the Hermetic–Platonic metaphysics of the neo-Platonists, which locates the intelligibility of history in divinely intelligised ‘perfections’ (transcendent essences of things). This, Schmidt-Biggemann argues, would eventually bear fruit in Leibniz’s grounding of natural law in ‘trans-religious and trans-confessional’ rational concepts of justice, and in Kant’s final recovery of ‘the autonomy of reason as a legal principle’ (). In characterising the culmination of seventeenth-century metaphysics in this manner, SchmidtBiggemann ignores both the polemical construction of Leibniz’s transcendent conception of natural law – its vehement opposition to Pufendorf ’s political conception – and the degree to which this construction depended on the explicitly confessional doctrines of the Lutheran natural jurists and political theologians (Schneider ). We will return to this set of issues in Chapter . According to the second version of this historiography, Protestant Schulmetaphysik is less the seed-bed of Kantian epistemology and more a by-product of a truly fundamental reconciliation of theology and philosophy: namely, that undertaken by the Jesuit metaphysician Francisco Suárez (–) at the advent of the ‘second scholasticism’. Here, Suárez’s metaphysics of ‘intelligible being’ – the sphere of timeless logical substances existing prior to their materialisation as things – is made central to the harmonisation of theology and philosophy, hence to the self-development of human reason. Written under Catholic auspices, this history of early modern metaphysics brings out the (de facto) Protestant character of the Kantian one. In his early attempt to account for the success of ‘Jesuit metaphysics’ in Protestant universities, Eschweiler appeals to the centrality of Suárez’s ‘practical intellectualism’, and to his conception of the intelligible ground of empirical being in particular. Scarcely mentioning the facts of intra- and extra-Protestant confessional conflict, Eschweiler sees Suárez’s doctrine as answering the need of Protestant academics for a unifying foundation for the academic sciences, so that the return of metaphysics is driven by a ‘need of the time’ or Zeitgeist (Eschweiler , –). While paying more attention than Eschweiler to the circumstances of intra-Protestant confessional conflict, Ernst Lewalter also ascribes the return of metaphysics to a purely intellectual dynamic, in fact arising from the tension between philosophy and theology. Lewalter thus depicts Protestant metaphysics as divided between a philological–humanist wing (Arnisaeus, Helmstedt) and a formal onto-theological wing (Scheibler, Gießen), the latter being

Metaphysics as the subsumption of theology



grounded in Suárez’s onto-theology of divine being and dedicated to reconstructing Aristotle for the purposes of confessional theology (Lewalter , –, ). He then presents Cornelius Martini (Helmstedt) as resolving this tension, by developing a metaphysics in which God is treated as part of ontology (rather than as its foundation), but in which natural theology is not allowed to replace revealed. The ground of this reconciliation, however, remains the theory of intelligible being, which Lewalter regards as driving German metaphysics from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and the idealists (–). The most influential rendering of this version of the history of metaphysics, however, is Charles Lohr’s. Lohr posits the existence of two forms of metaphysics. On the one hand there is the neo-Platonic ‘science of God’ – Lull, Nicholas of Cusa, the Florentine Platonists. This metaphysics pursues the unity of philosophy and theology by treating divine intellection of the forms as the goal of a practice of philosophical contemplation in which even the unconsecrated may participate (Lohr , –). Opposed to this is the Thomistic, scholastic-Aristotelian ‘science of being’, whose subordination of philosophical to revealed knowledge of God Lohr regards as dictated by clericalism and the hierarchical nature of medieval church and society (, ). By presenting both versions of metaphysics as under threat from a fideistic nominalism and an empiricist (Averroistic) version of Aristotelianism, Lohr’s account organises itself around the imperative of a fundamental reconciliation of the philosophical science of God and the theological science of being: ‘An approach was needed which avoided the fideism of the nominalists, the secularism of the Averroists and the clericalism behind the Christian Aristotelianism of the Thomists’ (). Lohr regards Duns Scotus as taking the decisive step along this path, by reconstructing the notion of ‘infinite immaterial being’ (God) in terms of the non-contradictory intelligising of possible things. For, in doing so, Scotus was able to free metaphysics from Aristotle’s physics while simultaneously maintaining the subordination of the physical world to the domain of transcendent being, which now appeared as this world’s intelligible or rational grounds (–). Suárez is then described as completing Scotus’ reconciliation of philosophy and theology, which he does by superimposing the distinction between uncreated and created being on Scotus’ pairing of infinite and finite being. This allowed Suárez to distinguish ‘real’ being, as the pure concepts or intelligibilia intelligised by God, from ‘actual’ being, as the empirical things whose existence was wholly dependent on God’s decision to realise some of the intelligibles



University metaphysics

(). Lohr thus regards Suárez as harmonising philosophy and theology – and outflanking the disintegrative forces of empiricism and fideism – through his new metaphysical construction of man and the world as finite beings bearing infinite principles of intelligibility. Placing it in this context, Lohr treats the return of metaphysics to Germany’s Protestant universities as a theatre for a smaller version of the same intellectual–historical drama. The main difference in the German case is that Reformation voluntarism and fideism intensified the threats to Christian metaphysics arising from secular ‘medical empiricism’. These threats were nonetheless countered in the familiar way, through the adaptation of Suárez’s new theory of intelligible being to German circumstances: Suárez’ work was well suited to the purposes of the Lutheran thinkers. He understood metaphysics as a general science of being and rejected the idea of an independent natural theology. He provided the philosophical basis for the treatment of the Incarnation. Most importantly, he provided a foundation for a refutation of the theory of double truth proposed by some extremist theologians. Suárez’ Disputationes describe a confessionally neutral, possible world to which all those who accepted the doctrine of creation could subscribe. (Lohr , –)

Despite several significant differences therefore – focused in the gap between Jesuit metaphysics and Kantian epistemology – these two versions of the history of metaphysics share a common core. Above all, by locating the reconciliation of theology and philosophy in the theory of intelligible being, both versions equate metaphysics with human reason’s recovery of its transcendent(al) foundations. It is on this basis that they can treat the return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy as the resumption of reason’s journey of self-discovery. This is the journey that would culminate in the subsumption of theology within a philosophical knowledge of the ‘rational’ (intelligible) grounds of the empirical world. From here arose a ‘confessionally neutral’ language for addressing the transcendent-rational intellect housed in the human subject, which would be spoken – albeit in different dialects – by Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant. .                     We can indicate the limitations of this historiographic consensus, and outline an alternative genealogy for university metaphysics, by making

The return of metaphysics



four observations. We can begin by observing that the return of metaphysics was driven more by the needs of confessional religion than by the destiny of reason. Salomon Geßner’s edition of Johann Versor’s Epitome Metaphysicae Aristotelicae () – published at Wittenberg in  – gives symptomatic expression to these needs. After complaining about the rude and ignorant students emerging from Melanchthon’s curriculum, Geßner approaches his central concerns by reminding his readers that the ‘Calviniani’ have used the slogan finitum non est capax infiniti – the finite cannot contain the infinite – in order to attack the Lutheran account of the communication of properties (communicatio idiomata) between Christ’s human and divine natures. If the Lutheran doctrine of the union of finite and infinite being is to be clarified and defended, says Geßner, then Lutheran universities must re-embrace the discipline of metaphysics. He continues: For how disgracefully today many stumble or falter when they have to speak about principles, about causes, about the elements of something, about the nature of something, about something such as unity, being and essence, identity and difference, opposition, ground and consequence, possibility and reality, about completion, about the relation of whole and parts, about the truth and error of something or about necessity and contingency and similar questions, whether in theology or in other disciplines – this we experience daily, with pain. (Geßner in Lewalter , )

Geßner’s complaint testifies to the central force that was driving the return of metaphysics to the Protestant universities: namely, the manner in which the conflict between the rival confessions was being played out in the spiritual formation of their intellectual elites. After a period of relatively peaceful coexistence in the first half of the sixteenth century, the second half was marked by an intensification of the process of confessionalisation in various German territories, principalities, and cities. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the alliance of territorial princes and confessional theologians had given rise to archipelagoes of religiously opposed, mutually hostile states (Schilling ). The fact that Geßner’s demand for the return of the theory of being was issued at the height of the confessional period, from the academic headquarters of Lutheran orthodoxy, leads us to suspect that the characteristic of metaphysics most responsible for its second coming was the spiritual authority that it bestowed on academic philosophers and theologians. If the Calvinist attack on the union of human and divine being was to be repulsed, and if the poorly formed ‘Melanchthonian’ students were to be transformed into a philosophically literate religious intelligentsia



University metaphysics

capable of mounting such defences, then they would have to be trained in the only discipline that permitted them to accede to the exalted domain where human and divine being overlapped: metaphysics. This observation of the confessional–theological character of Protestant Schulmetaphysik provides the appropriate context in which to introduce Walter Sparn’s remarkable Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des frühen . Jahrhunderts (The Return of Metaphysics: The Ontological Question in the Lutheran Theology of the Early th Century), to which I am indebted throughout this section. Sparn’s overturning of all those histories of metaphysics written in terms of the philosophical subsumption of theology hinges on a single fundamental reorientation. Rather than accepting it as the goal of an emancipatory history of philosophy, Sparn argues that the reconciliation of philosophy and theology in university metaphysics was in fact a cultural task imposed by academic theology itself, in accordance with theological ends, and using theological means (Sparn , –). Sparn shows that in early seventeenth-century universities the imperative to reconcile philosophy and theology was formulated in theological rather than philosophical terms (, –). Here it was argued that the disciplines must agree because of the singularity of truth, which is grounded in the self-identity of things created by a single God. This view was also reflected in the ‘two books’ topos – the book of nature and the holy book – whose interpretations must agree because they were written by the same divine hand, which makes natural and revealed knowledge into alternative ways of knowing God in his works. In fact, Sparn argues, the very distinction between natural and revealed knowledge is a theological construct. For it was used to impose a highly abstract category of ‘philosophy’ on a wide range of academic sciences – that is, all the sciences deemed grounded in the unaided or natural use of man’s faculties – with a view to subordinating them to the one revealed science, theology. The consequences of formulating the imperative to reconcile ‘philosophy’ and theology in theological terms can be seen in the doctrine employed to handle any conflicts arising between them. Such conflicts were to be treated as indicative of a personal failing in the philosopher – as symptomatic in fact of the corruption and impairment of all postlapsarian uses of the natural faculties – hence as requiring correction through revealed truths: ‘In this way, despite the principled separation of its scientific domain from that of philosophy, theology charged the philosopher – in the role of the Christian philosopher – with responsibil-

The return of metaphysics



ity for proving philosophically the non-contradictory character of the limitation of philosophical principles demanded by theology’ (, ). In short, as the academic discipline designed to maintain agreement between philosophy and theology, the objective of early-seventeenthcentury metaphysics was not to rationalise theology but to keep potentially secular (‘empiricist’) knowledges and their subjects within the orbit of Christian academic culture. In continuing to see metaphysics as the harmonisation of philosophy and theology, its modern historians may remain more indebted to this objective than they realise. Our second observation is that, as a para-theological discipline dedicated to configuring academic sciences in accordance with Christian culture, university metaphysics was itself subject to profound confessional division. We can gain some insight into the character of this division through a text of Christoph Scheibler. Scheibler belonged to the Gießen school of Lutheran theology, characterised by the strong uptake of Suárez’s theory of intelligible being – in fact he was tagged the ‘Protestant Suárez’. He should therefore be an exponent of Lohr’s ‘confessionally neutral’ metaphysics. This is not, however, the face we encounter in Scheibler’s Foreword to his Opus Metaphysicum of . In the course of dedicating his work to count Ludwig of HessenDarmstadt, Scheibler provides an epitome of his arguments for the necessity of metaphysics, which is worth quoting in full: In any case, it will be recalled that Boethius tells how at the Nicenian Council everyone said that in Christ there are two natures and one person, but no-one knew what this one ‘person’ was. And from this ignorance regarding the concept of person it then came about that some said it was the three persons of the divinity while others would not say this. Hence it is clearly very necessary that metaphysics contain a doctrine in which it explained what a suppositum or persona generally is. Equally, the wise will have often inquired into the differentiation of the three persons of the Godhead. Damascenus said they differed only in relation to our [human] knowledge; others responded that they were really different. What does it mean though: to differ ‘in relation to our knowledge’ (ratione) or ‘really’ (realiter)? Again, one can only discover this through metaphysics. If, further, divine providence comes into consideration then often with it come the expressions ‘necessity’ and ‘actuality’ (contingentia). If, though, the meaning of these expressions is not correctly recognised, then not only the infallibility of divine foreknowledge, but also the freedom and actuality of human decisions, can only be inadequately analysed. In the doctrine of the sacraments ‘sign’ is spoken about often enough. From whence though should one know what a ‘sign’ (signum) is, if not from metaphysics? Once this is known though then all the stupidities of the Calvinists collapse



University metaphysics

together; because the sacraments are not, as the Calvinists teach, ‘bare tokens’ (signa nuda) but have a signification (significant). Hence therefore when, in relation to the eucharistic bread and body of the Lord, sign (signum) is spoken of, one is to understand by this that the body of the Lord is present (while they think that he is only in heaven). In the conflicts with the Socinians (Photiniani) over the Trinity, arguments must often be developed from the nature of such things as cause, infinity, individual and universal, simple and composite. Only metaphysics though explains what all these are. Further, after Luther had restored the priesthood to its original condition, the church was brought into grave tumult through the opinion of Flacius Illyricus, who claimed that original sin is the substance of human nature and not just an accidental attachment. The error arose from the fact that Flacius knew nothing of the details comprehended in [the expression] ‘accidental attachment’ (accidens). (Scheibler in Lewalter , –)

Despite the assurances of modern historians regarding the confessional neutrality of Suárez’s doctrine of intelligible being, we find that this doctrine was itself caught up in bitter and often bloody theological conflict. Scheibler’s view is that a metaphysics of intelligible being is necessary because only those possessing the true (Lutheran) version of it will be able to destroy the false Calvinist doctrines regarding the union of Christ’s two natures, the Trinity, predestination, the mode of Christ’s presence in the eucharistic host, and the character of original sin. Rather than emerging as a confessionally neutral way of addressing the domain of intelligible being, it would appear that the language of metaphysics was being forged in accordance with rival theological viewpoints. In his discussion of the conflict between Lutheran and Calvinist metaphysics, Sparn treats them as two opposed ways of configuring the relation between infinite intelligible being and finite human being, representing in fact two opposed ways of relating theology and philosophy. For Sparn, ‘Lutheran metaphysics’ – which he expounds largely through the works of Balthasar Meisner and Jacob Martini of Wittenberg – is characterised by a particular disposition of its ‘general’ and ‘special’ parts (Sparn , –). General metaphysics, which Abraham Calov named Ontologia in , deals with being in general, including divine being. Special metaphysics deals with the three kinds of being – divine, cosmic, and human – eventually giving rise to the three sub-disciplines of ‘rational’ theology, cosmology, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Meisner’s and Martini’s Lutheran construction of general metaphysics lies in their stress on the unbridgeable gulf between God’s radically autarkic infinite being and man’s radically dependent

The return of metaphysics



finite being. This is a gulf so great that it cannot even be spanned by human concepts, which means that God can be understood as a ‘being’ or ‘substance’ only in an analogical sense (analogia entis). Here, in the analogical application of philosophical concepts to God we find a characteristic expression of the joining of philosophical and theological perspectives, and Sparn comments that: ‘In consciousness of the convergence of these perspectives, metaphysics assumed not only the terminology of creation doctrine but also the attitude of pietas’ (). The Lutheran construction of general metaphysics or ontology thus meant that divine being could only be analogically included under human concepts. But, conversely, it also meant that to the extent that God was known in ontology then he appeared in a purely (Aristotelian) ‘scientific’ manner – as the physical cause of motion – his divine nature remaining inscrutable to ‘natural’ philosophy. Meisner’s and Martini’s refusal to allow natural knowledge of the divine nature in ontology or general metaphysics is not, as Beck has argued, a symptom of Lutheran anti-intellectualism (Beck , ). Rather, it indicates that they reserved this knowledge for the domain of special metaphysics. Here it would occur not through natural philosophical means, but via the mediation of the gulf between the human and the divine that only Christian theology may perform – in fact via the figure of Christ, whose two natures form the nexus between divine and human being (Sparn , –). Sparn thus characterises Lutheran metaphysics as consisting of a ‘dualist’ or ‘analogical’ general part – where the conflict between logic and Christology could be treated as symptomatic of the gulf between human and divine understanding – and a ‘mediational’ special part, where this conflict would be overcome not in philosophy but via a metaphysical theology and sacramental ‘actions’ (–). Despite the fact that he discusses it largely as a foil, Sparn argues that the ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ developed by Keckermann, Timpler, and Alsted took a very different form to the Lutheran. According to Sparn, by drawing on a ‘monistic’ Platonic conception of the intelligibility of divine being, this metaphysics denied any absolute gulf between human and divine being (, –). In treating creation in terms of the divine being’s intellection of the essences, Calvinist metaphysics could view humans as participating in the divine intellection of the universe in a ‘natural’ or philosophical manner. This was made possible by their residual possession of an uncorrupted spark of the divine intellect – their ‘rational being’ – which was regarded as the source of man’s imago Dei or God-likeness (–). For Calvinist metaphysicians, therefore,



University metaphysics

general metaphysics or ontology was also natural (philosophical) theology – approximating in fact to the ‘rational’ theory of intelligible being that modern historians identify with metaphysics as such. Hence, Sparn argues, rather than reserving knowledge of the divine nature for Christian theology, Calvinist metaphysics began to treat philosophy itself as a kind of theology (–). It taught that the metaphysician himself could rise to a quasi-sacral knowledge of God. This would take place through such ‘Platonic’ practices as anamnesis – the contemplative ‘remembering’ of the divine mind’s continuous ‘sub-conscious’ thinking of the forms of things; or via the contemplative ascent from empirical appearances of things to the pure intellection of their forms or intelligences. Through these practices ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ prepared the ground for enlightenment ‘rationalism’. Our third observation concerns the manner in which a philosophical theology (or theological philosophy) emerged from the hybridising of Christian mysteries and philosophical concepts in metaphysics. If the way in which Schulmetaphysik formulated the relation between philosophy and theology was determined by conflicting theologies and ecclesiologies, then this refurbished metaphysics simultaneously provided these conflicting theologies and ecclesiologies with ‘philosophical’ articulation and armoury. From this reciprocity between its theological and philosophical organs, university metaphysics gave birth to a philosophical theology. Here, the ‘rational’ explication of the Christian mysteries was accompanied by a profound theological investment of philosophical concepts and doctrines, such that philosophical theology was always theological philosophy. This process took place through the continuous elaboration of a series of conflicting theological–philosophical doctrines – in the crucial areas of Christology and soteriology – as the rival confessions battled to delineate Protestant orthodoxy and to groom its intellectual bearers in the university. The crucial forms of these doctrines are clearly visible in Scheibler’s list. What is not so clear is the degree to which the early-seventeenth-century metaphysical explications of the Christian mysteries would flow into the philosophical theologies of the enlightenment rationalists. In order to prepare the ground for our subsequent discussion of this question, we shall draw on Sparn for three key instances. We have already mentioned the first of these, the rival metaphysical elaborations of the doctrine of Christ’s two natures and one person. This doctrine was central to all the Christian confessions; for it was through the sacramental union of Christ’s human and divine natures

The return of metaphysics



that the churches could offer mediation and redemption to the faithful, making the figure of Christ into such an intense object of worship and speculation (Baur ). University metaphysics entered the domain of Christology in order to reconcile a conflict with ‘Paduan’ logic. This arose because Christ’s saving office requires the transfer of essential properties between his two natures (communicatio idiomata), which entails the a-logical doctrine that a single supposite or ‘person’ could be the bearer of two conflicting sets of defining properties or ‘natures’. Sparn’s erudite discussion of this problem focuses on the conflicting solutions proposed by Lutheran and Calvinist metaphysicians, in accordance with their rival Christologies (Sparn , –). Briefly, Lutheran metaphysicians such as Meisner insisted that Christ’s natures should be understood as two distinct substances at the ‘philosophical’ level in order to posit their ‘perichoretic’ union – involving the complete reciprocal exchange of divine and human properties – in the ‘concrete’ performances of the incarnation and eucharist. Conversely, Calvinist metaphysicians taught that Christ’s true substance was his divine nature or Logos. This meant that he assumed his human nature ‘accidentally’ for the purposes of its regeneration – a solution more in keeping with the standard logic of substances and defining properties. For our present purposes, however, it is not the differences between the rival metaphysical Christologies that matter, but the manner in which they both give rise to a moral anthropology oriented to personal unity. For, in tying moral regeneration to the unification of the person’s divine and human natures, these Christologies gave rise to a redemptivist conception of personal unity that would flow directly into the metaphysical ethics of Leibniz and Kant. Sparn has thus argued that the central contours of Leibniz’s monadology – the relation between the monad’s active rational soul and the passive corporeal body to which it is attached – may be seen as a generalisation of the Lutheran metaphysical conception of Christ’s two natures (Sparn ). Even more pointedly, however, we shall see that Kant makes extensive use of the figure of Christ’s two natures and one person in order to give shape to his conception of moral regeneration (see .. below). In fact Kant superimposes the Christological doctrine of Christ’s divine and human natures onto the metaphysical doctrine of man’s noumenal and phenomenal natures, thereby conceiving of moral renewal as a kind of secular spiritual rebirth taking place via philosophy within the person. We find a similarly unsettling continuity between Christian and ‘rationalist’ metaphysics in our second instance of doctrinal elaboration – that



University metaphysics

occasioned by conflicting theologies of Christ’s mode of presence in the eucharistic host. Here a longstanding problem – that of accounting for Christ’s simultaneous presence in a foreign substance at different times and places – was exacerbated by the replacement of Aristotelian physics with a new cosmology: the Galilean–Newtonian conception of the universe as a set of spatio-temporal relations between physical bodies. In his discussion of this issue, Sparn concentrates on the manner in which Lutheran metaphysicians defended their conception of Christ’s ‘real presence’ in different places simultaneously – the so-called ‘ubiquity’ doctrine – against the Calvinist conception of a merely ‘symbolic’ presence in the host (, –). Meisner’s solution was to draw on pneumatological and eschatological doctrines, in particular those associated with the ‘non-spatial’ presence of the body in the soul, and of glorified bodies in space during the time of the apocalypse. This enabled him to declare that the property of filling space (extension) was ‘accidental’ for bodies rather than real, while simultaneously reconceiving ‘place’ in a non-spatial manner, via the notion of relations within a spiritual community. He could thus defend the doctrines of real presence and ubiquity by appealing to the capacity of Christ’s glorified body to suspend the accident of filling physical space, thereby being present everywhere in the community of immaterial beings. For our present concerns, the striking feature of this defence is the manner in which it gives rise to a doctrine that would be central to enlightenment metaphysics: namely, the doctrine of the ‘subjectivity’ of space and time (Beck , ). In order to maintain God’s real presence in the physical universe – thereby preserving it as the locale for redemption – Meisner’s pneumatology and eschatology permitted him to treat the spatio-temporal localisation of physical bodies as ‘imaginary’. By this he meant that it arose from the manner in which their substantial (immaterial) relations appeared to beings possessing man’s sensory apparatus. Leibniz’s metaphysical explication of trans-substantiation in his (posthumously titled) Systema Theologicum () shows how directly this conception passed into ‘rational’ philosophical theology. For here Leibniz dedicates his ‘metaphysical physics’ – his doctrine of unextended ‘point forces’ that give the appearance of occupying space due to their impenetrability – to the same end as Meisner’s pneumatology and eschatology. He seeks, that is, to treat Christ’s occupancy of the eucharist host as the ‘accidental’ manifestation of his immaterial substance in the spatio-temporal world (TS, –). Leibniz’s metaphysics of the eucharist – through which he hoped to restore the divided confessions to

The return of metaphysics



rational unity – may thus be regarded as an updating of the initial Christian–metaphysical attempts to preserve the redemptive potential of the universe against its Newtonian spatialisation (Fouke ). We may suggest that Kant’s doctrine of the subjective character of space and time – his conception of the Newtonian universe as the form in which a non-spatial community of intelligences appears to a creature with man’s sensibility – constitutes a similar act of preservation, as Wundt has argued in detail (Wundt , –, –, –). Here we witness the sprouting of modern ‘anti-empiricist’ philosophies, dedicated to the transcendent(al) conditions of experience, from their Christian–metaphysical seed-bed. Our third and final instance of the elaboration of philosophical– theological doctrine takes place in the metaphysics of morality. Here the problem confronting seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik was not the clash between logic and Christology, or physics and cosmology, but that between pagan ethics and Christian moral theology. Sparn argues that this problem was focused in discussions of sin and evil. If Aristotelian ethics employed a purely negative conception of evil – as the ‘privative’ failure to realise the ‘good’ or perfection contained in the entelechy of all things – then Christian theology regarded evil quite differently: as a positive choice by originally sinful man to transgress God’s holy law (Sparn , –). Through its conception of original sin as the transcendent predisposition to break divine law, the Christian conception of ‘radical evil’ is opposed to all pagan (Stoic, Epicurean) conceptions of a morally indifferent human nature; for these treat ethical attributes as ‘imposed’ in accordance with earthly interests or civil purposes. According to Sparn, the Calvinist and Catholic metaphysics of morality adopted the Platonic ‘ontological’ view of evil, in terms of the corrupting effects of matter and flesh on man’s rational soul. From the Lutheran perspective, this view not only threatened to reduce moral theology to ethics – by deriving sin and redemption from man’s philosophically accessible ethical substance – it also negated free will and responsibility, mortgaging man’s moral fate to the predestined corruption of his moral being. Lutheran metaphysicians like Meisner sought to avoid these consequences by treating the corruption of man’s sensible nature as itself the product of a free choice to transgress God’s law, while simultaneously treating this choice in a quasi-Aristotelian manner as the failure to realise the perfection of man’s rational soul. Once again, we are less concerned with the detail of these earlyseventeenth-century conflicts than with the fact that they gave rise to



University metaphysics

doctrines that would remain central to the enlightenment metaphysics of morals. This applies in particular to the Lutheran metaphysics of evil. Lutheran metaphysicians treat evil not primarily in terms of man’s corrupt sensible nature, but in terms of the transcendent choice that brings this nature into being, through a ruinous ‘qualification’ of man’s rational faculties. Setting aside the apparent circularity of this doctrine – for why would the first humans choose evil unless their natures were already corrupt? – we may observe that it remains central to the metaphysical ethics developed by both Leibniz and Kant. As we shall see in more detail below (..), Leibniz’s discussion of evil in his Theodicy moves within precisely the same pattern of thought, attempting to show how a rational being, predisposed to evil by its corporeal embodiment, might nonetheless freely choose the corporeal nature that predisposes it to evil (Riley , –). Similarly, we shall see that Kant’s metaphysics of radical evil is an improvisation on the same figure of thought (..). Significantly, both philosophers invoke man’s transcendent predisposition to evil in order to attack the ‘indifferentist’ conception of man’s moral nature contained in the ‘Epicurean’ anthropologies of the civil philosophers. They do so not because of a more profound insight into the nature of morality, but in order to defend the Christian metaphysics of morality against an anthropology that would place the determination of good and evil at the disposal of civil purposes and powers. In short, through its philosophical explication of Christian doctrine, seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik gave rise not to a ‘rational’ (desacralised, detranscendentalised) philosophical theology, but to one that pursued the sacralising ends of Christian metaphysics via other ‘enlightened’ means. It did so by providing its enlightenment successor with a Christological conception of homo duplex, as a morally self-redemptive being; an ‘anti-empiricist’ and redemptivist conception of the subjective character of the spatio-temporal world; and with a transcendent conception of good and evil, designed to outflank the civil determination of ethics in terms of man’s worldly need for peace and security. We shall return to these issues in Part . We are now in a position to signal our fourth and final observation regarding the historiography of metaphysics as the rational subsumption of theology. This concerns the quasi-religious intellectual deportment of the metaphysician and the spiritual–social prestige attaching to it. At this point however we must depart from Sparn’s remarkable history of Protestant Schulmetaphysik. For despite his observation of the ‘attitude of pietas’ attaching to metaphysics through its proximity to theology, and

The return of metaphysics



despite his comment that ‘Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a determinate shaping of religious life’ (, ), Sparn can provide no clear account of metaphysics as a quasi-sacral ethos. As a result of his own commitment to Lutheran ‘dualist’ metaphysics – whose distinctive feature is to reserve the crucial mediations of divine and human being for Christian theology – Sparn can only regard self-sacralising philosophical attempts at such mediation as indicative of the collapse of ‘Christian theology’ into an ersatz philosophical theology or ‘theosophy’: ‘according to the Lutheran framework there is no Christian metaphysics that mediates theology as philosophy’ (). This leads him to treat the notion that metaphysics might itself perform a sacralising role as indicative of a ‘crisis’ in Lutheran theology, one that it passed through on its way towards a more universalistic and scientific conception of its subject and object (Sparn ). Conversely, he regards the monistic–Platonic character of ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ as predisposing it to just such a self-sacralising conception of its role. For Sparn, it is this quasi-Platonic character – typified in its treatment of the world as containing the divine perfections in a form open to philosophical intellection – that transforms Calvinist rationalism into the progenitor of enlightenment rationalism, signalling the end of ‘Christian metaphysics’ (Sparn , ). A quasi-sacral understanding of its role is, however, far more deeply and generally embedded in early modern university metaphysics than Sparn’s account can allow for. In placing divine being beyond the reach of the corrupted human faculties, all versions of metaphysics were a means of giving shape to the personage who would overcome this corruption through self-clarifying, self-purifying spiritual exercises. Despite manifold differences, the entire spectrum of metaphysics is indebted to a single fundamental figure of thought: namely, that the gap between divine and human being (or the intelligible and sensible worlds) can only be closed by a person whose purification of his own human–sensible nature qualifies him for participation in quasi-divine intellection. Through this figure of thought we see the fundamental and ineradicable dependence of metaphysical knowledge on the ‘ascetic’ formation of its bearer. This formation, which merges intellectual and moral purity, is dependent on the core metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex – the figure of sensibly embodied intelligible being – whose role is to induce the longing for transcendent intellection. It was through this practice of intellectual self-culture – that is, by participating in a rite of speculative self-purification deemed to qualify them



University metaphysics

for quasi-divine intellection – that university metaphysicians acquired the spiritual–social prestige needed to explicate Christian mysteries, and to advise those seeking to govern Christian states. This, after all, is precisely why Thomasius identified university metaphysics with ‘sectarian philosophy’, urging law students to repudiate its core anthropological doctrines: ‘That God’s nature consists in thinking. That man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happiness of the whole human race depends on the correct arrangement of thought . . . That the will is improved through the understanding. That it is within human capacity to live virtuously and happily’ (SEG, –). In order to clarify this role of metaphysics as the ethos of a quasi-sacral estate, and thereby complete our fourth observation, we must turn to another source. .         Post-Kantian history of philosophy prides itself on accounting for the transition from ‘metaphysical’ to ‘anthropological’ constructions of reason, treating this as symptomatic of reason’s progress from its theocentric origins to the full recovery of its autonomous grounding in man. In approaching it as an ethos, however, we discover that metaphysics is itself deeply anthropological; for, no matter how theocentric its conception of rational being, metaphysics remains a discipline for grooming man in the image of this conception. This shifting of the axis of historical analysis is, of course, the direct outcome of our approaching philosophies via the anthropologies they presuppose and the spiritual exercises they require. In this setting, what matters is not the content of the image of rational being – whether this is restricted to God and the pure intelligences, or extended to man’s own higher intelligence – but the selfformative use to which the image is put; for in each case the bearer of this rational being will be man, as he carries out the exercises designed to reshape himself in this image. It is in seeking to clarify the role of university metaphysics as an intellectual paideia that we briefly break the bounds of our early modern focus, in order to take advantage of a remarkable study of Albert the Great’s Metaphysics Commentary. In doing so, we seek not to posit doctrinal continuity between late medieval and early modern metaphysics, but to uncover the roots of university metaphysics as a distinctive culture of the self. Beroald Thomassen’s study of Albert’s commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics and ethics offers invaluable assistance in this regard (Thomassen ). It provides an outline of a metaphysical

The metaphysical ethos



culture or Lebensform – an ensemble of doctrines and disciplines dedicated to a mode of spiritual grooming – which we shall find surfacing time and again through the entire history of university metaphysics, albeit of course in a wide variety of forms. Indeed, we shall be returning to Thomassen’s study in order to help elucidate the sense in which Kant’s metaphysics of morals may also be regarded as a form of spiritual grooming (.). At the heart of Albert’s construction of academic metaphysics is the reciprocal relation established between knowledge of its object and perfection of the intellect that knows. Metaphysics is the highest form of knowledge because its pursuit bestows the highest form of perfection of which the human intellect is capable, its participation in the divine; while physics and mathematics only perfect the intellect in its temporal and spatial forms, respectively. As Albert formulates this in his Metaphysics Commentary: through metaphysics ‘we accede to that true wisdom of philosophy, which perfects the intellect according to the degree that something divine exists in us; in the same way that natural science perfects the intellect so far as it is bound to time, and inclined to the continuum [space], to the extent that it is perfected by instruction’ (Albert in Thomassen , , fn. ). This is the basis on which Thomassen effects the fundamental methodological shift lying at the centre of his study. It allows him to show that Albert’s exposition of the foundations of metaphysics is not grounded in concepts thinkable by a generic human subject. Rather, the pursuit of foundations takes place instead through a construction that ties the concepts of metaphysics to the moral condition of the being qualified as their bearer: The grounding of metaphysics, which . . . is a constitutive element of metaphysics itself, is not simply aimed at the exposition of a logically and factually coherent system of metaphysical basic concepts – concepts suited to comprehending the object domain of metaphysics in a subject-independent manner and to demarcating it from the object domain of other sciences. The grounding of metaphysics asks more generally for the enabling of metaphysics as a science whose bearer is man, and is to this degree anthropocentric. (Thomassen , )

Thomassen argues that Albert constructs the possibility of metaphysics through a complex set of doctrines regarding the nature and relations of divine and human being (, –). According to these doctrines, which Albert elaborates through an Averroistic paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, God exists as a pure intellect spontaneously thinking the forms of the intelligible world. He is related to man by virtue of the fact



University metaphysics

that man, despite being an embodied creature, also possesses a pure intellect, or at least the potential to realise one. In fact man’s intellect is regarded as the ‘substantial form’ or telos of his being, itself emanating from the divine intellect. This means that the ‘completion’ of man’s intellect, through the discipline of metaphysics, signifies both the perfection of the human being and its partial return to God. This metaphysical anthropology is indispensable for understanding not just the grounding of metaphysics as a science, but also the modelling of the intellectual deportment whose grooming lies at the heart of metaphysics as an academic culture. According to Albert, metaphysics is founded in man’s desire for knowledge of it; but this subjective grounding also has an objective dimension, as the desire arises from the ontological difference between the divine and human intellects. The divine intellect differs from the human one by virtue of the fact that it is pure active intellection (Thomassen , –). Unhampered by the passive or receptive faculties characteristic of the human, the divine intellect knows things by bringing them forth from its own thinking, creating the ‘intelligibles’ or substantial forms of all things through reflection on itself, which means that the divine intellect creates and encounters the world through spontaneous self-reflection. The spontaneous activity of the divine intellect is linked to its perfect simplicity, for this allows it to have direct intuitive knowledge of the simple (nonembodied) substances – the intelligibles that arise from its intellection of them. The human intellect, though, ‘beshadowed’ through its combination with space and time, and complexified through its possession of passive receptive faculties, is incapable of knowing the intelligible forms directly in their simple non-embodied state. It encounters them instead only as they have been ‘scattered’ through space and time in material things (–). The human intellect is thus discursive rather than intuitive. It must use syllogistic and other forms of argument to pick its way through the scatter of phenomena, gradually and painstakingly synthesising knowledge of the intelligible principles of the world, which are known to the divine intellect through instantaneous and eternal selfreflection. As Heimsoeth has argued, this fundamental oppositional elaboration between the divine and human intellects provides the basis for the distinction between the active and passive intellect in Leibniz’s monadology, and for Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena (Heimsoeth b; Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth ). Given that the intelligibles or substantial forms are in fact the object of metaphysics as a science – constituting the domain of ‘being as being’

The metaphysical ethos



prior to its embodiment in the specific kinds of being which are the objects of the particular sciences – then the divine intellect must be the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge. Indeed, Albert says that God contemplates himself in metaphysics. At the same time, though, because he too possesses the spark of an active intellect, man is also capable of metaphysical knowledge, even if he must, for the most part, be satisfied with it in the approximate form suited to his discursive faculties (Thomassen , –). The condition of man attaining this knowledge is that he purify his intellect of its attachment to the sensory forms of space and time. He achieves this through the practices of abstraction and speculation, the three speculative sciences – (Aristotelian) physics, (Euclidean) mathematics, and metaphysics – constituting in fact a hierarchy of ways of perfecting the human intellect (). In other words, the human intellect accedes to metaphysical knowledge only to the degree that it transforms itself into an approximation of the divine. Man only comes to grasp the simple non-embodied substances to the extent that he ‘participates’ in the simple divine intellect that emanates them (). Abstraction and speculation in metaphysics thus assume the form of spiritual exercises, representing a work of self-purification performed by the intellect on itself. Three features of Thomassen’s account are of particular significance for our conjectural outline of the culture of university metaphysics. First, the reciprocal relation between the knowledge of metaphysics and the ‘spiritual’ or moral constitution of its bearer means that metaphysics is always shadowed by a particular moral anthropology. In Albert’s Aristotelian version this reciprocity is focused in the figure of the ‘separated’ or non-embodied substantial forms. For these are both the object that man strives to know in order to have access to ‘being as being’; and they are also the principles that make everything knowable, to which man accedes only by perfecting his own substantial form, his intellect. Of course, the particular character of this reciprocity between the metaphysical subject and object alters when the Aristotelian substantial forms are replaced by the Scotist treatment of being in terms of the divine intellect’s non-contradictory intelligising of possibilia, some of which it then wills into actual existence (Möhle ). But this does not alter the fundamental ‘ascetic’ reciprocity between the object and subject of metaphysics. For, in Scotist metaphysics, it remains God’s simple, spontaneous, and intuitive intellect that is responsible for the non-contradictory intelligising of the possible concepts; and it is still man’s duplex, sensible–intellectual subjectivity that must be purified through abstraction in order to qualify



University metaphysics

it for knowledge of this object (Honnefelder , –). Seen in this light, Sparn’s distinction between ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Calvinist’ metaphysics – the former insisting that the limits of the human intellect preclude its ‘philosophical’ participation in divine intellection, the latter arguing that such participation is possible for a suitably purified intellect – does not represent the difference between a truly theological and a merely ‘theosophical’ metaphysics. Instead, it points to a confessional variation in the anthropology being used to configure the intellectual deportment of the metaphysician. Second, the manner in which the metaphysical anthropology ties the knowledge of its objects to the moral constitution of its bearer also holds the key to the discipline’s ‘ascetic’ or self-transformative character. Albert regarded the gap between human and divine intellection as the enabling condition of metaphysics. By separating man’s natural desire for knowledge from its satisfaction, this gap creates the need for a specifically metaphysical knowledge – that is, for knowledge of things in the pure form in which they emanate from the divine intellect (Thomassen , –). Through the teaching that only God has full possession of metaphysical knowledge, man comes to know himself as the being who seeks this knowledge and whose perfection lies in its attainment. For, unless metaphysical knowledge were inaccessible to man, he would not desire it (–). This is why Albert says that metaphysics is founded in wonder – the impact of man’s ignorance on himself – which causes him to turn from the practical to the theoretic life, as the only way of overcoming his deficit (–). For Albert, of course, man’s desire for metaphysics comes ultimately from God, whose perfect contemplative felicity makes his condition the most desirable possible. From a properly historical perspective, however, it is the paideia of metaphysics itself – inculcated in religious or academic institutions dedicated to grooming the spiritual elite – that is responsible for inducing the desire for metaphysical knowledge. It does so by imbuing its novices with a view of themselves as beings cut off from divine intellection by the sensible embodiment of their intellects. Through this anthropologically induced pathos, apprentice philosophers are disposed to relate to themselves as beings whose true selves lie in the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge. This mode of relating to themselves in turn impels their adherence to metaphysics as an ethos; for it leads them to treat the discipline of metaphysics as the means of purifying their sense-affected intellects, hoping thereby to realise the pure one in which the intelligible forms of the world will be revealed. We may

The metaphysical ethos



pause to observe how profoundly this alters our understanding of Kant’s doctrine of the inaccessibility of noumena – the intelligibles created through divine intellection – to human understanding. We should regard this doctrine neither as if noumena were real entities lying beyond human intelligence (the ‘metaphysical’ interpretation), nor as if they were null posits designed to restrict reason to empirical experience (the ‘phenomenalist’ interpretation). Instead, we can treat the inaccessibility of the Kantian noumena as the latest variation in a longstanding paideia designed to induce the pathos of metaphysical longing and the ethos of intellectual self-purification. This paideia continues to work its magic even on today’s philosophers (Holzhey ). Finally, in tying human perfection to the characteristic life-activity of the metaphysician, the self-transformative function of university metaphysics gives rise to a particular claim to moral and social authority. Here, in defending the vita contemplativa as the highest form of life – on the basis of Aristotle’s subordination of civil well-being to contemplative happiness – Albert again prefigures a key tendency of the whole culture of university metaphysics. Thomassen argues that the Aristotelian hierarchy of forms of life is based on the fundamental distinction between activities undertaken in order to realise some end and those undertaken for their own sake. Perfect happiness arises only from the latter kind of activity; for, by being its own end or good, such activity depends upon no goods outside itself, thereby unifying all the goods and becoming autarkic (, ). Contemplation is the only activity of this kind, which means that contemplative happiness is the highest possible and the contemplative life the most virtuous, as man is perfectly happy only when he possesses all the virtues. Civil happiness though arises from activity undertaken in accordance with a single virtue: prudence (, ). Prudence is the form of all the civil virtues, as it is the principle of acting to realise some end, typically the political and commercial ends of civil life. The man of justice or politicus perfects the virtue of prudence, and his role is to realise the civil security required for the man of wisdom or philosophus to pursue the true end of humanity, speculation. Despite the fact that prudence plays a necessary role in providing the personal and social tranquillity required for speculation, it cannot be compared with the summa of the virtues in contemplation, which means that civil happiness is only a preparatory stage for contemplative happiness. This is because, through theoretical activity, the higher part of the soul is enlightened by the active intellect, permitting it to ‘touch’ the domain of the intelligences, thereby perfecting



University metaphysics

man. Prudential activity and civil happiness, though, are viewed as products of the lower or ‘unenlightened’ part of the rational soul, governed by the ends of useful action in the civil world (–). Here we can see the genesis of the entire line of ‘anti-consequentialist’, anti-civil moral and political philosophy – from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond – whose hostility to civil prudence is grounded in the self-sacralising cultivation of contemplative autarky. With this account of metaphysical anthropology as an instrument for the spiritual grooming of a ‘contemplative’ intellectual elite, we complete our fourth and final observation on the history of metaphysics as the philosophical subsumption of theology. We have argued that the return of metaphysics to the early-seventeenth-century Protestant university was driven by the exigencies of confessional conflict rather than the need to recover man’s rational being. Rather than responding to a rational need for the unity of ‘philosophy’ and theology, it imposed this unity – in conflicting ways – at the behest of confessional theologies. Further, rather than bequeathing a rational philosophical theology to the Enlightenment, the philosophical explication of the Christian mysteries in Schulmetaphysik gave rise to natural theologies in which the ends of Christian metaphysics would be pursued via ‘rationalist’ means. Finally, in grasping that the metaphysician returned to the academy not as the subject of reason but as the bearer of an elite self-sacralising culture, we have begun to grasp the source of the authority wielded by this personage. We shall conclude our overview of university metaphysics with a few remarks on this last topic.  .                    In responding to the account of the return of metaphysics as a purely rational–philosophical phenomenon, we have begun to show its role in the confessional–political circumstances of early modern Germany, concentrating on the cultural authority claimed by university philosophers as a particular estate. By cultivating insight into the transcendent concepts and laws of a divinely intelligised universe, metaphysically trained philosophers could present themselves to bishops and princes as uniquely able to discern the true ends of church and state. At the same time, the reciprocity between religious and civil discipline in earlyseventeenth-century cities and states provided political metaphysicians with a context well suited to the reactivation of this ostensibly ancient form of spiritual–political authority. In this religiously charged political

Political metaphysics



environment – in which conflicts between Empire and territorial state were deeply informed by those between opposed confessional-political estates – university philosophers could seek to shape civil governance in accordance with their quasi-sacral role as ‘Christian philosophers’. This is, of course, a highly idealised portrait. In seeking to provide it with concrete historical anchorage – by briefly discussing the Politica () of Johannes Althusius – we encounter all the difficulties of attempting to clarify the significance of abstract thought in highly ramified historical–political circumstances (Althusius ; Friedrich ). Althusius was a political philosopher rather than a university metaphysician and, as Robert von Friedeburg has shown, his Politica represents a sophisticated attempt to configure the political relations between the Empire and the territorial estates (Friedeburg ). Nonetheless, without dissenting from Friedeburg’s account, we may observe that Althusius relies on several leading Calvinist metaphysicians and theologians, including Keckermann, Zanchius, Aretius, Ursinus, and of course Calvin. Moreover, as Sparn has argued, in providing an overarching theological ordering of the contents of politics, ethics, and jurisprudence, Althusius’ Politica is a characteristic instance of confessional Schulphilosophie (Sparn ). In the Preface to the third edition we thus find Althusius arguing that: ‘I claim the Decalogue as proper to political science insofar as it breathes a vital spirit into symbiotic life, and gives form to it and conserves it, in which sense it is essential and homogenous to political science and heterogeneous to other arts . . . No one denies, however, that all arts are united in practice’ (Althusius , ). This theological framing of politics, however, is only a pointer to Althusius’ central political–metaphysical construct: his concept of ‘universal symbiotic communion’ (communio symbiotica universalis). In stressing his difference from those, like Bodin, who locate sovereignty in the prince and the supreme magistracy, Althusius insists that it resides in the ‘universal consociation’ or ‘the people’. For Althusius, sovereignty comes from the associated people because the conservation of their welfare, which forms the end of politics, arises not from the exercise of princely power, but from the communication of rights and capacities in universal symbiosis: ‘Universal symbiotic communion is the process by which the members of the realm or universal association communicate everything necessary and useful to it, and remove and do away with everything to the contrary’ (, ). By grounding political right in a communion of the people that is simultaneously spiritual and material,



University metaphysics

the Politica achieves the integration of religious and civil governance, which is the hallmark of confessional political theologies: Universal symbiotic communion is both ecclesiastical and secular. Corresponding to the former are religion and piety, which pertain to the welfare and eternal life of the soul, the entire first table of the Decalogue. Corresponding to the latter is justice, which concerns the use of the body and of this life, and the rendering to each his due, the second table of the Decalogue. In the former, everything is to be referred immediately to the glory of God; in the latter, to the utility and welfare of the people associated in one body. These are the two foundations of every good association. (Althusius , )

This metaphysical grounding of right and law in the spontaneous spiritual and physical communication between community members holds the key to Althusius’ political and religious doctrines. It allows him, for example, to include both tables of the Decalogue in his conception of natural law, on the grounds that this law expresses the fundamental forms of spiritual and civil communion of the ‘symbiotes’. Further, it also permits him to insist on the superiority of this theologically informed natural law over the civil law propounded by jurists and princes: ‘For there is no civil law, nor can there be any, in which something of natural and divine immutable equity has not been mixed. If it departs entirely from the judgment of natural and divine law ( jus naturale et divinum), it is not to be called law (lex). It is entirely unworthy of this name, and can obligate no one against natural and divine equity’ (, ). Finally, and most importantly, Althusius’ metaphysical conception of political community lies at the root of his construction of popular sovereignty. For it allows him to argue – against Bodin’s political jurisprudence and Machiavelli’s reason of state – that supreme political power comes not from the sovereign’s role in securing social peace, but flows instead from the symbiotic community, as the means by which it enforces the forms of its spiritual and civil communion (–). Given his desire to ground political sovereignty in a morally associated people, and given their desire to find precursors for a rationally grounded democratic sovereignty, it is not surprising to find post-Kantian philosophical historians embracing Althusius in these terms. Beck, for example, while acknowledging a ‘moderate’ degree of religious intolerance in the Althusian polity, sees the concept of political symbiosis as a ‘naturalistic’ expression of Calvinist rationalism that anticipates theories of the secular democratic state (Beck , –). Similarly, SchmidtBiggemann regards Althusius’ conception of natural law as anticipating the enlightenment subordination of positive Staatsrecht to a higher moral

Political metaphysics



law, even if the confusion of moral and religious community in the confessional period proved an obstacle in this regard (Schmidt-Biggemann b). Historians of political thought have begun to show how inaccurate this view is, particularly given Althusius’ use of ‘popular sovereignty’ as a means of defending the political rights of the territorial estates against those of the Empire (Friedeburg ; Skinner ). Given our interest in Althusius as a political metaphysician, however, our attention is focused on the manner in which the concept of symbiotic communion superimposes the religious on the political community. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that Althusius’ symbiotic communication is grounded in the metaphysical concept of the spiritual community and the religious figure of the communion of the saints in Christ’s mystical body. Althusius’ account of the role of the provincial religious estate (Geistliche Stand) shows just how tightly these conceptions bind the religious and civil concerns of the Politica: A collegium of pious, learned and most weighty men from the collegia of provincial clergymen, elected and commissioned by common consent, represents the sacred and ecclesiastical order. Entrusted to this collegium is the examination and care of doctrine, of public reverence and divine worship, of schools, of ecclesiastical goods and of the poor. Indeed, the care of all ecclesiastical business of the holy life in the entire province is entrusted to it in order that all the saints may unite for a common ministry, and constitute one mystical body. (Althusius , )

If the conception of symbiotic communion permitted Althusius to ground sovereignty in moral community, then it simultaneously allowed him to conceive of a civil exercise of religious authority, designed to conform the fallen civil community to its spiritual archetype. This merging of religious and civil discipline is particularly apparent in his account of the provincial presbyters, ‘to whom is assigned the administration of ecclesiastical things – that is, the administration of things other than the word and sacraments – for holding the saints together, for the work of the ministry and for building up the body of Christ’. He continues: Upon the presbyters rests especially the care of those things that have been instituted for arousing repentance in the brethren and for conserving discipline. Therefore, together with bishops, who are properly called presbyters, they preside over censorship of morals. Their office is also to observe that ministers perform their duties, and to disclose errors, schisms, scandals, and public necessities to the ministers for the purpose of producing prayers and repentance. (, )



University metaphysics

It is also on this basis that ‘the presbytery receives from God the power of the keys by which the kingdom of heaven opens and closes’ (). Writ large, the Politica provides a political theology for the Protestant territorial state of the pre-Westphalian period. It seems likely, however, that its concrete political correlate is to be found in the governance of the Imperial city-state, jointly ruled by councillors and presbyters. In fact, in the Calvinist city-state of Emden, where Althusius held the position of Syndic or chief magistrate from  to , we find a practice of presbyterial governance strikingly like that outlined in the Politica. Heinz Schilling’s research in the Emden presbyterial archives gives us some sense of the way in which Althusius’ programmatic identification of spiritual and political community was played out in historical reality (Schilling ). In showing how the city presbyters used ex-communication (‘the power of the keys’) to punish a wide variety of civil misdemeanours – drunkenness, fights between neighbours, sexual transgressions – this research shows that it was in fact the circle of communicants that formed the model for the political community. Breaches in the moral purity required for holy communion thus led to disqualification from civil association. In short, while Althusius sought an appropriate figuration for the governance of the city and the state, his Politica was grounded in the political metaphysics of the church, as the kingdom of God on earth. By grounding civil authority in moral community, the political metaphysics of universal symbiotic communion allowed Althusius to attack Bodin’s purely political–juridical conception of sovereignty. But this metaphysics simultaneously committed him to using civil authority in order to enforce moral community. As we noted in the Introduction, in attacking political metaphysics Thomasius alleged just such a homology between the merging of theology and the civil sciences in ‘sectarian philosophy’, and the merging of religious and civil power in the confessional state. It was for this reason that civil philosophy emerged as a profound repudiation of all forms of university metaphysics, Catholic and Protestant, secular and theological.

   

Civil philosophy

.      In the Foreword that he wrote to the first German translation of Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis (), Christian Thomasius was in no doubt about who the enemy was. In outlining the damage done to law, ethics, and politics by scholasticism, he begins with the four books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, attacking them for offering a philosophical explication of Christian doctrine: It is likely that in these four books Lombard attempted to unite the doctrines of Augustine and Aristotle; [for] the whole work contains a mish-mash of theology and philosophy. The Holy Scriptures are explained in accordance with the principles of pagan philosophy. In ethics and natural law the old stupidities are advanced. Lombard’s book was the staff and rod of the theology faculty, over which the theology professors fought in their glosses, just as the jurists fought over their Corpus juris.

If scholasticism corrupted religion, then it simultaneously gave rise to philosophical sectarianism among those purporting to offer the one true metaphysics of faith: Because their explanations were not of a single opinion and yet each claimed to be right, various sects arose among these orthodox scholastics, including the Albertists, the Thomists, the Scotists, and the Occamists, among whom the reputation of Thomas Aquinas overwhelmed the rest. [Aquinas] not only wrote a commentary on Lombard but also a new system of theology, which led many to later forget Lombard in order to write commentaries on Thomas, as we find with Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Bartholomew Medina, Gabriel Vasquez and Francisco Suárez. One can expect to find nothing rational in any of these, because everything arises from subtleties, authority and from being self-opinionated. One also finds that doctrines belonging to ethics and natural law begin to be ascribed to the theology faculty, under all kinds of titles. (VG, )

Further, if university metaphysics was a weapon for theologising ethics and natural law, then it was wielded in the interests of priestcraft: 



Civil philosophy

When, however, the Pope and the clerisy were assured that Aristotelian metaphysics, physics and ethics did no harm to their glory – because there is little or nothing in them that can be applied to the right use of the natural light [of reason] – and in fact it rather appeared that Aristotelian philosophy increased the clerisy’s authority, [then] . . . physics, metaphysics, and ethics were publicly taught in accordance with Aristotelian doctrine. (VG, )

This problem, however, was not just confined to the Catholic scholastics. Despite Luther’s banishment of metaphysics from Protestant academies at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seventeenth it had returned, modelled in part on the teachings of Francisco Suárez, who ‘began to expound mystical theology in accordance with a scholastic method’. As a result: In claiming that the Augsburg Confession is grounded only in this theological system, not though in ethics and natural law or in the Corpus juris, Protestant theologians and philosophers – that is, all those who have to teach about the difference between good and evil, right and wrong – feel able to follow the Catholic writers in these questions of right and wrong without any inhibition . . . So it happened that also everywhere at Protestant universities, moral philosophy and jurisprudence were bundled together without foundation, by many sometimes opposed writers. (VG, )

Finally, if the long ruination of the civil sciences could thus be laid at the feet of a metaphysical scholasticism – Protestant and Catholic – then their renewal was largely the work of the jurists, political and natural. Despite their own inability to relegate Roman law in favour of modern public and natural law, the French jurists Francis Hotman and Jean Bodin should be honoured among ‘the legists who everywhere began to defend the rights of worldly authority against the tyranny of the clergy’ (VG, ). For the full detheologisation of ethics and politics, however, the learned world had to wait for the natural law of Grotius and Hobbes, and, more importantly, of Pufendorf. We shall return to Thomasius’ remarkable cultural diagnosis in the final section of this chapter (.). For the moment, we can treat it as indicative of the historical self-consciousness with which the civil philosophers grasped their conflict with metaphysical scholasticism and constructed an alternative to it. Not only does Thomasius trace the mixing of theology and the civil sciences to the metaphysical explication of the Christian mysteries, he also identifies this with the sacerdotal exercise of authority by a clerisy. Further, he is aware that the natural law doctrines that would carry an alternative civil philosophy were grounded in a jurisprudence dedicated to the defence of worldly civil authority. Regardless

Introduction



of what today’s philosophical historians might say, rather than seeing the seventeenth-century return of metaphysics as the resumption of reason’s journey of self-discovery, Thomasius treats it as indicative of the theological contamination of ethics, law, and politics by a clerisy bent on defending its civil power. Given the clarity with which Thomasius grasped the historical need for a civil philosophy, the great puzzle confronting its modern historian is this philosophy’s present obscurity. The obscurity has two main sources. Firstly, civil philosophy has been subjected to historiographies intent on reducing its jurisprudential, political, and theological character to realities of a quite different kind. On the one hand, it has been subjected to sociological histories dedicated to showing the emergence of a socially grounded democratic reason. Such histories can only understand the expert (political–jurisprudential) and non-democratic (authoritarian–liberal) character of civil philosophy as aberrations arising from the social alienation of reason. On the other hand, as we have already seen, civil philosophy has also undergone reduction and assimilation at the hands of a philosophical history that identifies reason with metaphysical philosophy. The second reason for civil philosophy’s current obscurity is minor in comparison, but arises from a degree of uncertainty regarding the sources and form of its ‘civil’ character. Although historians of political thought agree that seventeenth-century Germany gave rise to civil sciences oriented to the desacralised government of a secular state, there is significant disagreement regarding the respective roles of law and politics in this development. As mentioned in the Introduction, some historians trace the desacralisation of government to its juridification, while others ascribe it to the emergence of political humanism, albeit of varying kinds. These differences have in turn affected the manner in which historians regard the central organ of civil philosophy, the ‘modern’ natural law of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Thomasius. Some, like Tuck, see this ‘profane’ natural law as playing a mediating role between a political humanism oriented to ‘reason of state’ and one dedicated to shaping sovereignty in accordance with the norms of civic republicanism (Tuck a). Others though, particularly Dreitzel, see natural law as a normative juridical retreat from a statist political science (Dreitzel b). Finally, Heckel and Kriegel both treat natural law as the philosophical expression of a politics already desacralised by jurisprudence (Heckel –, , –; Kriegel ). It is by working our way through these positions – from all of which



Civil philosophy

there is much to learn – that we shall arrive at our account of natural law as the intellectual clearing house for seventeenth-century civil philosophy. In doing so we shall outline a less exclusivist treatment of the relation between politics and law. In fact we shall argue that while there was indeed a juridical detheologisation of politics, this had the paradoxical effect of placing the sovereign above the law, by neutralising the moral-theological restraints on secular politics. The remarkable thing about the natural law doctrines developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius is that they may be regarded as reconstructing academic ethics and politics in order to reflect this juridical unleashing of a fully secular politics – but doing so in the very discipline that had been designed to prevent this from occurring. In order to provide an appropriate understanding of the emergence of civil philosophy, therefore, we must undertake two preliminary tasks. First, we must disarm those sociological and philosophical histories whose objective is to treat civil philosophy as a defective expression of society and reason. Next, we must clarify the relation between the juridical and political dimensions of civil philosophy. Then we will be in a position to grasp the full significance of Thomasius’ diagnosis of his own historical situation.  .       :         Jutta Brückner’s Staatswissenschaften, Kameralismus und Naturrecht offers an account of the emergence of the civil sciences by tying them to the historical sociology of bourgeois society. For its part, Michael Albrecht’s Eklektik incorporates an account of civil philosophy in a Begriffsgeschichte or conceptual history of early modern eclectic philosophy. Despite their methodological differences, it is striking that these representatives of historical sociology and philosophical history both treat the (authoritarian) political–jurisprudential character of civil philosophy as indicative of cultural–historical ‘failure’. For Brückner this is the failure of Germany to ground its law and politics in a democratically self-governed Öffentlichkeit or ‘public sphere’. For Albrecht it is the failure of the eclectic civil philosophy to ground itself in the true (a-priori–systematic) conditions of subjectivity. Neither is it coincidental that both histories share a similar dialectical method. For, by construing ‘failure’ in terms of the misfiring of dialectical integration, these histories locate the (statist) political–jurisprudential character of seventeenth-century civil philosophy as a blockage in a historical dynamic which is intrinsically oriented

Reductions of the civil: society and reason



to a self-governing society or a self-governing reason. If, therefore, we are to reinstate the historical reality and autonomy of civil philosophy, we must show why early modern politics and jurisprudence cannot be explained either in terms of a theory of bourgeois society or in terms of a philosophy of subjectivity. Brückner’s account of the emergence of the early modern civil sciences – economics, politics, jurisprudence – is framed by a conception of their prior moral unity. This conception is partly institutional–historical – with Brückner pointing to their scholastic treatment as branches of practical philosophy – but it is more importantly socio-moral. It is central to her account that the civil sciences precipitate from the milieu of the early modern court, where they had been unified within a concrete social ethos or way of moral life: ‘because in and around the court, the professional and social spheres, the life-realm and the realm of efficiency coalesce’ (Brückner , ). As for Habermas, on whose account of the relation between theory and practice she relies, for Brückner the seventeenth-century political and juristic sciences emerge from the splintering of a prior social order, in which the ends of politics and law had been embedded in moral culture and social relations. She thus regards the ‘prudential’ character and expert basis of these sciences as symptomatic of the loss of their organic relation to a moral-democratic ‘public sphere’ (Öffentlichkeit). In this regard at least, Brückner’s account joins several others that ascribe a ‘conservative’ or ‘authoritarian’ character to German culture and politics on the basis of its supposed lack of an appropriate material basis in liberal-democratic society (Epstein ; Krieger ). In projecting this social theory onto the early modern civil scientists and natural jurists, Brückner’s account can only view them in relation to the splitting of theory and practice, and the consequent alienation of reason from the social ‘life-world’. She thus characterises the objectifying political science of Arnisaeus and Conring – dedicated to treating the maintenance of political order as a ‘therapeutic’ (non-moral) problem – as symptomatic of the instrumentalising of formerly moral arts of government (Brückner , ). Drawing on Denzer’s neoAristotelian reading of Pufendorf, Brückner treats his natural law as damaged by the instrumentalising of politics, but as retaining a residual normative–legal character, grounded in a teleological conception of human sociability (–). It is left to Thomasius therefore to dissolve the last fragile bonds linking politics and morality, practice and theory in the civil sciences. Drawing on Werner Schneiders’ influential study of



Civil philosophy

Thomasius, Brückner argues that this occurs in two stages. First, Thomasius replaces Pufendorf ’s moral conception of natural law (as the law of human sociality) with a purely prudential conception of it as the means to political security. Next he introduces an anthropology based in ‘physiological facts’ – actually, the Epicurean anthropology of passiondriven man – which leads him to abandon the image of man as a rationally self-governing creature. In its place, Thomasius develops a purely prudential or instrumental ethics. This is grounded in the self-restraint needed for inner peace (morality), and the observance of social manners needed for civil peace (decorum), breaches of which would be punished by the law (Brückner , –). We can now see how difficult it is for histories based in modern social theory to grasp the circumstances that gave rise to early modern civil philosophy. Due to her own commitment to a socio-morally grounded political order, Brückner misunderstands the imperatives driving the early modern separation of state and society in political and natural law. In treating the uncoupling of government from moral community as symptomatic of the instrumental fracturing of the ‘life-world’, she fails to grasp its driving force: namely, the attempts by political and natural jurists to render the state independent of the fratricidal moral communities that had plunged Europe into religious civil war. This, as Dreitzel has shown, was one of the central preoccupations of Helmstedt political Aristotelianism (Arnisaeus and Conring). Here the therapeutic objectification of politics represented not a lapsing into political instrumentalism but its difficult achievement, through a protracted exercise in intellectual reconstruction (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ). In detaching the concept of political order from moral–philosophical and natural law norms – the very move that Brückner identifies with the social alienation of political knowledge – Arnisaeus intended to free it from the confessional division and conflict that entered politics through these norms. Rather than expressing the social interests of a rising class of bourgeois professionals, the autonomising of political expertise in Helmstedt political science was the expression of a fundamental cultural–intellectual strategy, developed as a means of desacralising civil governance. Similarly, in restricting law to the commands of a sovereign charged with maintaining social peace, decorum to the cultivation of the external manners required by social intercourse, and morality to the restraint of the passions required by inner serenity, Thomasius was not the unwitting representative of a bourgeois professionalism intent on monopolising political expertise and privatising moral aspiration. Rather, as a

Reductions of the civil: society and reason



law professor and jurisconsult to the Brandenburg-Prussian state, Thomasius was the self-conscious representative of a deep-seated campaign to destroy the infrastructure of the confessional politics by partitioning civil and religious authority (Dreitzel ; Wiebking ). Thomasius’ juridification of politics and ‘Epicurean’ privatisation of morality – which Brückner identifies with the bourgeois-professional fragmentation of a political public sphere – thus reveal a starkly different face to us. Rather than representing hindrances to the emergence of a participatory civil society, they were in fact part of a strategy for the deconfessionalisation and pacification of societies that had been all too participatory. Through its anti-political and anti-juridical interpretation of the early modern civil sciences – as symptoms of the alienation of political expertise from moral community – historical social theory forgets just how hard won and fragile this alienation was, not to mention how indispensable. While deploying a different methodology, Michael Albrecht’s Begriffsgeschichte of ‘eclectic philosophy’ suffers from a similar inability to grasp the historical sources and purposes of civil philosophy. At first sight, Albrecht’s history of early modern ‘eclectic philosophy’ encompasses a broader scope than the civil philosophy with which we are concerned. Yet, because the eclectic style was defined primarily by its opposition to scholasticism, and was typically dedicated to advancing a more irenic pluralistic philosophical discourse, it actually overlaps with the domain of civil philosophy, in a manner that we shall clarify. Despite its philosophical–historical character, Albrecht’s history shares many of the features and all of the limitations of Brückner’s historical–sociological account. For in discussing the ‘civil’ dimension of eclectic philosophy – its ‘anti-sectarian’ (anti-scholastic) pursuit of an irenic pluralistic philosophical style suited to life in a deconfessionalised civil society – Albrecht deploys a familiar dialectical strategy. He treats this as the ‘delayed’ or incomplete form of a systematic philosophy whose recovery of the a priori forms of subjectivity would render eclectic philosophy redundant. In adopting this telos for his history, Albrecht’s account is closely associated with the post-Kantian dialectical histories whose general form and limitations we have already discussed; and, in fact, several of the key dialectical historians have written accounts of eclecticism broadly similar to Albrecht’s (Holzhey ; Schmidt-Biggemann ; Schneiders a). Despite their exhaustive breadth, Albrecht’s materials are shaped by a single powerful dialectical schema. After characterising eclecticism as



Civil philosophy

the pursuit of free choice among different philosophies in order to arrive at truth, Albrecht opens a fundamental opposition within it. On the one hand, he argues, eclecticism was an idea, attitude, or intellectual deportment (Denkart, Einstellung). This was adopted by a range of early modern philosophers, jurists, and theologians seeking to cultivate intellectual independence, usually in opposition to various forms of scholasticism and orthodoxy. On the other hand, Albrecht claims, eclecticism was also a method for discovering the truth, modelled at this time on the hypothetical procedure employed by the seventeenth-century experimental physicist Johann Sturm (Albrecht , –, , –, –, ). Albrecht’s Begriffsgeschichte is premised on the unargued (ultimately Hegelian) doctrine that for the eclectic idea to step into history as an autonomous or self-grounded concept, then it would have to be possible for the eclectic attitude to be reconciled with the eclectic method. This must occur in a manner that reconciles the former’s aspiration to freedom of intellectual choice with the latter’s methodologically guaranteed access to truth. Albrecht argues that such a dialectical union was not possible under the name of eclecticism. For to the extent that eclectic philosophers cultivated the attitude of free choice they lacked a fundamental method capable of grounding this choice in demonstrable truth, which meant that this wing of eclecticism petered out in the merely fashionable cultivation of Selbstdenken or intellectual freedom (, –, –, –). Conversely, to the extent that eclectic philosophy did possess a method producing demonstrable truth – Sturm’s hypothetico-experimental method – then it lost the attitude of reflective choice among philosophies, solidifying into a merely scientific certainty (–). The striking result of this procedure is that Albrecht writes the history of a concept of philosophy that never really succeeded in existing: ‘One finds scarcely a single author embracing eclecticism who made the transition to praxis’ (). At the same time, because Albrecht’s history is organised around a particular philosophical–historical telos – namely, the idea of a philosophy whose ‘scientific’ method is simultaneously the reflective recovery of the grounds of free intellectual choice – it is actually oriented to a style of philosophy he regards as destined to eclipse eclecticism: the ‘critical rationalism’ of the Leibniz–Wolff–Kant line (–). Albrecht thus treats the emergence of Wolffian rationalism as signalling the appearance of a method that was capable of grounding the intellect’s free judgments in a systematic recovery of their a priori conceptual grounds. According to Albrecht, this discovery abolished the need for any merely contingent

Reductions of the civil: society and reason



cultivation of an eclectic attitude. In absorbing the capacity for free intellectual choice into the methodological recovery of its transcendent grounds, Wolff’s critical rationalism thus subjected eclectic philosophy to an Hegelian Aufhebung – preserving it by annihilating it (–). Thomasius’ civil philosophy fares particularly badly under this dialectical regime, falling foul of both of Albrecht’s strategies for denying the reality of eclectic philosophy. On the one hand, in discussing Thomasius’ Introductio ad Philosophiam Aulicam () – translatable as Introduction to Court Philosophy but also as Introduction to Civil Philosophy, given the role of the court as a metonym for civil politics – Albrecht argues that while cultivating the eclectic attitude as a means of attacking ‘sectarian’ (scholastic) philosophy, this work fails to count as eclectic philosophy. In developing merely empirical versions of logic and ethics, grounded in the use of concepts and norms suited to civil communication and civil intercourse, Thomasius is deemed to lack the systematic method capable of grounding his eclectic comportment in philosophical truth. This leads Albrecht to consign him to the ranks of the modish Selbstdenkers (, –). On the other hand, drawing on biographical accounts of his reconversion to a biblicistic Pietism in , Albrecht argues that Thomasius’ methodologically unsupported eclectic attitude collapses into an irrational fideism, whose central document is the Versuch vom Wesen des Geistes (Essay on the Nature of Spirits, ). Here, says Albrecht, Thomasius’ ‘eclectic’ attack on the mixing of philosophy and theology in sectarian philosophy has itself become sectarian, being grounded in adherence to a neo-Platonic nature philosophy of a quasiParacelsan kind (–). In short Thomasius occupies an exemplary place in Albrecht’s history because his work encapsulates the larger fate of eclectic philosophy. Both are condemned to oscillate between an antisectarian eclecticism whose lack of true philosophical method reduces it to a mere attitude, and a merely concrete method whose lack of transcendental reflexivity reduces it to another form of sectarianism. Once again, however, we are confronted by an approach to early modern ‘civil eclectic’ philosophy that misunderstands its historical circumstances and intellectual form. As we shall see in more detail below (.), Thomasius’ support of eclectic philosophy arose not from this modish incapacity to penetrate the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, but from his anti-scholastic campaign to uncouple philosophy from theology. In the Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius’ objection to the merging of ethics, law, and politics in neoscholastic natural law is grounded in his acute sense of its role as a prop for the power of the



Civil philosophy

clerisy. By separating philosophy and theology in accordance with their divergent objects, and by insisting that students should be taught to choose freely among rival philosophies in accordance with the ends of human happiness, Thomasius’ eclecticism formed an element of his anti-metaphysical attack on scholasticism (‘sectarian philosophy’). Rather than lacking a method, his eclecticism was based in a method of cultivating the pluralistic attitude he deemed appropriate to the discussion of secular knowledge. Thomasius’ empiricism and nominalism were thus grounded in powerful ethical–epistemological doctrines – in particular the ‘voluntarist’ doctrine of man’s incapacity for insight into transcendent objects – whose role was to ensure that politics and jurisprudence would be approached in terms of their (several) historical dispositions and purposes. Next, we may observe that in viewing civil eclecticism from the standpoint of its failure to recover the transcendental conditions of reason, Albrecht’s history obscures the historical point of civil philosophy’s attack on metaphysical scholasticism. In assembling the various elements of his Philosophia Aulica – in particular those designed to preclude access to forms of transcendent reason common to God and man – Thomasius was engaged in a frontal assault on university metaphysics. This attack, we recall, was driven by Thomasius’ conviction that the mixing of theology and philosophy in university metaphysics was complicit with the merging of sacerdotal and civil power in the confessional state. In what remains the best analysis of the eclectic ‘syndrome’, Dreitzel provides a helpful sketch for the context in which this attack took place: To religious confessionalism there corresponded a type of philosophical confessionalism in the higher educational and scientific institutions. [This was] especially pronounced in the restoration of scholasticism following the counterReformation monopolisation of philosophical training via the Jesuits at Catholic universities and gymnasiums. The sciences and ‘arts’ were demoted, homogenised, their disciplines polemically repelled or syncretistically assimilated – a procedure that was the less maintained the more strongly the scientific disciplines, anchored in life-practice, developed a life of their own and put into question academic philosophy’s claim to a total interpretation of things. In Protestant Germany, though, it was not the natural sciences that dealt the death-blow to Aristotelianism and philosophical confessionalism, but jurisprudence together with the doctrine of natural law, under the influence of Pufendorf. (Dreitzel , )

Dreitzel’s remarks are of course entirely in keeping with Thomasius’ own view of his historical situation in the Foreword to Grotius.

Sources of the civil: politics and law



Most damaging of all, though – given Albrecht’s treatment of eclecticism’s Aufhebung in Wolffian rationalism – is the fact that Thomasius was quite familiar with Wolff’s grounding of subjectivity in transcendent reason, but vehemently repudiated it. As we have seen, he warned his students off the intellectualist anthropology contained in metaphysical rationalism – the doctrines ‘that God’s nature consists in thinking’ and ‘that man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happiness of the whole human race consists in the correct arrangement of thought’ – on the grounds that the cultivation of a transcendent reason shared with God was wholly unsuited to future jurists and statesmen. In arguing that Thomasius’ civil philosophy failed to reach the level of transcendental philosophy (in fact university metaphysics), Albrecht’s history is thus methodologically inimical to its object. If we recall our discussion of the role of transcendental insight in Albert’s metaphysics, then we obtain a clearer view of its role in Wolff’s. In using the promise of transcendental insight as the goal of a practice of abstractive selfpurification, Wolff may be regarded as refurbishing the central ethos of metaphysical scholasticism, in order to defend Schulmetaphysik against its civil opponents. If this is so, then in presuming that Wolffianism marked the transition from merely historical philosophies to a properly transcendental recovery of the laws of reason, Albrecht’s history itself constitutes an apology for university metaphysics, albeit in its modern post-Kantian form.  .                  :             Having sketched the limits of the social-theoretic and philosophical–historical approaches to civil philosophy and the civil sciences, we may now turn to some accounts that take us closer to the ‘merciless sobriety’ required to address this philosophy in its sheer historicity. These are accounts for which the political-jurisprudential character of civil philosophy signifies not the alienation of expertise from community, but its emergence from particular expert communities. Further, for these accounts, civil philosophy’s emergence through opposition to various political theologies signifies not its failure to reach beyond historical contingency to transcendent philosophy, but the historical contingency of philosophy itself. Such accounts are given not in social theory or philosophical history, but in the historiography of political and jurisprudential thought. In discussing some representative instances of this historiography we shall be



Civil philosophy

concerned to clarify a particular question: namely, the relation between political and jurisprudential conceptions of the desacralisation of civil governance. For this holds the key to understanding what is meant by ‘civil’ in civil philosophy. In clarifying the approach of the political historians we shall take Richard Tuck’s work on Philosophy and Government – as broadly indicative of the ‘Cambridge school’ view, while Horst Dreitzel’s study of Henning Arnisaeus represents a characteristically German approach to the empirical history of political thought (Dreitzel ; Tuck a). For a distinctively jurisprudential treatment of the emergence of a desacralised conception of politics, we shall be indebted to several remarkable essays by Martin Heckel (Heckel –). Despite his own call for a renewed attention to ‘modern’ natural law, Tuck’s study traces early modern civil philosophy to the intellectual tradition of civic humanism and the political milieu of civic republicanism (Tuck ). Like some other members of the Cambridge school, he looks to civic humanism for the intellectual sources of a detheologised philosophy, and to the figure of the political humanist – joined to the prince through the roles of educator and political secretary – for the nexus between philosophy and government (Pocock ; Skinner ). Anchoring his account in the early modern commercial republics of Northern Italy and the Netherlands, Tuck argues that it was the recovery of Ciceronian political humanism in these settings that allowed a civil philosophy to break away from Aristotelian scholasticism, by reinvesting virtue in the life of active participation in the affairs of the republic (Tuck a, –). Focused in the genre of ‘advice to the prince’, and combining a liberal constitutionalism with enough scepticism about the transcendent to focus the mind on the city, this Ciceronian humanism provides the framework for Tuck’s account of civil philosophy. Significantly, it is not jurisprudence that provides the tension driving Tuck’s history, but another form of humanism: the ‘new’ humanism that he characterises through the trio ‘scepticism, Stoicism and raison d’état’. The sources of this humanism lay not in Cicero’s constitutional republicanism but in the statist histories of Seneca and Tacitus, whose moral scepticism and political pessimism found their answering milieu not in the commercial republic but in states requiring extreme measures to deal with the circumstances of religious civil war (Tuck, a –). Despite his descriptive treatment of scepticism and Stoicism – explored via Lipsius’ programme for cultivating the deportment of ‘constancy’ required to face the vicissitudes of religious civil war – a certain ambivalence surrounds

Sources of the civil: politics and law



the third term of Tuck’s new humanism, reason of state. For it is reason of state – the sovereign’s use of extra-constitutional measures to preserve the state – that conflicts most sharply with the ‘constitutional’ political virtues of Ciceronian humanism. In relying on this inner tension between constitutional and statist political humanism, Tuck’s history of civil philosophy begins to assume a dialectical character. In fact the ‘civil’ or desacralised politics of civic humanism is seen as oscillating between its two opposed forms. Tuck thus treats the political Aristotelians, Arnisaeus and Clapmar, as assimilating Tacitean reason of state to the old Ciceronian humanism. They do this via a concept of political order that allows the prince to break lower-level laws while nonetheless restraining his authority within a normative constitutional order (a, –). Tuck also views the refurbishing of scholastic natural law by Molina and Suárez in accordance with the same dialectic, treating their elaboration of metaphysical laws binding on the prince as another version of ‘liberal humanist’ constitutionalism (–). Finally, he regards Grotius’ natural law as culminating in the drive to mediate the constitutionalism of republican humanism and the statism of its Tacitean rival. According to Tuck, Grotius’ achievement of this reconciliation in the De Indis is marked by a reciprocity between the individual’s right to selfpreservation and the prince’s right to preserve the state; for the fact that these rights are reciprocal – being held together by the political contract – means that the power of the state comes ultimately from the ‘constitutional’ consent of individuals (a, –). Tuck concludes, however, by stressing the fragility of this reconciliation. For, after his personal experience of religious persecution at the hands of the Dutch Calvinists, Grotius’ writings shifted focus to the theme of the need for a state-enforced religious toleration, culminating in the revised natural law doctrine of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (). Here, religion is considered solely in terms of its political utility, and the preservation of the citizens also takes on a purely utilitarian character, becoming the absolute source of the state’s power over them (–). With this Tacitean turn, Tuck argues, Grotius forfeits the balance between republican and statist humanism he had achieved via the natural law notion of consent. For all that can be learned from it, Tuck’s account of early modern civil philosophy encounters certain perspectival limits. These arise in fact from the manner in which he derives the ‘civil’ character of this philosophy – its detheologised form and secular political function – from the tension between the two kinds of political humanism. For these two



Civil philosophy

humanisms are in fact the loci for different conceptions of the secularisation of politics: the ‘Ciceronian’ one grounded in the ethics of civic participation in a constitutional republic; and the ‘Tacitean’ conception grounded in the statist pursuit of social peace, using extra-constitutional means to cope with religious civil war. The play between these two sources of civil philosophy’s secularised character gives rise to a certain instability in Tuck’s history, which is the source of its two central limitations. In the first place it leads to a significant ambivalence in Tuck’s conception of the political. Despite his endeavour to provide a neutral historical contextualisation for the two kinds of humanism, there can be little doubt that the image of the Ciceronian humanist – defending the virtue of political participation in the commercial republic – functions as an implicit norm for Tuck’s history. This image represents both the normal course for the secularisation of politics, and a model for the role of political intellectuals. As a result, the statist politics designed to cope with religious civil war tend to lose their historical neutrality and appear instead as abnormal responses to extreme circumstances. In discussing Pibrac’s ‘Tacitean’ defence of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Tuck remarks that it ‘illustrates how extreme were the circumstances which called Tacitism into existence and broke Cicero’s hold on humanists’ (a, ). This tends to prejudge the historical issue, however; for, from a purely historical viewpoint, the capacity for unbridled religious warfare is no less normal than the capacity for irenic commercial republicanism. Concomitantly, extra-constitutional constructions of politics – in terms of the instrumental exercise of sovereign power to achieve social peace – are no less normal than constitutionalist conceptions, based on the participation of citizens in the governance of the republic. To the extent that this instability over the political informs Tuck’s approach to ‘modern’ natural law – the metonymic discipline of civil philosophy – then it gives rise to a parallel ambivalence in this context too. In treating Grotius’ natural law as slipping from a constitutionalist into a statist form – under the pressure of religious oppression – Tuck’s account tends to skew the manner in which this natural law would be taken up in the German context by Pufendorf and Thomasius. For Pufendorf and Thomasius were elaborating a civil philosophy under historical circumstances in which religious civil war was the norm, and in which statist conceptions of sovereignty were central to the desacralisation of politics. In his Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius traces these conceptions not to ‘scepticism, Stoicism and reason of state’, but to a new

Sources of the civil: politics and law



form of natural law informed by positive jus publicum or Staatsrecht. In developing their versions of natural law, Pufendorf and Thomasius thus drew on a conception of the political far removed from both Ciceronian civic republicanism and Tacitean reason of state. Further, they did so under circumstances in which German political jurisprudence had already played a major role in the desacralisation of politics. In order to clarify further the role of the political and jurisprudential sciences in the formation of civil philosophy we must address both of these issues: the statist secularisation of politics arising from German political science, and the juridical desacralisation of governance arising from German Staatsrecht. As far as the role of political science is concerned, Horst Dreitzel’s reconstruction of early-seventeenth-century ‘political Aristotelianism’ – in particular the work of the Helmstedt professors Henning Arnisaeus and Hermann Conring – provides a convenient starting point; for Dreitzel’s account of Arnisaeus differs from Tuck’s in a manner that is significant for our larger concerns. Unlike Tuck’s Arnisaeus – whose conception of political order imposes constitutional normative limits on the actions of the prince – Dreitzel’s Arnisaeus conceives of political order as the historical form of rule or domination characteristic of a particular kind of society. In fact there can be little doubt that Arnisaeus treats political order not as a constitutional order imposing normative limits on the prince’s conduct, but as an empirical reality whose maintenance constitutes the ‘scientific’ end of the prince’s political action (Dreitzel , –). That this is so is shown most strikingly by the fact that Arnisaeus justifies extra-constitutional political measures – including political murder – if these were required for the preservation of the state (–). Tyranny for Arnisaeus is defined not by the breach of constitutional norms but in a quite different manner: namely, by the prince’s pursuit of his personal interests in a manner incompatible with his role as a political expert responsible for diagnosing and eradicating threats to the political order. These local facts are only pointers to the significantly different conception of the political or civil arising from Dreitzel’s account of Arnisaeus, whose fascinating detail we can summarise in three broad points. In the first place, while the political Aristotelians were humanists in the sense of adapting classical texts and wisdom to deal with contemporary problems, they were not humanists in the Cambridge school sense of functioning as ‘humanistic–rhetorical’ educators and secretaries to the prince. As professors of political science at the University of Helmstedt who were also



Civil philosophy

advisors to the dukes of Brunswick-Wölfenbuttel, Arnisaeus and Conring drew their expertise not from Cicero or Tacitus, but from a combination of Galenic ‘medical empiricism’ and the ‘scientific’ analytic–synthetic method of Paduan Aristotelianism (, –). Rather than being seen as virtuous participation in civic affairs, in this intellectual setting politics was understood as the expert ‘diagnosis’ and elimination of pathologies threatening the political order (–). Second, it may be observed that the secularisation of politics entailed by Arnisaeus’ discipline was not the result of a neo-pagan recovery of civic humanism. Rather, it arose from the particular manner in which his science of political order was elaborated to meet the threat of religious civil war. In reconstructing politics in terms of the instrumental maintenance of any historically existing form of rule, Arnisaeus sought to render it autonomous of scholastic moral philosophy in general. In particular he sought to free politics from its Aristotelian conception as the form of rule required to realise man’s moral nature or his moral communio. ‘Where it is concerned with law-making for citizens or the appointment and deposing of rulers’, Arnisaeus argues, ‘then a [political] prudence directed to the public good follows neither the commands of ethics nor those of the church, because these are all exclusively political matters’ (Dreitzel , ). As a result, Arnisaeus was hostile to both Althusius’ conception of a sovereignty based in the people’s moral–religious communio, and to all attempts to ground politics in transcendent natural law – whether these arose from Melanchthon’s Protestant natural law or from Suárez’s Jesuit version. In purporting to subordinate the sovereign’s legislative acts to ‘legal’ norms lying beyond his positive commands, natural law jeopardised the autonomy of politics and the stability of the political order. Further, it threatened to allow jurists to slip their role as servants of the sovereign’s positive laws and take on the mantle of moral philosopher. ‘I believe’, Arnisaeus proclaims, ‘that there is no more accurate distinction than that between lawmaking [Gesetzgebung] and legal judgment [Rechtsprechung]. Law-making is not the task of jurists but of kings and statesmen’ (). Arnisaeus thus sought to make the concept of the state independent of all moral–philosophical and religious foundations, conceiving it as the instrument of an autochthonous exercise of political domination: ‘We learn and teach politics not to gain knowledge through it but so that we can direct the state in accordance with its precepts . . . In its constituent elements, of those who rule and those who obey, however, that state will have been built by the statesman himself . . . The immediate end of political action

Sources of the civil: politics and law



is the state itself, because when it is set up in the right way, the human groups belonging to it live happily’ (). The anti-democratic or ‘absolutist’ character of Arnisaeus’ conception of politics was thus not a feudal hangover. Rather it was a direct consequence of the manner in which he sought to autonomise politics by expelling the church from the state, seizing that eternal ecclesiological stalking-horse – the moral community – and transforming it from the source of sovereign power into the latter’s main target. Finally, we may observe that the context for Arnisaeus’ and Conring’s elaboration of a secular science of politics was not provided by a commercial republic, but by one of the several ‘political enterprises’ to be found in Germany prior to the Treaty of Westphalia: namely, the wouldbe sovereign territorial state of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In aspiring to the creation of such a state, specifically through the territorial incorporation of the imperial free city of Brunswick, the dukes of BrunswickWolfenbüttel engaged in such characteristic undertakings as the political integration of the estates (nobility and clergy), and the ‘cameralistic’ development of their territory’s social and economic infrastructure (Schorn-Schütte ). The founding of the Academia Julia in , and the appointment of the circle of humanist scholars to which Arnisaeus would belong, was an integral part of these activities. Successive dukes thus saw the university as a source of the clergy and politici required by a territorial state, and regarded the training in politics in particular as a means for the political integration of the nobility (Baumgart ). Dreitzel thus regards Arnisaeus’ secular political science – whose ‘absolute’ character was focused in his rejection of any contract between sovereign and citizens and his treatment of politics as a technical problem of domination – as suited to the construction of an absolute state under circumstances of confessional conflict. The objective correlate of Arnisaeus’ profound detheologisation and instrumentalisation of politics was the transformation of Brunswick-Wölfenbuttel’s nobility into a political elite, one equipped with a science that would allow it to subordinate all other religious and political interests to those of the territorial sovereign (–). Juridical and natural law doctrines, however, play only a subordinate role in Dreitzel’s account of the emergence of a desacralised politics, as is the case with the Cambridge school account. In Dreitzel’s case this seems to arise from his view that natural law in particular has been captured by social theories of the political, several modern versions of which – including Brückner’s – he has submitted to searching criticism



Civil philosophy

in an important series of articles (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ). In any case, it is clear that Dreitzel regards the construction of an autonomous secular conception of the political by the Helmstedt neoAristotelians as the achievement of a non-juridical, purely political science. Natural and positive law play a subordinate role in this setting; the former providing the exercise of power with a juridical form, and the latter being regarded as one of the regalia or royal rights (Dreitzel , –). As a result, Dreitzel regards the rise of natural law doctrines in the second half of the seventeenth century – especially those of Pufendorf and Thomasius – as signalling the lapsing of the ‘scientific’ autonomy of politics in favour of a normative theory of sovereignty (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel b). For all that we have learned from it, however, there are several reasons for thinking that Dreitzel’s account overstates the role of Helmstedt political Aristotelianism, and underestimates that of jurisprudence in the emergence of a desacralised conception of civil governance. First, as Dreitzel himself comments, in addition to neo-Aristotelian political science there were several other intellectual movements seeking to construct the autonomy of the political in seventeenth-century Germany, including Lipsian neo-Stoic ‘political psychology’, Protestant political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht), and Pufendorf ’s statist natural law and political history. Without doubting Dreitzel’s claim that political Aristotelianism gave rise to a distinctive conception of the secular autonomy of politics, there is no need to treat this either as pre-eminent or as incapable of joining the other modes – just as Stolleis argues that Lipsian neo-Stoicism flowed into the practice of Staatsrecht as part of the ethos of the political jurists (Stolleis , –). Second, in order to demonstrate the pre-eminence of the political over the juridical, Dreitzel has to do more than show that Arnisaeus and Conring treated positive law as the form in which the sovereign exercised rule. For, even if Dreitzel is right that utility trumped justice in this secularisation of the political, this does not explain the aptness of German Staatsrecht for such a desacralised exercise of sovereignty. As we shall see, this aptness had an independent source, arising from the manner in which German politics itself had been juridified during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, once we have done justice to the secularising work of positive political jurisprudence, then, in the chapter’s final section, we shall see that Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law was not in fact a continuation of earlier normative ‘social’ theories of politics. Rather, it was an attempt to transform these theories in the wake of the detheologisation

Sources of the civil: politics and law



of politics arising from its juridification in Staatsrecht and its instrumentalisation in absolutist political science. In order to overcome these limitations in Dreitzel’s approach, we must move from the political history of civil philosophy to its juridical historiography. In , as part of a wide-ranging attack on scholastic moral philosophy, Thomasius identified several reasons for Protestant universities to teach German jus publicum or Staatsrecht, as an academic discipline distinct from Roman law. Initially, he argues, learned legists and glossators such as Bardolus and Hotman had attempted to use the Roman-law construction of majestas in order to model the new forms of territorial sovereignty which were emerging in the German Empire. This was to prove insufficient: ‘When though in our time high potentates and their ministers observed that this old method explained little, and that the Respublica Germanica, [while] bearing the title of the Holy Roman Empire, differs completely from the ancient Roman Republic, then it became necessary to separate the doctrine of public law [ Juris publici] from the profession of Justinian law [ Juris Justinian], if one wished . . . to teach it to scholarly youth’ (KTS, –). The reasons for the teaching of the new jus publicum or political jurisprudence were however more immediate and more pressing, because they flowed from its use by all parties to formulate the conduct of the Thirty Years War and the peace that ended it: When therefore during this war the parties on both sides advanced claims and arguments that were in fact largely grounded in [appeals to] the form of the German Empire, this opened the way for the scholars to apply themselves to study this more assiduously. And it helped not a little that other [scholars] sought to explicate the same arguments on the basis of their principles, through other writings and systems of public law [Juris publici] . . . When though after the Thirty Years War the electoral princes began to extend the peace treaties further and further, and through this the estates, especially the princes, apparently expanded their privileges; and, additionally, when through the instrumentum pacis Caesareo-Svecicum . . . the rights of the estates were strengthened – although from both new controversies arose – then many estates have considered it useful that Jus publicum be taught in their universities, either privately or publicly; so that for any case arising one would have people available skilled in claiming the rights [Jura] of the high potentates through public writings. (KTS, –)

In his studies of Protestant political jurisprudence, Martin Heckel confirms and deepens Thomasius’ eye-witness account of the emergence of Staatsrecht as an instrument for the regulation of confessional conflict. In doing so, he elucidates the role of positive jurisprudence in



Civil philosophy

the desacralisation of civil governance. At the centre of Heckel’s account lies the argument that this secularisation was not a symptom of a general process of rationalisation – whether grounded in the Reformation’s division of worldly and spiritual government, the emergence of bourgeois society, or the gradual philosophical self-assertion of human reason. Instead, he argues, desacralisation assumed a specific and limited historical form – that of ‘juridification’ – as a result of the fact that Protestant political jurists were forced to deal with the staggering problems of confessional politics and religious civil war in the only way they could, by juridifying them (Heckel , –). Heckel thus sees the desacralisation of civil governance – the detheologisation of political thought, the separation of church and state, the emergence of religious toleration as the prime ‘liberal’ right – arising neither from a secular–rational philosophy, nor from Roman law as such, but from a unique set of intellectual and historical circumstances. These were circumstances in which, once it became abundantly clear that the religious wars were incapable of theological adjudication or military-political termination, Protestant jurists developed a series of measures designed to end the conflicts by securing the coexistence of the confessions within the legal framework of the Empire. Beginning with the Peace of Augsburg in , and continuing through to the Treaty of Westphalia in , the desacralisation of the Imperial framework resulting from these measures led to the formation of a ‘non-confessional or supra-confessional order of coexistence between the two great confessional blocks’ (Heckel , ). Heckel identifies the central features and effects of these measures under five main themes. First, there was an attempt to rescue the Empire from the splitting of its religious foundations by reconstituting its unity in secular–political terms. This attempt to salvage a political unity for the Empire from the fragmentation of the church was, however, only partially successful, as both Protestants and Catholics continued to view this unity as grounded in the notion of ‘the one true church of Jesus Christ’, which both believed themselves to be (Heckel , –). Second, the legal coexistence of the confessions was pursued through a series of measures designed to establish ‘parity’ between them at the level of their representation in the key institutions of imperial governance, the Reichstag and the Reichskammergericht. This mode of establishing equality between the confessions depended on a far-reaching secularisation of the imperial constitution, as all of its various offices, privileges, and protections had now to be distributed in a non-confessional manner,

Sources of the civil: politics and law



in accordance with a purely ‘instrumental’ political end – social peace (Heckel ). Third, the secularisation (juridification) of political governance witnessed the emergence of a purely secular-political concept of peace, in place of the religious conception of pax Christiana. This worldly concept of peace required that excommunicated heretics be included in peace settlements such as Augsburg. It therefore gave rise to confessional neutrality between states at the level of their Imperial relations, even while allowing confessionalisation (the Jus Reformandi) to proceed unabated inside state territories, on the principle of Cujus regio ejus religio (Heckel , –). Fourth, somewhat paradoxically, the secularisation of the legal framework allowed a greater degree of freedom for the religious. For theologians could also accept that a purely secular legally regulated coexistence offered them the best protection from the covert undermining of their religion by rival theologians (–). Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our present concerns, the progressive secularisation (juridification) of Imperial church law (Reichskirchenrecht) led to a striking relativisation of its religious content. Given that this law had now to apply to two theologically opposed confessions, its central ecclesiological and liturgical concepts could no longer be defined in terms of the existing theological systems. This gave rise to a form of ecclesiastical jurisprudence that separated itself from Catholic and Protestant church law by coming to view the governance of religion in a non-theological manner, as a purely political problem. From this secularised Reichskirchenrecht would grow the theologically indifferent Staatskirchenrecht of Pufendorf and Thomasius (–). It was indeed through this protracted elaboration of the political–legal instruments required to deal with religious civil war that German political or public law (Staatsrecht) gradually became independent of Roman law, employing the latter’s categories as the scaffolding for these great works of legal construction, but filling them with contents suited to purposes unknown to the Roman legists (Stolleis , –). This does not mean, however, that positive law emerged as a neutral instrument for an exercise of power whose secular character arose from a ‘utilitarian’ political science of the Helmstedt kind. On the contrary, through its elaboration as a means of securing the political–legal coexistence of the warring confessions, German Staatsrecht became the source of a specifically juridical autonomising of political governance. This helps to clarify the relation between politics and law in Arnisaeus’ absolutist political science and, indeed, more generally. For it allows us to see that if Arnisaeus’ prince exercised sovereign power in the form of positive law,



Civil philosophy

this was because Protestant political jurists had already detached German jus publicum from all higher-level moral and theological ends, thereby allowing it to be treated as a series of the purely instrumental commands required to achieve social peace (Schmitt , –). Rather than making a forced choice between politics and law as sources of the desacralisation of civil governance, therefore, it is more historically appropriate to treat them as independent strategies converging on this end – each drawing on the intellectual resources at its disposal in order to forge instruments capable of meeting the challenge to governance posed by religious civil war (Stolleis , –). One of the striking results of Heckel’s research is the demonstration that many of the central features of a ‘liberal’ civil society – the secularisation of war and peace, the religious neutrality of law and politics, the gradual acceptance of the ‘permanence of heresy’ which accompanied the introduction of religious toleration – were not the result of a line of transcendent philosophical reflection whose culmination would come in the democratic natural law theories of the Aufklärung. We learn rather that they arose as unplanned consequences of a whole series of juridical improvisations undertaken by anonymous political jurists seeking the political–legal bases of social peace. Conversely, when we examine contemporary arguments on the need to ground positive Staatsrecht in a ‘higher’ natural law – such as Althusius’ argument that unless it were founded in a natural law containing the Decalogue human society (‘symbiosis’) would be ‘a beastly congregation of vice-ridden men’ – we find that they are in fact attempts by political metaphysicians to undo the secularising effects of political jurisprudence (Althusius , ). If, therefore, positive political jurisprudence was the source of an independent juridical secularisation of civil governance – and if this process of deconfessionalisation and instrumentalisation was a source of ‘moral’ consequences that we now identify with the emergence of a pluralistic civil society – then we might expect that this role of political jurisprudence would be reflected in the early modern civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius. This is in fact the case. For what distinguishes their civil philosophy from political metaphysics – and what distinguishes their ‘profane’ natural law from neoscholastic natural law – is just this fact: that it was elaborated in order render ‘practical philosophy’ (university ethics and politics) capable of reflecting the profound secularisation of religious and political culture that had been taking place in the political–jurisprudential sphere.

Civil philosophy and profane natural law



 .            Having disarmed the sociological and metaphysical reductions of civil philosophy, and located it at the confluence of the great political and jurisprudential desacralisings of civil government, we may conclude our exposition of Thomasius’ Foreword to Grotius. Taking the form of a brief history of natural law, Thomasius’ Foreword offers us a striking insight into the cultural role and significance that he and Pufendorf envisaged for their reconstructed version of this discipline. Nothing could be clearer, Thomasius begins, than the difference between revealed and natural truths – the former coming through faith and revelation and leading man to eternal beatitude, the latter arising in man’s understanding and guiding him to temporal happiness: ‘Herein lies the simple and clear distinction between theology and philosophy or between theology and the three other faculties: theology is concerned with the light of grace and teaches in accordance with it, jurisprudence, medicine, and philosophy teach in accordance with the natural light’ (VG, ). Yet, he continues, nothing has been more responsible for derailing man’s natural pursuit of a long and happy earthly life than the mixing and confusion of these two kinds of truth; for from this have arisen shameful exercises of priestcraft with all their attendant misery of religious tyranny and conflict. It is the ‘scholars’ who have been most responsible for this grievous confusion, Thomasius argues; particularly those who inherited the pagan philosophical conception of nature and mixed it with the Christian doctrine of creation – that is, the metaphysicians. Ensnared by ‘Platonic fables’, the metaphysicians not only produced a bastard philosophical–theological conception of a creation divided into visible and invisible things, they also used their alleged insight into transcendent being as the basis for doctrine-mongering and religious oppression: ‘One was not content to present Christians with errors that contradicted the sound reason and senses of normal men. Through heresy-hunting and the coercion of conscience one forced these errors on the people as necessary articles of faith’ (VG, ). Above all it was the incorporation of Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics in the development of scholastic philosophy that formalised this corrupting mixture of philosophy and theology, leading to the progressive ruin of ethics, statecraft, and natural law. In this regard, Thomasius’ Foreword belongs to the genre of ‘histories of morality’, whose role in forming an intellectual bulwark for the



Civil philosophy

new natural law has been investigated by Timothy Hochstrasser (Hochstrasser , –). In a striking instance of his analysis of the corrupting effects of metaphysical doctrines, Thomasius divides their proponents into two kinds, the ‘orthodox’ (Rechtmeinenden) and the ‘esoterics’ (Geheimen). The former exercise power through the public imposition of articles of faith, the latter through a secret practice of mystical spiritual direction. In purporting to know the divine through natural (pagan) philosophical means, each of the two forms of metaphysics – orthodox Schulmetaphysik and the clandestine pursuit of mystical enlightenment – amounts to a ‘secret theology’: Both therefore misuse the natural light. The orthodox do so in that they overstep the limits of reason, seeking through its powers to explain things that God has held it not necessary to reveal, overly neglecting, however, the will and its improvement. The esoterics do so in that they make the powers of the will greater than they are, and, on the other hand, diminish the light of the understanding too much. Both complain about the pagans and pagan philosophy, and yet both are descended from pagan wisdom and its disciples. The orthodox in fact [descend] from refining Platonic disputations regarding the divine being, the esoterics though from the Platonic doctrine regarding the end of true wisdom: namely, union with God through the way of purification and enlightenment. (VG, )

Further, both use their secret theology to engage in priestcraft – the illicit exercise of authority through the claim to privileged religious insight – to the ruin of true Christianity: So everything leads either to idle speculation or enthusiasm and, thereby, simple active Christianity is forgotten. Both of them impress upon the laity that giving is more blessed than taking, although for them this means that taking is more blessed than giving. Both seek to strengthen the pretences of their doctrines through holy fraud, through the fabrication of many evidently false histories, and through false miracles . . . Finally, we can add that both classes rob their listeners of the right use of their God-given reason. The orthodox [do so] by binding their listeners to their formulas, the esoterics by binding them to inner inspirations. So they spread the two most grievous prejudices of the human understanding, the former [the orthodox] that of human authority, the latter [the esoterics] that of untimely rashness. (VG, –)

Thomasius is particularly concerned with the effects of Schulmetaphysik on the civil sciences of ethics, politics, and natural law, regarding it as the source of their confessional corruption and assimilation to scholastic moral philosophy:

Civil philosophy and profane natural law



It is certain that the [teaching of] ethics by the first philosophers in the universities founded by the Pope was so bad that, so to speak, one could not entice a dog behind an oven with it. The profession of statesman first arose long after that. In his account of the papal monarchy, Herr Pufendorf has remarked that it belongs to the secrets of papist states either not to teach politics in the universities or to do so only in accordance with the interests of the clergy. Because of this even the name of politics itself has been made suspect, and a taint of shame attached to it. More should be said about this elsewhere, because politics and natural law or ethics [Moral] – which are in fact markedly different – were often confused. (VG, )

Several brave and wise men had attempted to redress this situation – among them Pierre Bayle, Hermann Conring, Jean Barbeyrac, and, most notably, Samuel Pufendorf – attacking the scholastic anthropologies and cosmologies and pointing the way towards a new conception of politics and natural law. Their efforts, though, have been hampered by the scholastic domination of the universities. In the law faculties the dominance of jus civile has been a retarding factor; for this has meant that the glossators have been unable to separate natural law from Roman law, and thereby provide it with the political form required by recent historical circumstances. Things are even worse in the theology faculties, however. For here natural law has been ensnared by the full metaphysical confusion of theology and philosophy, being in effect transformed into a branch of moral philosophy and losing its civil vocation altogether (VG, ). While Thomasius castigates the Jesuits (Vitoria, Molinas, Suárez) for this corruption, he is equally scathing of the Protestant theology faculties. Here too the ‘secret theology’ of Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics had crept back in, allowing the Protestant theologians and philosophers to follow the Catholics in assimilating natural law to metaphysics and moral philosophy: ‘As a result, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the doctrine of virtue and vice, or of the difference between good and evil, of the natural law and such like, was in a wretched and deathly condition, among both the Catholics and the Protestants’ (VG, ). Turning at last to the subject of his Foreword, Thomasius writes that it was Grotius’ task and honour to begin cleansing the Augean stables of scholastic metaphysics and natural law. He characterises Grotius as a man who had himself held political office and had experienced at first hand the monster of religious authority. In his treatment of ‘the law of war and peace’, Grotius had been the first to show that conflicts between princes could not be decided on the basis of Justinian or canon law but



Civil philosophy

only through natural law. In doing so he separated divine, universal, mosaic, and human laws from each other: ‘In a word, Grotius was the instrument that served God’s wisdom in lifting the long-lasting confusion of natural and supernatural light by making a beginning’ (VG, ). Perhaps keeping in mind the fundamental corrections that Pufendorf had made to Grotius’ construction of natural law, Thomasius concludes his Foreword by observing that Grotius represented only the dawning of truth from the long night of scholastic error. Modern commentators – particularly those wedded to post-Kantian philosophical history – have great difficulty in understanding the separation of knowledge and faith in Thomasius’ civil philosophy, or the manner in which it combines a secularising empiricism and a ‘spiritualistic’ (anti-sacramental) theology. In treating this as a failure to reconcile philosophy and theology – and in treating this failure as destined to be overcome in the great line of German metaphysics running from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – they overlook two signal issues. First, they fail to observe that the reconciliation of philosophy and theology actually pre-dated Thomasius; that it was the defining mark of the metaphysical ‘confusion’ that he set out to destroy; and that he had carefully diagnosed the ‘secret theology’ of Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics on which this reconciliation depended. They also overlook the fact that Thomasius linked the confusion of philosophy and theology in this secret theology to the merging of civil and religious authority in confessional society. These were joined by the ‘priestcraft’ of the theologians and philosophers, and in particular by their claim to be able to administer a philosophical salvation to the laity through speculative and selfpurifying access to the Platonic intelligibles. In short, far from failing to reach the transcendental reconciliation of philosophy and theology in the great line of German metaphysics, Thomasius identified this reconciliation with the catastrophic fusion of civil and religious governance in the confessional state. He located the nexus between university metaphysics and the monstrosity of a religious state in the exalted deportment of the academic theologians and philosophers – the clerisy – who purported to govern others on the basis of their access to a domain of pure intellection. In fact, the reshaping of the relations between the civil sciences and theology which lay at the heart of Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law arose not from their philosophical failure but from the failure of university philosophy; that is, its failure to comprehend the profound transformation in the relations between civil and religious governance that

Civil philosophy and profane natural law



had already been achieved in the domain of politics and jurisprudence. The comprehension of this transformation was to be the task of the civil philosophy developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius, in particular of their refashioned natural law. Rather than signalling their failure to become metaphysicians, the fact that their natural law contains a statist conception of politics and law alongside an unreconciled ‘spiritualist’ theology points to a quite different historical reality. It indicates the manner in which Pufendorf and Thomasius sought to destroy metaphysics so that they could transform practical philosophy in accordance with the juridical and political secularisation of civil governance. This transformation was dependent on two fundamental and interdependent strategies which in fact form the basis of Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ civil philosophy. The first of these strategies concerns the manner in which their profane natural law separates the exercise of civil authority from the pursuit of moral regeneration. In excluding the question of truth from the great religious peace treaties, political jurisprudence had not only detheologised politics, it had in effect ‘detranscendentalised’ it; for the key to the peaceful legal coexistence of the rival confessions lay in the sovereign power’s complete indifference to their transcendent truth claims. This in turn required the recalibration of politics and law as instrumental disciplines whose object was restricted to political order as such. The detranscendentalising of politics and law was reflected in the anti-metaphysical voluntarism of the new civil natural law. Pufendorf and Thomasius denied that natural law could be founded in the transcendent truths of man’s moral nature or moral community, grounding it instead in his limitless capacity for mutual self-destruction. This supported a conception of politics and law understood in terms of the commands of a sovereign power issued for the sole end of maintaining social peace. As we shall see, it also led to the fundamental doctrine that the sovereign power had the absolute right to settle religious controversies, by force if necessary; but only if they threatened social peace and only if this power remained completely indifferent to the conflicting religious truths. At the same time, because this detranscendentalising of politics resulted from a specific (political–jurisprudential) kind of desacralisation – and was not the result of a general philosophical or social process of rationalisation – it did not lead to a wholesale secularisation or instrumentalisation of all social spheres. On the contrary, in accordance with a second strategy, the civil philosophers sought to remove ‘true



Civil philosophy

Christianity’ from political supervision by treating it in terms of the informulable and unenforceable faith of an ‘invisible church’. This accounts for the ambivalent attitude to religion in the new natural law. To the extent that it is considered in its public ecclesiological sense, then religion is strictly subject to political utility, with a refashioned Staatskirchenrecht being the source of laws designed to neutralise the independent power of the churches and transform them into instruments of social pedagogy. To the extent that religion was regarded in its transcendent salvific sense, however, then Thomasius in particular sought to free it from all forms of authority – clerical and political – treating it as a matter of private faith and grace. In so doing, of course, he was simultaneously removing politics and law from all religious obligations. The instrumentalising and detranscendentalising of politics and law, accompanied by the ambivalent ‘privatising’ of religion, signalled a profound reconfiguration of the relations between civil and religious governance. It gave rise to an outlook in which the exercise of civil authority would only be considered legitimate to the extent that it was indifferent to transcendent truth, and in which the pursuit of transcendent truth would be considered legitimate only to the extent that it involved no exercise of civil authority and had no impact on social peace. Pufendorf and Thomasius were amongst the first to formulate this new outlook, which lay at the heart of their civil philosophy. This combination of secular civil sciences and spiritualistic theology was the instrument and outcome of a radical reorientation of the academic–intellectual field, giving rise to the outlook of civil philosophy. On the one hand, it meant that the civil sciences would only be considered legitimate to the extent that they eschewed revealed or transcendent objects and restricted themselves to empirically available ones. On the other hand, it dictated that the transcendent objects of theology would be considered legitimate only to the extent that they were treated as objects of faith, completely inaccessible to natural philosophical knowledge. This outlook, while it employed the traditional Lutheran ‘dualist’ formulations regarding the gap between reason and revelation, knowledge and faith, was not oriented to a metaphysical delimitation or reconciliation of the two domains. On the contrary, by inheriting the political–jurisprudential imperative to separate the spheres of civil and religious governance, and through its spiritualistic rejection of all attempts to provide either a transcendent basis for the civil sciences or a rational basis for theological doctrine, the outlook of the civil philosophers was dedicated to the radical decoupling of the civil and theological

Civil philosophy and profane natural law



knowledge, and the consequent destruction of university metaphysics. This of course is the viewpoint informing Thomasius’ Foreword to Grotius. It will already be clear that Protestant university metaphysics and its natural law adopted diametrically opposed positions to civil philosophy in both of the above regards. In the first place, university metaphysics remained committed to anchoring the civil sciences of ethics, law, and politics in transcendent truth, through philosophical reflection on their ‘rational’ foundations. Whether in the form of Alberti’s recovery of divine law, Leibniz’s recovery of the transcendent concept of justice, Wolff’s recursion to the intellectual possibilia that underlie all possible things, or Kant’s ascent to a transcendental moral law underlying all empirical ethics and politics – German university metaphysics would be characterised by a relentless drive to overcome civil philosophy’s separation of the empirical–civil and the transcendent–religious sciences. It sought thereby to re-establish the unity of Christian academic culture at whose centre sat the privileged figure of the metaphysician himself, preserving a quasi-religious disposition for the civil sciences through his own self-purifying recovery of their transcendent grounds. Secondly, university metaphysics and its natural law rejected civil philosophy’s uncoupling of the spheres of civil and spiritual governance. Metaphysicians from the Martinis to Kant refused to accept the indifference of sovereign power to moral truth – thereby rejecting the autonomy of the political – with Kant commenting on how ‘terrible’ it was that ‘no philosopher has yet been able to bring into agreement with morality . . . the fundamental principles of the great societies called states’ (., RRT, ). At the same time, these metaphysicians remained committed to reconciling Christian theology and metaphysical philosophy, with Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant all producing elaborate ‘philosophical theologies’. In doing so they continued to seek a ‘rational faith’ capable of reunifying Christianity and forming the basis of a ‘moral commonwealth’. As a result, they remained wedded to a political eschatology, conceiving the state via the figure of the church, or the ‘kingdom of God on earth’. We may conclude the first part of our study, therefore, by observing that the metaphysical and civil philosophy found in early modern German universities represented independent and opposed responses to the reshaping of civil and religious governance that was taking place in the political–jurisprudential domain. Far from emerging as a failure to achieve the metaphysical synthesis of philosophy and theology – a



Civil philosophy

failure that would force it to combine an amoral statism and an irrational theology – civil philosophy emerged as a deliberate repudiation of the whole programme of metaphysical reconciliation, patiently uncoupling the civil sciences from theology in order to separate political authority and religious truth. For its part, university metaphysics remained constitutionally committed to the unification of philosophy and theology – albeit on the basis of increasingly ‘secular’ conceptions of the transcendental domain – and refused to renounce the ecclesiological desire for a state governed in accordance with transcendent moral principles. These rival intellectual cultures were neither mediated by a dialectic internal to a universal human intellect nor unified by a singular form of truth. Rather they confronted each other as divergent modes of forming particular intellectual deportments, each characterised by its own way of acceding to truth. Such is the manner in which we shall approach the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius, and the metaphysics of Leibniz and Kant, treating the works of these philosophers as representative instances of a still-unresolved divergence in the fundamental forms of intellectual culture.

 

Civil and metaphysical philosophy

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

    

Leibniz’s political metaphysics

.      If the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy represented a major fissure in the academic–intellectual culture of early modern Germany, then one of its central texts is Leibniz’s celebrated Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf. Written in  at the request of the abbot of Locum (Molanus), this text was first published as an appendix to Jean Barbeyrac’s French edition of Pufendorf ’s De Officio (). Here it was interspersed with Barbeyrac’s adjudicatory comments, intended to mediate the conflict for the Huguenot Diaspora (Barbeyrac ). In his monitory discussion of the De Officio, Leibniz comments that while he agrees with Pufendorf ’s derivation of duties from laws, Pufendorf has no idea of the depth of natural laws or the scope of the duties they embrace. Leibniz expands this comment with the following remarks: But my analysis of this is scarcely recognised by our author, [namely] that in a universal society governed by God every virtue . . . is comprehended among the obligations of universal justice; and not only external acts, but also all of our sentiments are regulated by a certain rule of law; thus those who are worthy of being philosophers of law [must] consider not only concord among men [humanae tranquilitatis], but also friendship with God, the possession of which assures us of an enduring felicity. (PW, )

These remarks provide a useful pointer to the central differences between the natural law doctrines of Pufendorf and Leibniz. As we shall in more detail in chapter , Pufendorf had indeed sought to limit natural law duties to those derivable from the end of human tranquillity. He had done so in order to separate civil authority from man’s pursuit of his ‘enduring felicity’ or salvation, thereby restricting law to ‘external’ or civil actions, to the exclusion of all concern with man’s inner moral or religious purity. Moreover, in disputing Pufendorf ’s account of the ‘efficient cause’ of natural law, Leibniz clearly identifies the rival theological–political underpinnings of their divergent constructions: 



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

‘[Pufendorf], indeed, does not find [the cause of natural law] in the nature of things and in the precepts of right reason which conform to it, which emanate from the divine understanding, but (what will appear to be strange and contradictory) in the command of a superior’ (PW, ). Against Pufendorf, Leibniz insists that justice is not to be restricted to the governance of external actions in accordance with the end of civil peace, being grounded instead in God’s salvific governance of the universe, which extends to man’s inner moral condition. For, in Leibniz’s metaphysical philosophy, man shares in God’s intellection of the ‘substantial forms’ or ‘perfections’ responsible for the universe’s intelligible and moral order: ‘Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on [God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intellect, which constitute, so to speak, the essence of divinity itself; and it is right that our author [Pufendorf] is reproached by theologians when he maintains the contrary’ (PW, ). According to this neo-Platonic metaphysics, wisdom is knowledge of the forms or perfections which are the source of the universe’s teleological order. To know the rational forms or perfections, however, one must love them; for in loving or finding happiness in the perfections man perfects himself – realises his telos as a rational being – and thereby qualifies himself to dispense justice as one in whom love and wisdom are combined. Leibniz’s metaphysical conception of justice, justitia est caritas sapientis – justice is the love of the sage – thus constitutes a thoroughgoing contrast with and self-conscious repudiation of Pufendorf ’s anti-metaphysical or civil conception. For, according to Pufendorf, the natural law duties find their effective source not in the reasons of a quasi-divine intellect but in the commands of a political superior. How, though, should we approach these rival natural law doctrines? In what historiographic space are they most appropriately located? Seen from the viewpoint of the history of moral philosophy, the natural law doctrines of Leibniz and Pufendorf appear as competing attempts to provide a rational basis for political duties or, equivalently, a moral basis for the exercise of civil authority. Historians writing from this standpoint regard Leibniz’s natural law as philosophically superior to Pufendorf ’s, despite the fact that Leibniz wrote nothing of the magnitude of Pufendorf ’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium, or even of its epitome, the De Officio. As we have already noted, some of these historians regard both philosophers as destined for eclipse with the appearance of Kant’s moral philosophy (Schmidt-Biggemann a; Schneewind ; Schneewind ). Others, though, with greater sympathy for Leibniz’s neo-Platonic

Introduction



metaphysics, focus more directly on its supposed philosophical superiority to Pufendorf ’s ‘Hobbesian’ perspective. They regard Leibniz’s attempt to provide civil authority with a metaphysical–moral basis as intellectually and morally preferable to Pufendorf ’s alleged reduction of right to might (Barreau ; Riley ; Sève ; Sève ). Viewing Leibniz’s relation to Pufendorf in these terms, however, underestimates the degree to which it was shaped by the religious and political circumstances of post-Westphalian Germany. In his discussion of Pufendorf ’s theological writings, Detlef Döring observes that both thinkers were attempting to influence Protestant Religionspolitik (Döring , –). In writing his Jus Feciale Divinum sive de Consensu et Dissensu Protestantium Exercitatio Posthuma (The Divine Feudal Law, or On Consensus and Dissensus among Protestants, ), Pufendorf sought to provide a core theology acceptable to Lutherans and Calvinists, in accordance with the religious policy of Brandenburg-Prussia. Leibniz, however, had never deviated from his visionary quest to reunite the whole of Christendom around an agreed philosophical theology – his own (Döring a). Leibniz’s stinging attacks on Pufendorf ’s theology and natural law were thus in part driven by personal rivalry – Leibniz resented the high office Pufendorf had obtained at the Brandenburg court – but, more importantly, by a fundamental difference in their cultural and political outlooks. This difference, as Döring comments, is given symptomatic expression in their radically opposed views of the discipline of metaphysics: ‘Is a greater opposition thinkable than that between Leibniz’s pride in having already penetrated the depths of metaphysics in his youth, and Pufendorf ’s thanking fate for having allowed him the timely recognition that metaphysics is nothing other than a useless mish-mash of empty concepts?’ (Döring , ). In the face of the modern proclivity to treat Leibniz as simply a better philosopher than Pufendorf, Döring’s comments are a pointer to just how deeply Leibnizian metaphysics were embedded in a specific set of religious and political conflicts – particularly the conflict with civil philosophy. We have already indicated that Leibniz’s metaphysics may be regarded as a characteristic neo-Platonic improvisation on seventeenthcentury Protestant university metaphysics. Despite the important doctrinal shifts involved here, there are, we have suggested, important continuities at the level of the culture of metaphysics itself; for Leibniz and those who came after him continued to cultivate the spiritual authority of a personage with access to the divine–intelligible order of the cosmos and, on this basis, to claim authority in the civil sphere. This



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

distinctive cultural–political comportment holds the key to understanding Leibniz’s attack on Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy, which was dedicated to destroying just this nexus of intellectual and civil authority in the metaphysical personage. It is also a pointer to the larger conflict framing this skirmish: that between the civil desacralisation of politics and the strategy of rationalist resacralisation being pursued by the metaphysicians. In fleshing out these suggestions, this chapter offers an account of Leibniz’s metaphysics as a specific kind of intellectual self-culture, one embedded in the neo-Platonic anthropology and cosmology, and dedicated to the cultivation of a socially authoritative moral persona. This approach results in a view of Leibniz’s philosophical theology and natural law quite unlike that offered by the historians of moral philosophy, but one more attuned to the religious and political circumstances in which his metaphysics did battle with Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ civil philosophy.  .       S C H U L M E TA P H Y S I K     In its neo-Platonic pursuit of the ‘intelligibles’ underlying the empirical world, Leibniz’s metaphysics represents a characteristic early modern ‘rationalist’ transformation of the scholastic inheritance, comparable with Descartes’ and Spinoza’s. It is helpful to view this transformation in terms of an intellectual spectrum. Scholasticism may be characterised in terms of a particular tension: between the drive to elaborate a conception of substance or being common to God, man, and world, and the equally strong insistence on the gulf separating the divine and human realms. This gave rise to a variety of ‘orthodox’ metaphysical theologies, in accordance with several strategies for responding to the tension, as we have seen in Walter Sparn’s account of Lutheran and Calvinist university metaphysics. In its positing of a single domain of intelligibles, open to both the divine and the human intellect, early modern neo-Platonism occupies the rationalist end of the metaphysical spectrum. Leibniz’s metaphysics may thus be regarded as representing a particular historical negotiation of the path from the scholastic to the rationalist poles of this spectrum. We obtain a helpful overview of this transition in a short but pregnant essay by Bogumil Jasinowski. Jasinowski sees Leibniz’s philosophy emerging from the interplay between two distinct metaphysical traditions,

From ‘Schulmetaphysik’ to rationalist metaphysics



Christian scholasticism and Renaissance neo-Platonism (Jasinowski , –). Central to Leibniz’s rationalist transformation of his scholastic inheritance are two interlinked doctrines that Jasinowski calls pancosmism and gnoseomonism. Described by Jasinowski as a ‘metaphysical faith’ originating in Chaldea, pancosmism is the doctrine that the entirety of the world is contained in each of its parts. This is the organicist teaching that gave rise to both the search for occult relations between things and the pursuit of mathematical formulas capable of expressing these relations. Gnoseomonism is Jasinowski’s term for the ‘epistemological’ concomitant of pancosmism. This is the doctrine that, just as there is a single order of pancosmic being, so there is a single principle of knowledge informing God, man, and the world. The prime instance of this principle is the Platonic Idea, acceded to via pure intellectual intuition rather than discursive reason, and giving rise to empirical things through a process of devolution into the world of the senses. The reversal of this process finds expression in the doctrine of a self-purifying ascent from confused sensory perceptions to their source in the timeless forms or intelligences. Jasinowski sees Leibniz’s philosophy as effecting a pancosmic and gnoseomonistic transformation of scholastic dualism and, in this regard, his account agrees with fundamental studies by Heimsoeth and Merlan (Heimsoeth ; Merlan ). Leibniz’s monadology is a typical expression of this transformation. The monad or ‘spiritual atom’ is both a substance originating in God’s creative intellection of the universe yet – in the case of the soul or ‘intelligent monad’ – also contains the totality of substances in a pancosmic manner, through its own intellection, which mirrors God’s. From this viewpoint, the pantheistic and deistic tendencies of Leibniz’s metaphysics arise from this neo-Platonic collapsing of the scholastic dualism of divine and human being. This interpretation echoes Sparn’s account of the Platonic provenance of ‘Calvinist’ rationalist doctrines, particularly the doctrine of regenerate man’s capacity to participate in God’s thinking of things through contemplative ascent to the divine ideas (Sparn , –). It is somewhat surprising then that Patrick Riley should regard Leibniz’s neo-Platonic conception of justice – ‘the charity of the wise’ – as indicative of the harmonisation of Christian theology and scientific rationality: ‘In the end one can say that Leibniz preserves the Christian/Pauline notion of charity as one side of justice, that he does not altogether secularise the idea of justice, but that (at the same time) the stress on “the wise” is redolent of both ancient Platonic rationalism



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

and modern scientific Enlightenment’ (Riley , ). In fact, like its ‘Calvinist’ prototype, Leibniz’s conception of enlightenment through contemplative ascent to the intelligibles may itself be regarded as a form of ‘metaphysical faith’ – or spiritual self-cultivation – rather than as an anticipation of science; for we shall see that this ascent takes place not through experimental method but via a practice of intellectual selfpurification. In fact, Leibniz’s mode of acceding to the intelligibles or ‘perfections’ is symptomatic of the ‘secret theology’ that so concerned Thomasius, as we gather from Leibniz’s claim that: ‘The divine perfections are concealed in all things, but very few know how to discover them there. Hence there are many who are learned without being illumined, because they believe not God or the light but only their earthly teachers or their external senses and so remain in contemplation of imperfections’ (Lm, ). Similarly, as Heimsoeth has shown, rather than anticipating experimental biology, Leibniz’s interest in the microscopic examination of pond amoebae was driven by his pancosmic (antiDemocritean) desire to prove that even the smallest particles of matter contained the living universe within them (Heimsoeth , –). Rather than indicating an epochal transition to a ‘modern scientific Enlightenment’, Leibniz’s metaphysics is thus better seen as a characteristic seventeenth-century Platonistic modification of Protestant Schulmetaphysik. In this regard it is symptomatic of a significant parting of the cultural ways available to seventeenth-century Protestant intellectuals. Other intellectuals, we recall, responded to the Lutheran dualism of divine and human being in a quite different manner. Rather than collapsing the two levels into a single form of reason or intellection, political scientists (Arnisaeus and Conring) and civil philosophers (Pufendorf and Thomasius) intensified the separation of divine being and human thought as a means of naturalising and objectifying the latter. This enabled them to treat the sciences of politics and law as governed by specific empirical objects and technical–formal methods. By contrast, in maintaining the classical religious–metaphysical conception of the divine intellection of the essences, while ‘deconsecrating’ the manner in which these would be acceded to, Leibniz was turning his back on the construction of autonomous empirical sciences and improvising the ‘modern’ form of philosophia Christiana. At the very least, then, there are several paths into the ‘modern scientific Enlightenment’, and these do not lead to the same destination. In order to prepare the way for our discussion of the form and circumstances in which Leibniz undertook his Platonic modification of

From ‘Schulmetaphysik’ to rationalist metaphysics



Protestant Schulmetaphysik, we need to supplement Jasinowski’s schematic account by bringing forward two of the results of our earlier discussion of university metaphysics and civil philosophy. In the first place, we need to recall the central lesson of Thomassen’s discussion of metaphysics as a particular Lebensform (see section . above). Thomassen, we recall, treats the pursuit of the intelligibles not as an epistemological necessity, but as the goal of a way of life grounded in a contingent moral anthropology. This is the metaphysical anthropology of man as the being whose spark of divine intellect permits him to participate in God’s creative intuition of the substantial forms, even if his corporeal embodiment means that to achieve this end he must rise above the discursive–sensory forms of human understanding through self-purifying abstraction. Despite its more explicitly Platonic character, we find the same anthropology at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphysics – in the figure of the ‘rational monad’, with its inner intellectual spontaneity and its outer sensory passivity, and with its driving desire for intellectual self-perfection (Heimsoeth ). We shall therefore approach Leibniz’s monadology as an improvisation on the longstanding metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex. Inheriting the latter’s ‘ascetic’ function and moral prestige, the monadology is also a means of grooming the exalted and authoritative intellectual deportment of the metaphysician. Next, we need to bring forward the results of our preliminary discussion of the relation between university metaphysics and the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius (see section .). In their reconstruction of natural law – grounded in the Epicurean anthropology of self-restraint rather than the Platonic one of self-realisation – Pufendorf and Thomasius sought to uncouple the spheres of political governance and religious formation through a radical separation of politics, law, and ethics from theology. They did so by treating the former as objects of sciences whose epistemological horizons were set by the state’s pursuit of social peace, and the latter as a discipline rooted in a private faith lying beyond the reach of all philosophical explication and doctrinal formalisation. Acting in accordance with the deep-seated desacralisation of politics that had been taking place in the political–jurisprudential domain, the civil philosophers sought to eliminate the political enforcement of religious life-styles by excluding transcendent truth and value from the ‘civil kingdom’. This meant that the ‘kingdom of truth’ could only be entered through private devotion, not teachable metaphysics. Conversely, outraged by Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ desacralising



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

philosophy, the university metaphysicians continued to seek the reconciliation of theology and philosophy and, on this basis, to ground political governance in some version of Christian moral perfectionism. Lutheran political metaphysicians such as Alberti, Veltheim, Placcius, and Prasch thus continued to offer metaphysical explications of central theological doctrines. They also refurbished ‘ante-bellum’ neoscholastic natural law, according to which sovereignty and positive law are constrained by transcendental rational and moral laws. Rather than signifying his dialectical overcoming of the civil separation of theology and the political sciences, the fact that Leibniz sought to resolve religious conflict through a trans-confessional philosophical theology indicates his closeness to the anti-political strategy adopted by the university metaphysicians. Similarly, rather than solving a philosophical problem inherent in the civil decoupling of positive law and moral philosophy, Leibniz’s reestablishment of a continuum between these domains is a weapon against the (political–juridical) desacralisation of civil governance. As the instrument of a new ‘rationalist’ resacralisation of politics and law, Leibniz’s metaphysics is also a means of preserving the intellectual and civil authority of the Christian philosopher in a new form – that of the ‘anti-positivist’ critical intellectual. These at least are the propositions that we shall defend in our discussion of the ‘ascetic’ character of Leibniz’s metaphysics, and the ‘neo-confessional’ character of his philosophical theology and natural law. .          The key to understanding the self-formative character of Leibniz’s metaphysics lies in the reciprocal relation it establishes between knowledge of the ‘perfections’ (intelligibles) and the perfection of the intelligible being who strives to know them. Leibniz gives symptomatic expression to this relation in a short meditation on ‘Felicity’ (c. –). ‘Virtue’, Leibniz asserts, ‘is the habit of acting according to wisdom. It is necessary that practice accompany knowledge.’ Wisdom, for its part, ‘is the science of felicity’ and felicity ‘a lasting state of pleasure’. Pleasure, though, ‘is a knowledge or feeling of perfection, not only in ourselves, but also in others’; and this knowledge or feeling is itself transformative or perfecting of us, ‘for in this way some further perfection is aroused in us’. In other words, wisdom as the science of felicity is not just the theoretical understanding of a concept. It is the awareness of the

The subject of metaphysics



divine perfections or essences that we achieve when we are ourselves perfected through that awareness, and is thus the pleasure or feeling of perfection. Leibniz goes on to formulate the transformative character of metaphysical knowledge of the perfections in this way: Now it is necessary to explain the feeling or the knowledge of perfection. The confused perception of some perfection constitutes the pleasure of sense, but this pleasure can be [productive] of greater imperfections which are born of it, as a fruit with a good taste and a good odour can conceal a poison. This is why one must shun the pleasures of the sense, as one shuns a stranger, or, sooner, a flattering enemy. Knowledge is of two kinds, that of facts and that of reasons. That of facts is perception, that of reasons is intelligence. Knowledge of reasons perfects us because it teaches us universal and eternal truths, which are manifested in the perfect Being. But knowledge of facts is like that of the streets of a town, which serves us while we stay there, [but] after [leaving] which we don’t wish to burden our memory any longer. (PW, –; Gr, , –)

Here we can make out the lineaments of a particular self-transformative contemplative practice. In the classic Platonic–rationalist manner, Leibniz teaches that to be virtuous or act in accordance with wisdom one must attain the knowledge or feeling of perfection that comes with being perfected. One attains this knowledge or feeling through the pleasures of the mind or the knowledge of reasons, which is in fact the knowledge of the perfections that perfect us. To obtain this pure knowledge and pleasure, though, is not just a theoretical matter. In fact it is to undergo a personal transformation. As in Albert’s metaphysics, this is figured in terms of shunning the pleasures of sense and approaching the perfections or essences at their source, in their continuous emanation from divine intellection. For sensory perception is not just the confused or ‘imperfect’ knowledge of an intellectual concept but is also the source of our metaphysical–moral impairment, as we remain locked in our imperfect sensory condition through the contemplation of empirical things and satisfactions. Factual or sense-based knowledge is thus not just intellectually inadequate but spiritually corrupting, as it threatens to trap us in contemplation of imperfections. The world of facts should be like a town we pass through on our way to a permanent dwelling in the city of contemplation. For its part, rationally based knowledge is not just theoretically true but is so because it is spiritually purifying. It permits knowledge of intellectual perfections (reasons, essences, intelligibles) by purging the intellect of the sensory perceptions



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

that cut us off from self-perfecting contemplation of the source of all perfections – the ens perfectissimum. We can propose therefore that Leibniz’s metaphysics – and, to the extent that he is its harbinger, enlightenment metaphysics more generally – represents not the final recovery of man’s ‘rational being’, but a way of cultivating the self in the image of this figure. This specific mode of ‘subjectifying’ individuals was adapted from the contemplative practices of Schulmetaphysik, and was developed in opposition to the rival ways of grooming ‘truth-capable’ subjects contained in civil philosophy. In clarifying this metaphysical cultivation of the self, the present section undertakes three tasks. First, we discuss Leibniz’s anthropology (and cosmology) as giving shape to a particular way of relating to and shaping the self. This in turn will require us to describe the principles of metaphysical abstraction as a particular spiritual exercise or practice of intellectual self-transformation. Finally, we will have to comprehend the figure of formal or pure intellection as the comportment-ideal of a prestigious way of life, that of the secular sage. Once we have completed these tasks we will be in a position to discuss Leibniz’s philosophical theology and natural law as disciplines whose truth is informed by the metaphysician’s prestigious moral–epistemological status – that is, his qualification to speak authoritatively on religious and civil matters by virtue of his participation in the quasi-divine intellection of pure concepts. .. The anthropology of pure reason The most compact formulation of Leibniz’s anthropology is given in his Monadology (), which also contains a cosmology and theodicy. The Monadology posits a universe teeming with monads or simple substances. The ‘atomic’ or non-complex character of the monads means that they may never pass away, generation and death merely being cyclical compositions and decompositions of the simple substances. Increate God creates the monads by intelligising them, thereby imbuing the created intelligences with a ‘spark’ or ‘image’ of this same creative intellection, albeit limited by the receptivity or passivity characteristic of the creaturely status: ‘So only God is the primary unity or the simple original substance of which all the created or derivative monads are products, and from whom they are born, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment, but limited by the receptivity of the created being, for whom it is essential to have limits’ (Mo, § ).

The subject of metaphysics



Through this continuous creative intellection of the monads or substantial forms, the divine mind imbues them with all of the accidents or predicates which will occur to them as events in time, and which they will experience as ‘perceptions’. All monads, even the ‘naked’ monads that make up the world of things, are animate in the sense of harbouring a soul or entelechy, which is the substantial form intelligised by God and containing the predicates or perceptions that individuate things. Given that all monads reflect the divine mind, and given that the universe is a plenum, placing all monads in communication with each other, then: ‘this mutual connection and accommodation of all created things to each other and of each to all the rest causes each simple substance to have relations which express all the others and consequently to be a perpetual living mirror of the universe’ (Mo, § ). It is, however, in his treatment of the ‘rational’ or ‘thinking’ monads – man and the angels – that the ‘ascetic’ or self-formative role of Leibniz’s anthropology comes to the fore. Like ordinary monads or souls, rational monads or spirits are subject to the same passive perceptions that arise from the unfolding of their forms in time. By virtue of the spiritual substance which they share with the divine mind, however, the rational monads are capable of becoming self-conscious of these perceptions, which allows them to rise from passive to active intellection, in imitation of God: Among other differences which exist between ordinary souls and spirits . . . there is still this: souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of created beings, while spirits are also images of divinity itself or of the author of nature, capable of knowing the system of the universe and of imitating it to some extent by means of architectonic samples, each spirit being like a little divinity within its own sphere. (Mo, § )

Due to its structuring by this onto-theological hierarchy, Leibniz’s distinction between empirical–historical knowledge and knowledge derived from a priori reflection possesses a strongly moral–anthropological character, despite the fact that it is normally discussed in largely epistemological or logical terms, as, for example, by Beck (Beck , –). Leibniz thus treats empirical–historical knowledge as symptomatic of the body-burdened passive perceptions of the lower creatures, while regarding a priori reflection or intellectual intuition as indicative of man’s capacity for participating in God’s active timeless intelligising of the forms of things (Mo, §§ –). The monadology therefore functions as a moral anthropology by tying the capacity for divine intellection to an image of the being who is to be its bearer. This is what permits



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

Leibniz to present theoretical speculation as a god-like deportment of the self, while stigmatising empirical knowledge as passive and beastly. In this regard, despite its neo-Platonic formulation, Leibniz’s monadology plays a role strikingly similar to the one Thomassen ascribes to Albertian metaphysics. The common feature is the role of the metaphysical anthropology – always focused in the image of man as a sensibly embodied intellectual being – in inducing the desire for a particular kind of self-transformation. In both Leibnizian and scholastic metaphysics the desire for metaphysical knowledge of the perfections or forms arises from the imaginal ‘ontological’ gap between divine and human intellection. This gap is, in its turn, instituted in the paideia of metaphysics, in order to induce the desire for metaphysical knowledge. By configuring man as a spiritual being whose spontaneous intelligising links him to divine intellection of the forms – but whose receptive sensing threatens to trap him in confused and self-interested empirical perception – Leibniz, too, is engaged in programming a particular work of spiritual self-formation. This is one that requires individuals to focus their desires (and fears) for moral regeneration in the way they know about things. Specifically, it impels them to relate to their own thoughts as if these were a conduit to a higher mode of being, but one threatened with corruption by empirical perceptions that mire them in the sensory ‘historical’ world. Rather than being a philosophical mistake that would be corrected by Kant’s separation of sensibility and understanding, the continuum that the monadology establishes between a degraded sensory perception and a purified rational intellection may thus be regarded as instituting a particular way of relating to the self. This is a relation through which certain individuals learn to regard their true selves as a fugitive pure intellect, emanating from the divine mind yet darkened by man’s sensible being, hence in need of restorative purification for completion. Two features of the intellectual deportment arising from this use of the monadology are of particular importance for our present concerns. In the first place, as Patrick Riley has pointed out, by establishing a continuum between human and divine intellection, the monadology allows Leibniz to represent man as a citizen in the divine republic or Civitas Dei, rather than as a mere passive thing in a mechanically ordered universe (Riley , ): It is this [their image-relation to divine intellection] which renders spirits capable of entering into a kind of society with God and makes his relation to

The subject of metaphysics



them not merely that of an inventor to his machine (as God is related to other creatures) but also that of a prince to his subjects and even a father to his children. It is easy to conclude from this that the assemblage of all spirits must make up the city of God, that is to say, the most perfect state which is possible under the most perfect of monarchs. (Mo, §§ –)

More importantly, however, Leibniz’s monadology is designed to have a transformative effect on the philosopher himself. If the monadology is central to the continuum Leibniz establishes between God’s moral governance of the universe and the prince’s political governance of the state, then the key to this continuum lies in the exercise in spiritual selftransformation programmed by this speculative anthropology. For it is through the exercise in ascent to the a priori intellection of the forms of things that the individual establishes the unity of his own persona, as metaphysician, modelling this on the transcendent unity of God’s timeless intellection of substances prior to their scattering across time and space. From this perspective, there can be no fundamental distinction between God’s rational natural law and the civil laws of the secular prince, or between man’s religious and civil duties. For the latter represent only the devolution of the former into the world of time and utility, which it is the task of the metaphysician to transcend. This speculative deportment, as we shall see in the following chapter, is precisely what is excluded by Pufendorf ’s anthropology. .. The exercise of abstraction In redescribing Leibnizian metaphysical abstraction as a spiritual exercise, we can begin by returning to our observation that the role of the metaphysical anthropology is to programme a certain kind of ‘work on the self ’. In treating empirical objects as confused perceptions of quasidivine clear and distinct ideas, Leibniz’s monadology is designed to effect a turn from the outer to the inner world. In fact, it is an exercise in unifying the person around a single ‘I’ or self – a metaphysical moral personality – whose God-likeness consists in apprehending the apparently autonomous and differentiated historical world from a single point of a priori intellection: It is also by the knowledge of necessary truths and by their abstraction that we rise to reflective acts, which enable us to think of what is called I and to consider this or that to be in us; it is thus, as we think of ourselves, that we think of



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

being, of substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial, and of God himself, conceiving of that which is limited in us as being without limits in him. These reflective acts provide us with the principal objects of our reasonings. (Mo, § )

According to Leibniz our reasonings are ‘based upon two great principles’. The first of these is ‘the principle of contradiction, by virtue of which we judge that false which involves a contradiction, and that true which is opposed or contradictory to the false’ (Mo, § ). The second is ‘the principle of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we observe that there can be found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise, although we cannot know these reasons in most cases’ (Mo, § ). The principle of sufficient reason provides Leibniz with his key method of abstraction and, indeed, of acceding to truth. It is the means by which individuals, ‘shunning’ the pleasures of sense, ascend from empirical facts and the confused murmur of sensory perception, via a ladder of progressively simpler definitions – which are also causes of the facts they determine – arriving finally at a priori axioms, laws, and primitive definitions. The latter terminate the analytic regress in that they define themselves simply on being contemplated (DM, §§ –; Mo, §§ –). In this way one passes from ‘truths of fact’ to ‘truths of reason’. Conversely, the principle of contradiction is the means by which one passes from a priori intuition of concepts – known to be true (possible) by virtue of their component intelligibilia containing no contradictions – to the synthetic demonstration of empirical truths independently of experience. Leibniz recommends the a posteriori analytic path to truth, regarding the a priori synthetic path as too difficult for unregenerate intellects, although not for all: ‘Yet superior geniuses should enter upon this [a priori] way, even without hope of arriving at particulars by means of it, in order that we may have true concepts of the universe, the greatness of God, and the nature of the soul, through which the mind can be most perfected, for this is the most important end of contemplation. Yet we believe that the absolute use of this method is conserved for a better life’ (Lm, ). Leibniz’s twin principles of reason are of course normally understood in terms of epistemology and its (post-Kantian) history. Here, these principles have come to stand for Leibniz’s flawed attempt to formulate the true relation between reason and experience that would eventually be captured in Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. For, so the standard argument goes, Kant shows that the mind accedes only to

The subject of metaphysics



the transcendental forms of empirical experience – the categories of cognition and the forms of sensory intuition – rather than to the transcendent forms of ‘things in themselves’, or Leibnizian noumenal essences (Beck , –; Kahl-Furthmann ; Wundt , –, –, –). On this telling of the history, Leibniz’s principles of contradiction and sufficient reason are incapable of the correct formulation due to their blurring of causes and reasons, sensibility and understanding. This is unavoidable given the programme of ascending from the empirical experience or ‘confused ideas’ of the perfections to their ‘clear and distinct’ intuition. Leibniz of course sees the principle of sufficient reason as representing the fundamental operation of the soul or mind itself – the operation through which it perfects itself by following the path that leads from its corporeal sensations to the pure intelligising it shares with God. If, however, we consider its dependency on the metaphysical anthropology – that is, on the philosopher’s image of himself as an intelligible being mired in the imperfections of empirical experience – then the principle of sufficient reason acquires a strikingly different significance. Rather than being a false theory of the conditions of experience, or a true path to the intelligibles of pure reason, it appears instead as a speculative practice performed by the philosopher on himself, in pursuit of the perfection required to know the perfections. In short, it appears as one of Hadot’s exercises in ‘mental concentration and renunciation of the sensible world’ (P. Hadot , ). Programmed by the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, Leibnizian abstraction takes place as a fundamental reshaping of the individual’s relation to himself and his world. Leibniz thus understands abstraction as the moment in which individuals ‘recollect’ that perceptions of (apparently) external objects in fact come from their own subconscious thinking: ‘we rise to reflective acts, which enable us to think of what is called I and to consider this or that to be in us’ (Mo, § ). This in turn is to be regarded as an imitation of or participation in God’s ‘continuous fulguration’ of the intelligibles. We can propose then that Leibniz’s principles of reason are not theoretical mistakes that left him with an insufficient regard for the independence of empirical experience. Rather, the abstractive ascent to determining Gründe – through the shunning of the pleasures of sense and the contemplation of reasons that are also causes of phenomena – is a spiritual exercise individuals perform to ensure that they will not regard empirical experience as independent of pure intelligising. In other



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

words, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason is not a mistaken theory through which a universal subject misrepresents its true relation to a domain of independent empirical experience. Rather it is a real practice through which certain individuals cultivate a specific way of relating to empirical experience: as the passive sensing of ideas originating in the (presently quasi-conscious) active intellection of the universe. The principle of sufficient reason is the means by which individuals can groom a subjectivity in which all sensory phenomena appear as husks of the ‘hidden perfections’ that God’s intelligising maintains within them: ‘The divine perfections are concealed in all things’, we recall Leibniz intimating, ‘but very few know how to discover them there’ (Lm, ). Seen in this light, Leibniz’s principles of reason appear less as early forms of Kantian epistemology and more as late versions of scholastic metaphysical exercises (Honnefelder , –). Like these exercises, Leibniz’s practice of abstraction requires a prior ‘existential’ acceptance by the philosopher that empirical experience is both intellectually and morally imperfect. This, we recall, is the burden of Leibniz’s comment that: ‘The confused perception of some perfection constitutes the pleasure of sense, but this pleasure can be [productive] of greater imperfections which are born of it [which is why] one must shun the pleasures of the sense, as one shuns a stranger, or, sooner, a flattering enemy’ (PW, ; Gr, , ). Without this ‘personal’ acceptance of the spiritual deficiency of finite empirical experience – that is, in the face of unmoved acceptance of the ‘brute’ adequacy of such experience – the demonstration of the world’s metaphysical intelligibility lacks pedagogical grip on the person who is to undergo enlightenment. This helps to explain Leibniz’s stigmatisation of those who deny the defective nature of empirical knowledge as ‘coarse’ empiricists and ‘irreligious’ mechanists. In any case, in requiring personal acceptance of the spiritual insufficiency of empirical experience, the proof of a priori intellection is not just a chain of ideas leading to a propositional conclusion. As the means of inducing this acceptance, the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason form part of a specific intellectual paideia or formative regimen. This paideia is one that initiates neophytes into the discipline of metaphysics by inducing in them the experience of empirical reality’s spiritual insufficiency. It thereby binds them to the exercise in metaphysical abstraction as the only means of recovering the pure ideas of their higher being: ‘One need not shun at all pleasures which are born of the intelligence or of reasons, as one penetrates the reason of the reason of perfections, that is to say as one sees them flow from their source, which is the absolutely perfect being’ (PW, ; Gr, , ).

The subject of metaphysics



The method of abstraction is thus not a means of recovering concepts whose thinking in fact makes the experience and reality of things possible. It is rather a spiritual exercise – a ‘work of the self on the self ’ – aimed at forming a person who will relate to their concepts and themselves in this way. This exercise operates by inducing a (milieu-specific) state of metaphysical anxiety or longing for pure vision of the intelligibles, thence to resolve it through assiduous winnowing of the husks of empirical perception, leading finally to the contemplation of pure ideas as if they were the source of empirical experience. This is the ascesis lying behind Leibniz’s claim that in order to know the pure ideas or ‘hidden perfections’ individuals must perfect themselves, as human understanding has to approach the same intensity or perfection of being as its spiritual object. But this ascesis is simultaneously the means by which the threatening autonomy of civil authority and its sciences could be held in check. For abstractive intellection leads not only to God but to the intelligibles that are responsible for the knowability of being as such, and are hence presupposed by all the particular sciences, including the civil ones. Seen in this light, Leibniz’s Platonic conceptualisation of justice is not inherently superior to the nominalist–empiricist conceptualisations of Pufendorf and Thomasius. Rather, it is just historically different to theirs, but in a highly significant way. In claiming insight into the divine idea of justice – and in stigmatising the empirical conceptions of the civil philosophers as imperfect and utilitarian – Leibniz was in fact using metaphysical abstraction as a weapon for combating the secularisation of civil governance inherent in their objectification and instrumentalisation of political–juridical rule. We will return to this issue below. For the moment, let us say that, far from representing the true path from empirical to ‘theoretical’ concepts of justice, Leibniz’s method of metaphysical abstraction is the ascetic discipline for a highly specific ‘theo-rational’ mode of acceding to truth. As such, it is not inherently superior to other methodological disciplines – such as Arnisaeus’ empirical–technical conceptualisation of political order, or Pufendorf ’s empirical–historical construction of natural law – which resulted in ‘therapeutic’ or instrumentalist modes of acceding to the truths of law and politics. .. The philosopher’s deportment This is the appropriate angle from which to approach our third and final task in this section: understanding the pursuit of formal or pure intellection as the comportment-ideal of a prestigious way of life. If Leibniz’s



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

anthropology and cosmology represent the configuration of a subject capable of acceding to divine or rational truth – and if his method of abstraction is a spiritual exercise that individuals carry out on themselves in order to shape the being capable of this accession – then it seems that knowledge of theo-rational truth is inseparable from attaining a particular kind of personhood, that of the self-purifying metaphysical sage. This inner relation between rational knowledge and personal deportment is given symptomatic expression in Leibniz’s own discourse. After all, Leibniz posits just such a relation in his cardinal doctrine that knowledge of the pure concepts or ‘hidden perfections’ is dependent on the spiritual perfection of the being who is to know them. In fact this linkage between reason and spiritual perfection was both instrument and outcome of the process through which Leibniz was able to tap into the cultural authority that Schulmetaphysik had acquired through its confessional proximity to theology, channelling this into a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher. We are fortunate in having several helpful commentaries on the appearance of this new and exalted conception of secular philosophy that accompanied ‘modern’ rationalist metaphysics (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –; Schneiders b, –). What these accounts have perhaps not made sufficiently clear, however, is the degree to which Leibniz’s fashioning of a new and culturally authoritative persona for the philosopher – that intellectual being who uncovers the forms of intelligibility common to all the sciences through an act of abstractive selfpurification – was dependent on a complex process of cultural transmission and adaptation. This is the process that saw the exercises used in the self-perfecting contemplation of the divine perfections adapted to the practice of philosophical reflection on the pure concepts. These are the concepts intended to anchor the centrifugal civil sciences in transcendental reflection on the pure forms of experience, thereby allowing philosophia Christiana to make the transition to its modern form – rationalist metaphysics. So culturally ambitious was this metaphysical philosophy that it sought to expel rival civil modes – neo-Stoic, neo-Epicurean, empiricist – from the domain of philosophy altogether, appropriating the term ‘philosophy’ for metaphysical philosophy alone. The effects of this cultural arrogation can still be felt today, in those histories of early modern German philosophy that chart a course from Leibniz to Kant via Wolff, consigning the civil philosophers to a minor, barely philosophical role. Leibniz thus initiated a distinction between ‘philosophy’ and ‘history’

The subject of metaphysics



that would indeed pass via Wolff to Kant. He did so by identifying philosophy with pure insight into the a priori possibilities (possibilia) of things prior to their occurrence in time, and history with the merely empirical knowledge of things as they are given to the senses post facto (Schneiders b). This hierarchical distinction between philosophy and history became metonymic for a whole series of distinctions between the rational and empirical disciplines, the pure and applied sciences. It also harbours an image of the philosopher as a type of secular prophet who, through his pure apprehension of the a priori concepts, possesses privileged insight into the future course of history, as the eschatological unfolding of these concepts in time. The relation between the truth of metaphysical philosophy and the enlightened or exalted condition of the philosophical personage is clear enough in Leibniz’s meditation ‘On Wisdom’, probably written in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Commenting that ‘persons of rank’ too often squander their power to do good through succumbing to the pleasures of ‘sensual indulgence’ – only to reap the punishments of ill-health and ill-repute – Leibniz prescribes a course of philosophical meditation. Only this can bring the true regenerative pleasure that comes with the perfecting of our intellects in the intellection of perfection: Such joy, which a person can always create for himself when his mind [Gemüth] is well ordered, consists in the perception of pleasure in himself and in the powers of his mind, when a man feels within himself a strong inclination and readiness for the good and the true, and particularly through the profound knowledge which an enlightened understanding provides for us, namely, that we experience the chief source, the course, and the purpose of everything, and the incomprehensible excellence of that Supreme Nature which comprises all things within it. Thus we are lifted above the unknowing, just as if we were looking down from the stars and could see all earthly things under our feet. (Lm, ; Ge, , )

From this panoptic vantage-point, to which he accedes through the purification of his intellectual being, the metaphysical philosopher can view the objects of all the sciences via the light of reason ‘which is born with us’; for these objects are themselves only empirical manifestations of the pure ideas revealed in this light. Through this linkage of pure knowledge to the exalted purity of the philosopher’s persona, Leibniz carries forward the conception of metaphysics as the transcendental science of ‘being as being’ and as the ‘science of the sciences’. For Leibniz, all men are in principle capable of attaining this level of



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

intellectual perfection, although in fact few actually do so, due to the preponderance of the sensory perceptions and passions in the majority. We have already argued, however, that Leibniz’s subject of reason is not even in principle universal. By virtue of its dependency on an instituted spiritual anthropology and an administered exercise in abstraction, the intuition of pure ideas takes place as the goal of a specialised spiritual grooming. Similar anthropologies and spiritual exercises were responsible for tying knowledge to personal ‘holiness’ – that is, to the culturally authoritative comportment of the sage or the holy man – in antiquity (Brown ; Brown a; I. Hadot ; P. Hadot ). They can also be found in the early modern Schulmetaphysik that Leibniz was adapting (Sparn , –; Sparn ). Lutheran natural jurists such as Samuel Rachel, for example, tie knowledge of natural law to the good man’s ‘nobility of character’ in a manner that is typical of Protestant neoscholasticism: In the same way, although Natural Laws are in themselves certain, yet relatively to men and human knowledge they may be either obscure or uncertain or clear; so that, just as jurists employ as a kind of standard of human conduct the diligence of the good man [arbitrium boni viri], so, and rightly, philosophers refer to the judgment of a good man, whose nobility of character, ␬␣␭␱␬␣␥␣␽␫␣, is known to be conjoined with Wisdom in an indissoluble connection, and who therefore knows better than anyone else whether a given action is or is not conformable to the Natural Laws which Prudence has promulgated. (Rachel , )

It is reasonable to propose, therefore, that in tethering rational knowledge to spiritual perfection – and thereby attaching the civil sciences to the hub of Christian philosophy – Leibniz was placing the ancient cultural authority of the sage at the disposal of the metaphysical enlightenment. It should now be clear that in deriving theo-rational concepts of law, politics, and religion through abstractive ascent to the intelligibles, Leibnizian metaphysics is not the elaboration of a confirmable theory. Rather, it constitutes a spiritual discipline aimed at forming a particular kind of intellectual deportment which, in fact, is the deportment of a particular kind of intellectual. This is an intellectual who will treat the existence of empirical–historical forms of law, politics, and religion as imperfect and corrupting. This transforms actually existing legal, political, and religious arrangements into the starting point for the exercise in spiritual ascent that will qualify the metaphysician to reshape them in accordance with metaphysical conceptions of justice and salvation. In

Philosophical theology



short, if Leibnizian rationalism does not constitute a confirmable philosophical theory, that is because it embodies the spiritual grooming responsible for the authoritative spiritual deportment of the metaphysical sage. It is in this light that we now turn to Leibniz’s philosophical theology and then his natural law. .        Leibniz’s philosophical theology can only be understood against the backdrop of the civil philosophers’ attempt to extirpate the whole genre of ‘natural theology’. Here, we can recall Thomasius’ attack on the four books of Lombard’s Sentences, for their philosophical explication of the Christian mysteries: ‘It is likely that in these four books Lombard had attempted to unite the doctrines of Augustine and Aristotle; [for] the whole work contains a mish-mash of theology and philosophy. The Holy Scriptures are explained in accordance with the principles of pagan philosophy. In ethics and natural law the old stupidities are advanced’ (VG, ). For a long time, historians have seen the civil philosophers’ refusal to integrate theology and philosophy as symptomatic of their failure to develop a reconciliatory philosophical theology. Now, however, we can see this refusal as indicative of a profound historical analysis of the cultural and political functions of university metaphysics and natural theology. In rejecting all forms of natural theology – in programmatically excluding all philosophical explications of the mysteries of sin, damnation, justification, and salvation from the sphere of civil knowledge – Thomasius was executing the dual strategy that lies at the heart of civil philosophy: the desacralising of the civil and the ‘privatising’ of the sacral. Concomitantly, in those works which he dedicated to the metaphysical explication of Christian doctrine – the ‘Catholic Demonstrations’ (–), the Confessio Philosophi (), the Systema Theologicum () and the Theodicy () – Leibniz was engaged in a process both more contentious and less benign than that of making religion safe for reason, or vice versa. In fact he was attempting to transfer the philosophical mediation of the Christian faith – together with all of the power and prestige attaching to it – from the custodianship of confessional theologians to that of rationalist metaphysicians. In ignoring the civil philosophers’ embargo on natural theology, Leibniz was thus engaged in an uncompromising defence of the metaphysician’s access to the divine and,



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

through this, of this personage’s claim to mediate Christian doctrine and authority in the civil domain. Leibniz’s grandest version of this claim lies in his programme for reunifying the faith around a metaphysical explication of Christian truths agreeable to all three confessions ( Jordan ; Wiedeburg ). These at least are the propositions to be explored in our discussion of Leibniz’s Confessio Philosophi. .. Theological philosophy Leibniz’s Confessio Philosophi or Philosopher’s Confession of Faith was written in  but remained unpublished during his lifetime. Manuscripts were, however, circulated to influential philosophers and theologians, including Antoine Arnauld and the Catholic vicar to the Hanoverian court, bishop Nicolaus Steno, who is the probable source of an important set of marginal annotations. Taking the form of a philosophical dialogue, the Confessio deals with the origin of sin and the defence of God’s justness in the face of the suffering and damnation. It thus explores the central questions of the Theodicy, but in a more compact and lucid manner. In contrast with the civil-philosophical strategy of treating contentious doctrines as adiaphora, while simultaneously establishing theologically indifferent forms of civil authority, Leibniz’s objective in the Confessio is to construct a metaphysical surrogate for theological truth, making the latter available as a moral foundation for civil society. In the Confessio Leibniz concentrates on providing metaphysical explications for the biblical doctrines of sin, damnation, and election. These explications are grounded in the metaphysical anthropology and cosmology later elaborated in the Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology. In keeping with this Christian–Platonic anthropology and cosmology, God is conceived as related to the world through an optimally harmonious ordering of the ‘series of things’. This onto-theological order is grounded in God’s non-contradictory intellection of the essences and his choice of the best possible world. Among the infinite other worlds that God might have actualised from his intelligising of non-contradictory and ‘compossible’ (logically possible and actually compatible) substances, the best possible world is the one that permits the maximum harmonisation of potentially conflicting elements (DM, §§ –). The ethical or moral–theological dimension of this metaphysical cosmology is encapsulated in the Confessio’s concept of happiness, whose roots lie not in the notion of social security that Leibniz’s civil rivals were elaborating, but in the notion of spiritual felicity or beatitude. For

Philosophical theology



Leibniz, as we have already seen, happiness is a spiritual condition arising from the soul’s intellectual contemplation of the divine harmony, representing in fact a ‘taking on’ or participation in this harmony: [ilosopher]. I will take it from your answer that you and I accept [that if God is just he loves everyone]. Is there not general agreement that God is all-knowing? [eologian]. Yes, so? . Therefore no thinkable thing possesses harmony unless God perpetually knows it. . Agreed. . So, each happiness is harmonious or beautiful. . Granted. . Now, I will prove it so that others won’t deny it. There is happiness only in the intellect. . Correct, because no-one is happy if he doesn’t know that . . . Whoever is conscious of his condition is an intellectual being [mens, geistiges Wesen]. Therefore no-one is happy who is not an intellectual being. . That follows. In any case, happiness is the condition of the intellect that is most agreeable to the intellect itself; nothing is agreeable to the intellect, though, except harmony. . Yes, of course, because we have just agreed that ‘to take pleasure’ [delectari] means nothing other than to experience harmony. . Happiness is based therefore in a spiritual condition of highest possible harmony. The nature of the intellect is thought; the harmony of the intellect is based therefore in the thought of harmony; [and] the highest harmony of the intellect or felicity [is based] finally in the contemplation of universal harmony – that is, God’s – in the intellect. . Excellent: because at the same time this shows that the happiness of the intellect and the contemplation of God are one. (CP, –)

Harmony, as a mode of perfection, holds together the cosmological and moral–anthropological sides of Leibniz’s theology. On the one hand, harmony refers to the perfect condition of the cosmic order or ‘total series of things’ arising from ‘God’s nature or, equivalently, the ideas of things’. On the other hand, it refers to the enlightened condition of the intellect that, in contemplating this order, establishes harmony within itself and with the divine order of things, which is the source of its felicity or perfection. As the most perfect being, God finds happiness or love in the felicity of all beings, this in turn making him most love-worthy; and, as justice consists in the love of all, God is most just. With this framework in place, Leibniz is ready to begin his metaphysical explication of the problems of evil and providence. It is the Theologian who plays devil’s advocate, drawing out what he takes to be



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

the heterodox fatalistic consequences of the Philosopher’s doctrine, and doing so in a manner that threatens to make it stand proxy for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. If, argues the Theologian, God is the cause of the whole series of things, and if this series contains sin and evil, then God himself must be the author of evil – unless, of course, there is a second wicked God, which is impossible. Moreover, if the events of the series flow of necessity from God’s intelligising of their a priori possibility – if, as Leibniz would later argue, all the events that a monad may undergo are already contained in God’s intelligising it – then it is necessary that some individuals, such as Pilate and Judas, should sin and be damned for eternity. Hence, if all-knowing God thus necessitates the whole cosmic series, he must will the damnation of some and the election of others, as the Calvinists teach, which is incompatible with his justice or universal love (CP, , ). The Philosopher employs two kinds of argument to avert this chain of consequences, the first one being an ethico-cosmological argument. As nothing exists without a ‘sufficient reason’, and as the chain of sufficient reasons leads ultimately to God – as the ungrounded cause of the whole series – one cannot wish to alter or suspend the chain of conditions without wishing God’s non-existence (CP, , –). At the same time, however, we know with certainty that this world is the best possible – that is, the one permitting the optimal harmonisation of dissonant elements. This means that sin and evil are to be regarded as contributing to the overall harmony or perfection of the series; just as, in the words of the Philosopher, the painter uses shadow to enhance brightness and the doctor uses poison to cure illness. If, therefore, we wish to maintain the harmony and tranquillity of our own intellect, we must regard sin and evil as reconciled within the greater harmony of the divine order, somewhat in the manner of Stoic and Epicurean ethical cosmologies. Interwoven with this is a second, more strictly Christian–metaphysical, argument. Just as Scheibler had done sixty years earlier, Leibniz argues that if we wish to understand how evil can be inevitable without being metaphysically necessary – which would make God into its author – we must refine our usual understanding of such concepts as necessity, possibility, and actuality. The key to this clarification lies in the metaphysical distinction between God’s existence – that is, his understanding or intellection of things – and his will. Like everything else, argues the Philosopher, evil exists in God’s understanding as a ‘necessary possibility’, or as something whose thinking entails no contradiction. This concerns only the idea or essence of evil though, not its ‘accidental’ or

Philosophical theology



existential inevitability in the ‘series of things’ that comprises this world (CP, –). The existence of evil in the world – which is indeed inevitable and foreseen by God – thus represents only an existential necessity, not an absolute one; something that God tolerates as part of the whole series of things (CP, –, –). Hence God neither wills nor finds pleasure in sin and damnation, because he takes pleasure only in the integration of evil in the larger perfection of the whole. Sin or evil thus arises from the contingency of the actual totality of things – in fact from the imperfect actualisation of the intelligised perfections – and is reconciled in God’s ‘best possible’ harmonisation of this dissonant totality (CP, –). These two modes of argument are jointly responsible for Leibniz’s novel metaphysical account of damnation and election. According to Leibniz the damned are those who die hating God. For, cut off from new impressions by separation from their bodies, these souls must remain imprisoned in their dying hateful thoughts for eternity, so that: ‘Who hates God at their death therefore damns themselves’ (CP, ). On the one hand the figure of self-damnation is explicated via the ethico-cosmological argument. The damned are those who die in a sinful or ‘dissonant’ moral condition, hating God for the presence of evil in the world rather than achieving the self-harmonising love that comes with contemplative acceptance of God’s reconciliation of evil in the greater cosmic good. On the other hand, Leibniz explains damnation via his distinction between metaphysical necessity and existential inevitability. Here, in the subtle fissure between the metaphysical necessity of the relations between divinely intelligised substances and the contingent necessity of their actualised forms, the damned souls are free to hate rather than to love God, which is a symptom of their imperfect actualisation. But they do so apparently only because of their erroneous knowledge of their place in this harmonised best of all orders. It thus appears that the correct metaphysical theory of the harmonic order is also the salvific means by which the elect bring themselves into harmony with this order: ‘the harmony of the intellect is based therefore in the thought of harmony’. If so, then rather than being a rational explication of Christian doctrine, Leibniz’s philosophical theology is laying claim to the power to save. We must therefore depart from Walter Sparn’s interpretation of the Confessio, in which he credits it with striking a ‘dialectical’ balance between the ‘theosophical’ translation of Christian doctrine into idealist philosophy, and the anti-metaphysical ‘two-truths’ doctrine, which consigns theology and philosophy to discrete (revealed



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

and natural) spheres (Sparn , –). The synchronisation of this work’s philosophical and soteriological functions – its ascription of salvific power to metaphysics itself – suggests, however, that Leibniz was indeed attempting to fashion a philosophical substitute for religion. Moreover, by making moral redemption contingent on acceptance of the ‘true philosophy’, this cultural translation betrays the persistence of a certain kind of confessionalism. .. Rationalism as religion We derive some evidence for the quasi-confessional character of Leibniz’s philosophical theology from the contemporary reactions of an avowedly confessional theologian, Nicolaus Steno, the Hanoverian court’s Catholic vicar. In the margin of his copy of the Confessio, adjacent to Leibniz’s account of the soul eternally imprisoned in its dying thoughts, Steno writes: ‘This is a mere assertion. Why shouldn’t the soul be able to perceive the conditions of the place in which it finds itself ?’ To which Leibniz counter-annotates: ‘How else than through the corporeal senses?’ (CP, –, fn. ). Here Leibniz’s metaphysical account of damnation – with the soul eternally imprisoned in its self-damning last thoughts through loss of new sensory inputs – is seen by Steno as a nonauthoritative rival confessional doctrine. In fact Leibniz’s metaphysics of damnation conflicts directly with Catholic teaching on the possibility of post-mortem redemption arising from the soul’s experiences in purgatory. Similarly, adjacent to Leibniz’s claim that: ‘God harms those who slavishly fear him or who wrongly assume that he will harm them, just as, conversely, he who firmly believes himself chosen or loved by God, brings it about that he (whom God loves constantly) will be elect’ (CP, ), Steno makes the following annotation: ‘This too is a mere assertion because, on the contrary, everyone fears God at the beginning of their conversion, and assumes that he might at least occasionally harm them; but nonetheless in this way they are led to the complete trust of love.’ This provokes Leibniz’s counter-claim: ‘Those who slavishly fear God do not love him and are therefore not yet in the condition of grace. Therefore they will not be led to holiness in this way’ (CP, , fn. ). Recalling that Leibniz sees fear as arising from erroneous knowledge of the metaphysical order, this statement again suggests that he regards the truth of his metaphysics as possessing salvific power – that is, as a rival confessional doctrine. It appears that only those who possess true metaphysical knowledge of the harmonisation of evil within the cosmic order

Philosophical theology



can be saved. For only thus is it possible to avoid the fear and hatred of God arising from the erroneous perception of unreconciled evil, and the damnation to which this leads. In fact the quasi-confessional character of Leibniz’s enterprise is manifest at the very heart of his philosopher’s theology, at the point where his cosmology and anthropology intersect: namely, in the rationalist doctrine that the moral condition of the will is a function of the rational conformation of the intellect to divine ideas. Here, in the field marked out by the long struggle between rationalism and voluntarism, Leibniz rehearses a problem which, we recall (see section .), was central to Protestant Schulmetaphysik. This is the problem of reconciling the metaphysical conception of evil as the imperfect realisation of an essence or entelechy, with the biblical conception of sin as a culpable free choice. In fact, just like his Lutheran and Calvinist predecessors, Leibniz is forced to confront the problem that metaphysical rationalism appears to allow little scope for the freedom of the will necessary to make the damned responsible for their own punishment. Without such responsibility however God’s providence appears incapable of reconciliation with human notions of justice. Once again, Leibniz puts this critique of the metaphysical conception of evil into the mouth of the Theologian (CP, –). The damned are those who will not to love God but to fear and hate him, thereby becoming responsible for their own damnation when they are trapped in their dying thoughts. Given, though, that the Philosopher sees this condition of the will as arising from knowledge, knowledge from perception, and perception in turn from the soul’s location in the total series of things, then the sinful condition of the will is determined by the sinner’s place in the cosmic order. The damned would thus appear to be souls having the misfortune to occupy an imperfect or ‘dissonant’ place in the cosmic order – to be incapable of willing otherwise than the imperfect conformation of their intellects in this place permits – hence to lack the freedom of will required to make them morally responsible for their damnation. The Philosopher begins his answer to this problem by arguing that a harmonious or good will is available to everyone, by virtue of the fact that it arises from rational contemplation of the order of things or the ideas in God’s mind (CP, –). This way of framing the issues, though, does not address the Theologian’s questions regarding free will and responsibility. Leibniz understands freedom of the will in a special metaphysical sense: not as the capacity to choose between alternative paths



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

in an undetermined manner, but as the capacity spontaneously to actualise one’s (intellectual) nature on the basis of true insight. In fact the Philosopher distinguishes between spontaneity – the agent’s capacity to act in accordance with his nature – and freedom, which is the dispassionate condition of the will arising from a pure and tranquil intellectual insight: ‘Spontaneity comes from potency, freedom from knowledge’ (CP, ). This means, however, that souls can only freely will the good, never evil; for the freedom of the will that comes with tranquil knowledge of the order of things allows only for the spontaneous actualisation of the soul’s (good) intellectual nature (CP, ). As a result, Leibniz advances the definitive doctrine of rationalist theology, that ‘every sin arises from error’ (CP, ). Sin is thus a purely ‘privative’ or negative phenomenon, arising from the mind’s failure to conform itself to the theorational metaphysical order, which leads to the will’s incapacity for love and justice. This doctrine does not, however, immediately solve the problem of freedom and moral responsibility for, as the Theologian concludes, if sin is actually based in error then: ‘As a result, every sin is to be excused.’ The Philosopher’s response is worth quoting: . Not in the least; because just as light falls through a crack into the darkness [so] a means of escape stands within our power, assuming that we want to use it. . But why do some will to use it [the light of divine knowledge] and others not? . Because those who do not want to, do not understand that it can be used with profit; or, more specifically, because their souls [anima, Geist] are such that it is as if it [the light] were completely absent; that is, [they are] without reflection or attention, so that they look without seeing, listen without hearing. Here lies the beginning of the refusal of grace or, as it is called in the Holy Scripture, obstinacy. (CP, )

The problem with this solution, when seen from the viewpoint of modern academic philosophy, is clear enough. Leibniz – having explained the condition of the will in terms of knowledge of the divine order – when asked why only some make use of this knowledge, answers in terms of the condition of their will: everyone has access to the light of knowledge ‘assuming that they want to use it’. This impending circularity in the relation between the condition of the will and knowledge of the metaphysical order is only postponed by reference to the intellectual darkness of the damned souls, whose imbecility makes them obstinate and whose obstinacy makes them imbecile. In either case Leibniz’s

Philosophical theology



explication does not leave the circle in which the sinful will is explained in terms of lack of understanding and lack of understanding in terms of the sinful will. .. The philosopher’s sin We are not however interested in viewing Leibniz’s metaphysics of evil from the standpoint of modern academic philosophy, as if a better noncircular solution to this problem was waiting in the Kantian wings (Riley , –). Rather, we are interested in it as a particular way in which a secular philosopher could lay claim to the authority flowing from a longstanding and prestigious metaphysical explication of Christian sin. Once again bishop Steno offers us a way into the contemporary religious significance of Leibniz’s philosophical theology. In one of his several attempts to clarify the free will’s dependency on rational knowledge, Leibniz’s Philosopher comments that: ‘In order to maintain the privilege of a free will, it is enough that we position ourselves at the crossroads of life in such a way that we can only do that which we will, and that we can only will that which we take to be good; but that we can only investigate that which is to be taken as good through the most complete use of our reason’ (CP, ). Steno’s response is brief and to the point: ‘But [can this be so] when free will is necessary for the investigation?’ That Steno is alert to the aporia lying at the heart Leibniz’s articulation of free will to rational knowledge is clear in the mini-dilemma that he sketches for it: ‘Therefore [i.e., given the necessity of free will for the use of reason], either one praises the highest gift of reason in vain [because without free will it will not be used to know the good] or one must admit the freedom of its use.’ Leibniz’s exasperated counter-annotation – ‘As if anyone seriously denied this freedom of its use! I don’t understand the ideas that the critic formed as he read this’ – is a more-than-rhetorical expression of the fact that he has not understood the force of Steno’s criticism (CP, , fn. ; my italics and square brackets). For Steno is objecting to the fact that one cannot purport to derive freedom of the will from the use of reason (for ‘harmonious’ intellection of the divine order), and then explain this use of reason by appealing to the free will. The important issue here, though, is not that Steno has identified the circularity of Leibniz’s account, but that he has done so on the basis of a rival confessional theological anthropology. In fact Steno’s criticism is grounded in the Catholic teaching that the subject of reason must be graced with a degree of moral regeneration, hence freedom of will, before



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

pursuing rational knowledge of the good. The religious character of the bishop’s Christian anthropology is thus a pointer to the religious character of the Philosopher’s Platonic one. In fact both anthropologies may be regarded as specific ‘ascetic’ means for programming a particular relation to the self and way of life. In treating rational intellection as dependent on a prior sacerdotal regeneration of the will, Steno staunchly limits the ‘power of the keys’ to the Catholic clergy. Leibniz’s neo-Platonic treatment of rational intellection as the source of purity of will should thus be seen as a rival theological anthropology, aimed at making the philosopher morally self-generative. In this light it comes as less of a surprise to observe that Leibniz’s treatment of evil is an improvisation on patterns of thought already elaborated in early-seventeenth-century metaphysical theology. Sparn, we recall (.), argues that reconciling the fatalism of ‘pagan’ moral anthropology with the Christian demands for free will and moral responsibility is the constitutive problem for metaphysical discussions of evil. For Lutheran metaphysicians such as Balthasar Meisner the problem was how to reconcile the ‘privative’ Aristotelian conception of evil – as the imperfect realisation of an entelechy or substantial form – with the Christian conception of sin as the freely chosen transgression of divine law. This is something that Meisner’s dualistic framework allows him to overcome by treating mankind’s first sin as a transgressive choice that corrupted the human faculties, making humanity’s imperfect realisation into the outcome of a positive choice – the choice of a flawed metaphysical nature. For their part, Sparn argues, the Calvinist and Catholic metaphysicians held a much more strongly ‘metaphysical’ conception of radical evil. In treating evil as ontologically embedded either in matter or in the flesh – just in fact as Leibniz locates it in the rational monad’s sensory imperfection – they find it much harder to escape the consequences of pagan fatalism (Sparn , –). Given our immediate concerns, however, it is not the differences between these various formulations that matter but their similarities. For all of them arise as theologically impelled attempts to reconcile the pagan philosophical and Christian theological conceptions of evil, in keeping with the constitutive historical task of Christian university metaphysics as such. In attempting the same reconciliation – moreover in attempting it in precisely the same terms as its theological predecessors – Leibniz’s theodicy remains on the terrain of Christian metaphysical theology. The important historical difference of course is that Leibniz was pursuing this

Philosophical theology



exalted task outside the theology faculty, as an unconsecrated or, better, as a self-consecrating metaphysician. We may conclude therefore that the exoteric rationalisation of theology in Leibniz’s philosophical theology was underpinned by a profound sacralisation of philosophy and the philosopher. The main difference between Leibniz’s metaphysical theology and Lutheran Schulmetaphysik is that the latter permitted escape from the damning circle between intellectual imperfection and moral corruption via the regeneration of the subject that came with Eucharistic participation in the Logos. Somewhat unexpectedly, Leibniz’s trans-confessional Platonic universalisation of the rational subject removed this escape route. Ostensibly requiring no prior moral qualification of the capacities, Leibniz’s rational subject is always already saved or, equivalently, always already damned. In the language of the Monadology, the damned soul reflects the cosmic order from an imperfect viewpoint, whereby its intellectual capacity represents a degree of perfection determined by the sensory impressions to which it has been subject in that place: ‘It is not in the object but in the modification of their knowledge of the object that the monads are limited. They all move confusedly toward the infinite, toward the whole, but they are limited and distinguished from each other by the degrees of their distinct perceptions’ (Mo, § ). The one way of avoiding the hatred of God arising from the imperfect viewpoint is to achieve that knowledge of the harmony of good and evil in the cosmic order which has the effect of harmonising the soul itself. But this knowledge represents another, more perfect, vantage point in that order and is simply not available to those still mired in their confused sensory impressions. In the Confessio, this state of affairs is captured in Leibniz’s doctrine that souls differ only by virtue of their location in the cosmic order. Given that this location determines their respective moral identities, it would be as vain for a damned soul to blame God for its reprobation as it would for a peasant boy to blame his father for not marrying a queen (CP, –). For our purposes, the significance of this striking figure lies not its faintly shocking callousness, but in what it tells us about the moral significance that Leibniz ascribed to his philosophical theology. We have already observed that it is only the contemplative metaphysical viewpoint – with its capacity to harmonise the intellect through the ‘thought of harmony’ – that permits souls to achieve the inner tranquillity that attunes them to the divine order and hence redeems them from sin. This means, however, that the moral–intellectual natures characteristic of



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

particular places in this order are differentiated only through their adherence to the metaphysical viewpoint. In other words, Leibniz’s metaphysics itself now appears as a ‘saving truth’, occupying the same soteriological space as the confessional theologies it was intended to replace. Moreover, given the complete incapacity of Leibniz’s rationalism to differentiate between philosophical error and moral sin – between the inattentiveness of the intellect and the corruption of the will – then it may be legitimate to punish those who adhere to erroneous doctrines or even to compel them to adhere to a true metaphysics. We will return to these possibilities at the end of the chapter, when discussing Leibniz’s views on the decriminalisation of heresy. For the moment we can conclude that Leibniz’s metaphysics is indicative of a profound re-ordering of the cultural relations between theology and philosophy; for it makes metaphysics itself into a ‘saving truth’, acceptance of which is the condition of membership of a new elect. In comparison with the twin strategies employed by the civil philosophers – the privatisation of theological truth and the desacralisation of civil authority – Leibniz’s philosophical theology is thus symptomatic of a quite different cultural strategy. It represents the ‘neo-confessional’ transformation of Protestant university metaphysics into a supra-political metaphysical rationalism. This is grounded in the exalted spiritual deportment of the metaphysical sage who now claims the confessional theologian’s right to direct the civil authority in accordance with transcendent truths. Such is the transformation that gave birth to Leibniz’s political metaphysics and metaphysics of law. .           In our Introduction we observed that the seventeenth century witnessed the clash between two kinds of natural jurisprudence. From Aquinas through Melanchthon to Suárez and Althusius, scholastic or ‘Christian’ natural law had maintained the theological basis of civil authority by modelling the person as a being capable of natural knowledge of divine moral law (Haakonssen , –). This allowed political sovereignty to be treated as the earthly form in which such persons exercised their ‘natural right’ to order the moral communities that are the realisation of this law (Tierney , –). As the discipline charged with reconciling natural and revealed knowledge, university metaphysics played a key role in the formulation of neoscholastic natural law doctrines during the seventeenth century. It taught men how they might accede to natural

The metaphysics of law



knowledge of divine laws through the spark of divine reason, and how the civil community could mirror or foreshadow the heavenly one, if only men would associate in accordance with the moral law. It was just this claim to special insight into transcendent law that was repudiated by the civil philosophers. They saw it as an instance of the clerisy’s attempt to maintain its civil power, thereby jeopardising the desacralisation of the state. This is what led Pufendorf and Thomasius, in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War to reconstruct natural law from within, seeking to give it a form that would reflect the secularisation of civil governance that had taken place in the political–jurisprudential sphere. The full exposition of this reconstruction is reserved for our chapters on the two civil philosophers. For the moment we may observe that – despite the longstanding and deep-rooted failure of philosophical historians to differentiate clearly the two forms – this civil natural law differed fundamentally from the metaphysical form that it was born to combat. Rather than treating man’s natural knowledge of transcendent morality as the foundation of social order, the new civil natural law saw such knowledge claims as a central problem for social order – given the recent profound and bloody disagreements over transcendent morality. It therefore sought a new natural law foundation for society, finding this in man’s capacity to change his own moral nature, through the institution of civil sovereignty, in the interest of civil security. This meant that ethics would be subordinate to the end of social peace and to the laws of the only institution capable of attaining this end, the sovereign territorial state. It is no surprise, therefore, that civil natural law was profoundly and vehemently anti-metaphysical. For it identified the metaphysical image of the person, or the image of the metaphysical personage – the rational being capable of governing itself and society on the basis of transcendent rational and moral laws – as the intellectual icon of confessional society. It sought to replace this image with various voluntarist and neo-Epicurean conceptions of man. The civil philosopher’s Epicurean man is a creature whose passions not only remove him from divine intellection but also threaten him with utter destruction, leaving him only enough knowledge of the natural law – now focused in sheer survival rather than spiritual perfection – to institute the sovereign who would enforce it. Despite the fact that he did not write a full natural law system, Leibniz’s various writings on this theme are of great historical significance. They represent the key transitional form in which the neoscholastic metaphysical natural law of the confessional period was modified and passed into



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

the eighteenth century, where it would be resumed by Kant among others. Patrick Riley thus illuminates our understanding of Leibniz by treating his central natural law doctrine – the theory of a ‘universal jurisprudence’ common to the religious and civil domains – as deeply rooted in the Christian–Platonic anthropology and cosmology of the Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology (Riley , –). Yet we must be careful not to treat Leibniz’s natural law as simply an alternative theory of justice to that offered by Hobbes and Pufendorf – especially not as a superior one. As we have begun to see, these conflicting doctrines were not grounded in theoretical ideas but in the grooming of certain kinds of person possessed of distinctive intellectual deportments. Moreover, at stake in their disagreement was not a theoretical victory but something far more consequential: the right to configure the relation between spiritual and political governance in civil society. In fact all of the participants to this great intellectual conflict were advisors to governments that were attempting to reprogramme this relation in the aftermath of a protracted, vicious, and destructive series of religious civil wars. Once this is recalled, then Leibniz’s proposal to refound law and politics in a transcendent morality may lose something of the warm glow that surrounds it in many modern commentaries; for this of course was the longstanding imperative of neoscholastic natural law. Further, in discussing his philosophical theology, we have seen that Leibniz’s rationalism is not as far removed from theological metaphysics as it first seems. In any case, approaching Leibniz’s philosophy in this manner gives us a new insight into the hostility displayed in his Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf (), which takes us to heart of Leibniz’s version of ‘Christian’ natural law. As we have already noted, Leibniz’s commentary on Pufendorf ’s De Officio Hominis et Civis arose in response to a prelate’s concern regarding the suitability of Pufendorf ’s natural law ‘as a topic of instruction for the young’ (PW, ). Given the steadily increasing use of the De Officio in Protestant universities in the early eighteenth century, and given our account of the two forms of natural law as rival ‘comportment educations’, this pedagogical concern takes on its full significance. As Sieglinde Othmer has shown, in making the central doctrines of his massive De Jure Naturae et Gentium () available in an epitome suited to the capacities of undergraduates, Pufendorf ’s De Officio was a potent means of disseminating the new detranscendentalised ethics and secularised politics of civil philosophy. Commenting on Barbeyrac’s French translation of the De Officio () for the Huguenot Diaspora, Jacques Bernard, editor of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, prophesied that here it would be ‘the magistrate, the military man, the businessman, the artisan . . . who

The metaphysics of law



will find the rules of their conduct’ (Othmer , ). This, of course, was precisely what Leibniz and the Christian natural jurists were afraid of. It comes as no surprise therefore that Leibniz’s commentary takes the form of a warning (monita), stressing not only the intellectual errors of Pufendorf ’s natural law but more especially its moral corruption and social danger. We noted in our introductory comments that Leibniz identifies three central errors in Pufendorf ’s work. First, focusing on the De Officio’s strict separation of natural and revealed knowledge, and its attendant uncoupling of man’s temporal happiness from his eternal felicity, Leibniz attacks Pufendorf ’s restriction of natural law to the end of secular civil welfare (PW, –). This restriction, he argues, renders the science incapable of its divine objects, confines it to merely civil duties and, in excluding the soul’s immortality, robs it of the normative force flowing from the whole economy of divine rewards and punishments. Leibniz’s next target is Pufendorf ’s stipulation that natural law applies only to man’s external actions (PW, –). When joined with its corollary – that the inner purity of man’s soul is a matter of revelation to be dealt with in a completely separate discipline of moral theology – this stipulation, Leibniz argues, is an ‘excessively hard and objectionable doctrine’. Not only does it jeopardise ‘universal jurisprudence’ by detaching civil from religious law, it also threatens to exclude ‘Christian philosophers’ – moral philosophers and natural theologians – from the sphere of a detranscendentalised natural law. It does so by assigning their privileged object – the question of the mind’s inner conformity to a pure reason and will – to the domain of revealed theology. Finally, confronting the voluntarist character of Pufendorf ’s account of the ‘efficient cause’ of natural law, Leibniz argues that in deriving natural law duties from the ‘command of a superior’, rather than from the ‘eternal truths’ of a divine mind, Pufendorf destroys the rational and moral basis of natural law. Like Hobbes’, Pufendorf ’s voluntarism removes all capacity to judge earthly tyrants, by equating justice with their positive law; and, again like Hobbes’, it also threatens to turn God into a divine tyrant, by robbing us of insight into the norms that govern his actions and make them praiseworthy. Against Pufendorf ’s secularising and naturalising voluntarism, Leibniz thus mobilises his own theo-rational metaphysics: Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on [God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intellect, which constitute, so to speak, the essence of divinity itself; and it is right that our author is reproached by theologians when he maintains the contrary; because, I believe, he had not seen the wicked consequences which arise from



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

it. Justice, indeed, would not be an essential attribute of God, if he himself established justice and law by his free will. And, indeed, justice follows certain rules of equality and or proportion [which are] no less founded in the immutable nature of things, and in the divine ideas, than are the principles of arithmetic and of geometry. (PW, )

Leibniz concludes his commentary by constructing a dilemma for Pufendorf ’s voluntarism (PW, –). Pufendorf, he observes, having derived natural law duties from the superior’s command, also, and inconsistently, adds that the superior must have ‘just causes’ for this coercion. But, Leibniz argues, either these just causes are justifying reasons, in which case political obligation flows from the reasons not the command; or they are not, in which case the sovereign’s commands lack a justifying reason, thereby reducing right to the sheer exercise of might. As we shall see, this way of establishing mutually exclusive relations between philosophical reason and political sovereignty was destined to have a big future in the history of philosophy. The most striking feature of Leibniz’s criticisms is the light that each of them sheds on the real historical contest that was driving his attack on Pufendorf ’s natural law: namely, the struggle over the proper configuration of religious and civil governance, and over the appropriate roles of religious and civil intellectuals. In objecting to Pufendorf ’s restriction of the end of natural law to civil welfare, Leibniz was actually resisting the ‘detranscendentalising’ of ethics that the civil philosophers were attempting to bring about in the Protestant arts faculty. Similarly, in attacking the De Officio’s confinement of natural law to man’s external actions – to the complete exclusion of any concern with his inner intellectual purity – Leibniz was not only taking offence at Pufendorf ’s expulsion of ‘Christian philosophers’ from the domain of natural law. He was also resisting the exclusion of transcendent morality from the exercise of civil authority, which was of course central to Pufendorf ’s desacralisation of political governance. Finally, in criticising Pufendorf ’s voluntaristic reconstruction of duties in terms of the command of a superior, Leibniz was repudiating the most fundamental of the civil philosopher’s desacralising strategies. For this was the way in which Pufendorf excluded all transcendental justifications for sovereignty – the exercise of natural or divine right, the defence of the faith, the preservation of the godly community – reconstructing political and ethical duties in terms of unconditional obedience to commands issued for the preservation of social peace. In each of these regards Leibniz was of course defending the rival way of configuring the relations between religious (transcendental–moral) and civil governance. In fact, he was

The metaphysics of law



defending some version of a state of affairs in which civil ethics and politics would continue to be subordinated to a (natural) moral theology. This ‘resacralising’ subordination of the civil to the transcendental would be executed not by the old clergy but by a new kind of philosophical theologian. The natural or rational theologian would be qualified to judge the inner moral condition of the citizens of the moral community through his own metaphysical participation in the transcendent ‘wise love’ that defined God’s universal justice. Given that this was the historical stake, it is somewhat surprising that so many commentators should continue to treat Leibniz’s attack on Pufendorf as simply part of a general theoretical critique of voluntarist (‘Hobbesian’) ethics and politics (Barreau ; Riley , ; Schneewind ; Sève ; Sève ). Given our present interest in grasping the historical conflict between civil and metaphysical natural law, this ‘intellectualist’ approach suffers from three main deficiencies. First, it uproots Leibniz’s anti-political natural law from the circumstances in which it conflicted with civil natural law over the correct intellectual configuration of civil and religious authority. In particular, by considering him as a genius, it underestimates Leibniz’s dependency on the neoscholastic natural law of a particular group of Lutheran academic theologians and natural jurists. Second, those adopting this approach generally assume that Leibniz’s rationalist construction of justice is ‘philosophically’ superior to Pufendorf ’s voluntarist one. But this assumption obscures the degree to which Leibniz’s rationalism is in fact the instrument for a rival ‘spiritual grooming’, and thereby a rival conception of the role of religious intellectuals in civil life. Finally, we can identify the assumption that Leibniz’s maintenance of continuity between civil law and transcendent morality – between human and divine justice – is ethically and politically superior to Pufendorf ’s desacralising separation of these spheres. In regarding this continuity as restoring a higher justice (wise love) to the otherwise brutish reign of political utility, commentators like Barreau and Sève seem to forget the extraordinary brutality that had flowed from the meshing of transcendent morality and civil authority in the confessional state. In any case, as we shall now see, each of these assumptions is unsuited to understanding the historical reality of Leibniz’s legal and political metaphysics. .. Leibniz and Christian natural law We have already encountered the so-called Christian natural jurists, in our Introduction. As one of his theology professors at the University of



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

Leipzig, Valentin Alberti had warned the young Thomasius against reading Pufendorf. Later, when Pufendorf ’s arguments had done their work, Alberti was among the phalanx of neoscholastic philosophers and theologians who had lobbied the Saxon court to prevent Thomasius from lecturing on theological matters, forcing him to seek refuge at the University of Halle in  (Grunert b; Lieberwirth ). As Thomas Ahnert has argued, this dispute cannot be understood as a conflict between religious orthodoxy and enlightenment rationalism (Ahnert , –). In fact, in deriving natural law from necessary moral laws common to God and man, Alberti is the rationalist, not Thomasius. Thomasius thus attacks Alberti for overestimating the powers of reason, precisely because Alberti’s theo-rational conception of moral law is incompatible with the civil philosopher’s detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics. Leibniz, we have observed, insists that theologians like Alberti are right to attack Pufendorf for denying that natural law is grounded in ‘eternal truths common to God and man’ (PW, ). This, we may propose, is in part because Leibniz’s rationalism is much closer to Alberti’s Platonised scholasticism than is generally understood. But it is also because Alberti belonged to a network of Lutheran natural jurists whose work Leibniz knew intimately. In his still-indispensable study of the intellectual sources of Leibniz’s natural law, Hans-Peter Schneider demonstrates the degree to which Leibniz’s legal metaphysics depends on fundamental forms of thought already elaborated within this network (Schneider ). Its members – Alberti, David Mevius, Valentin Veltheim, David Placcius, Samuel Strimesius, Johann Prasch, and Samuel Rachel – may be regarded as heirs to the early-seventeenthcentury Protestant Schulmetaphysik of Meisner, Scheibler, and the Martinis, even if some of them had already moved away from the earlier ‘dualistic’ form of Lutheran metaphysics towards a more Platonic metaphysical rationalism. In fact, the central lesson of Schneider’s study is that the Lutheran natural jurists had moved in this direction – developing a doctrine of natural law based on the metaphysical recovery of the a priori norms underpinning both divine and human justice – in order to combat the secularising effects of Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s antimetaphysical separation of religious and civil authority (Schneider , –, –). Schneider’s study thus shows us that even after the Treaty of Westphalia – whose granting of toleration to the three main confessions marked a decisive (political–jurisprudential) desacralising of political governance – Lutheran academic metaphysicians and theologians

The metaphysics of law



continued to argue for the subordination of civil authority to transcendent moral truths, insisting, for example, that the Decalogue remain central to natural law hence to the civil law it founded. Further, in showing the striking similarity between this Lutheran metaphysics of law and Leibniz’s – particularly in their common appeal to the notion of a self-purifying ascent to the divine forms of justice – this study raises the question of the degree to which Leibniz too sought to continue the subordination of civil authority to transcendent truth, although this is not a question that interests its author. Schneider identifies two main intellectual tendencies that emerged from the heartland of Lutheran university metaphysics and converged in Leibniz’s doctrine of natural law. The first is a renewed stress on the orthodox doctrine of man in his regenerate condition – the status integritatis. Through this moral anthropology of regenerative man, certain Lutheran jurists and metaphysical theologians sought to combat the voluntarism and statism of civil philosophy, by invoking man’s remnant capacity for governing himself through participation in divine intellection. The legal metaphysicians David Mevius (–) and Samuel Rachel (–), the Leipzig theologian Valentin Alberti (–), and the Regensburg jurist Johann Ludwig Prasch (–) – the latter invoked by Leibniz in his attack on Pufendorf – were leading representatives of this line. They argued that man’s intellectual and moral faculties had not been completely corrupted at the Fall; that he retained a remnant of their perfect spiritual form in the shape of his imago Dei or God-likeness; and that through this residuum of his spiritual nature man acceded to a partial awareness of the divine law that governed his society with God in the state of innocence. This dim outline of divine law inscribed in human reason – that is, in the spiritual remnant of the soul – is natural law. The ‘nature’ on which this conception of natural law is based is not the passional nature posited by the civil philosophers, but man’s divine imaginal nature. The fact that this nature is in turn identified with ‘rational being’ or reason is an appropriate pointer to the theological character of seventeenth-century rationalism. Samuel Rachel’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium Dissertationes (Dissertations on the Law of Nature and Nations) of  – which, in addition to a ferocious denunciation of Hobbes, contains a rebuttal of Pufendorf ’s recently published and similarly titled work – provides us with a typical formulation of this theme: Come, then, let us see what is the utility of a knowledge of Natural Law. He who rightly pursues his enquiry into it will in the first place get in some sort to understand what is that Image of God [imago Dei ] in which man was originally



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

created. That it consisted before everything in Justice and Holiness, we have the Apostle’s warrant (Ephesians, ch. , v. ; Colossians, ch. , v. ), so that man can not only readily ascertain the Divine will and distinguish what is to be done from what is to be left undone, but also can exactly conform his own will and conduct to the Divine will and render perfect obedience to the Law of God . . . Now after the first-create threw away this perfection by their disobedience (Romans, ch. , v. ), and had begotten issue in their own likeness (Genesis, ch. , v. ), and the light of their intellect was darkened and the inclinations and disinclinations of their appetites had begun to be varied and vast, there was yet left to man Reason; and this Reason, contriving to retain a certain degree of Rightness, recognised and promulgated the Law of Nature which is written on the heart, and controlled and curbed by its authority the activities of the soul. For although fallen man can not exactly conform his will to the Divine will and his conduct to the standard of Natural Law, yet it remained as binding on him after as before the Fall. (Rachel , –)

Here we have a clear indication of the manner in which the Lutheran natural lawyers could use a rationalistic version of the imago Dei doctrine in order to defend the notion of a natural or philosophical knowledge of man’s inner conformation to divine law. This was their way of combating Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s strict separation of revealed and natural knowledge and the consequent uncoupling of religious and civil law. On this basis Rachel – who taught Prasch and some of whose works bear Leibniz’s (probable) annotations – could argue that underpinning the civil law to which man is subject as the citizen of a particular state, there is a higher natural law to which he accedes via his imago Dei or reason. This natural law is in fact the Christian lex caritas or law of love, epitomised in the two commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbour. Rachel’s identification of the imago Dei with man’s partially regenerate reason – which allows him a natural philosophical access to the law of love – suggests that the neoscholastic natural jurists tied love to justice in essentially the same way as Leibniz. In fact the figure of the imago Dei remains central to Leibniz’s metaphysics, helping to give shape to the transcendent character of man’s capacity for philosophical reflection, as we are reminded by the following passage from the Discourse on Metaphysics: ‘It is also only by virtue of the continual action of God upon us that we have in our soul the ideas of all things; that is to say, since every effect expresses its cause, the essence of our soul is a certain expression, imitation, or image of the divine essence, thought, and will and of all the ideas which are comprised in God’ (DM, § ). In arguing that man accedes to the law of love by refurbishing the capacity for pure thought through which he participates in divine intellection, Leibniz was

The metaphysics of law



thus improvising on one of the central themes of the Lutheran legal metaphysics. The second way of tethering civil law to Christian natural law – or jurisprudence to Christian metaphysics – involved the direct application of the central doctrines of Protestant Schulmetaphysik as found, for example, in the works of Christoph Scheibler. Here Schneider focuses on the grounding of natural law in the fundamental figure of God’s ‘emanation’ of the universe’s ontological and moral order, through his intelligising of the non-contradictory essences and his willing of the most perfect world. It was on this basis that the professors of philosophy and theology Valentin Veltheim (–) and Samuel Strimesius (–) argued that God’s intellection is natural law, as it gives things their ‘whatness’ and actions their goodness (Schneider , –). It is not the ‘command of a superior’ therefore that provides the ontological and cognitive ground of natural law but ‘right reason’ (recta ratio), either originally – because man’s reason once agreed with God’s – or in its devolved imaginal form. Human society is thus a reflection of divine community, as human beings are intellectual substances emanating from the divine intellection of the universe and imitating this intellection each according to their degree of perfection. The extent to which Leibniz drew on this metaphysics or ‘onto-theology’ of natural law is conveyed in a striking figure of thought in his ‘Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice’ of c. – which, in its turn, anticipates some of the central doctrines of the Monadology of . Having commented that microscopic examination of ‘insects and other small things’ reveals the design of the divine craftsman in his work, Leibniz continues: Thus by much stronger reasons craftsmanship and harmony would be found in large things, if we were capable of seeing them as a whole. And above all they would be found in the whole economy of the governance of spirits, which are the substances most resembling God, because they are [themselves] capable of recognising and of producing order and craftsmanship. And as a consequence, one must conclude that the author of things, who is so inclined to order, will have had particular care for it with respect to those creatures who are naturally sources of order, in proportion to their perfection, and who alone are capable of imitating his craftsmanship. But it is not possible that this should seem so to us, in this small particle of life which we live here below, and which is an inconsiderable fragment of a life without bounds which no spirit will lose. To consider this fragment separately is to consider things like a broken stick or like the bits of flesh torn from an animal, where the craftsmanship of its organs cannot sufficiently appear. (PW, –)



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

Finally, if Leibniz’s metaphysical grounding of natural law thus bears a strong resemblance to Alberti and Veltheim’s neoscholastic version, then his use of this metaphysics as a weapon against Pufendorf also follows theirs. In fact, in rejecting Pufendorf ’s treatment of natural law as the means to man’s civil security, Alberti and Veltheim appeal to the grounding of natural law in morally necessary divine truths. This of course anticipates Leibniz’s main line of attack on Pufendorf. Leibniz’s insistence that: ‘Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on [God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intellect, which constitute . . . the essence of divinity itself ’ is virtually identical with Alberti’s identification of the law with God’s intellection of necessary truths. Far from being ‘minor German writers’ who had failed to develop a metaphysics of law harmonious with Platonistic rationalism, the Lutheran natural jurists were in fact the powerful source of just such a legal metaphysics, elaborated specifically to combat the desacralising of law and politics being pursued by the civil philosophers. This is not to deny, of course, that Leibniz’s natural law was in a certain sense more secular than Veltheim’s, Alberti’s, and Rachel’s. But even here the differences are not as great as is generally argued, as we shall now see. .. Metaphysical abstraction and the spiritualisation of law Riley, we recall, regards Leibniz’s Platonistic philosophical recovery of the divine perfections or essences – specifically the perfection of divine justice – as the mode in which he integrated Christian law (the lex caritas) in a scientific and enlightened philosophical jurisprudence (Riley , ). We have already questioned the adequacy of this account as applied to Leibniz’s metaphysics in general, arguing instead that his doctrine of metaphysical abstraction should be regarded as the architecture of a particular kind of spiritual exercise. This is an exercise that ties the formal purity of concepts to the moral self-purification of the philosopher, who thinks them via ascent from impure sensory ideas to the selfperfecting intellection of the perfections or essences. Now we can apply this historical reconstruction to the role of abstraction in Leibniz’s metaphysics of law in particular. In doing so we discover that while Leibniz’s legal metaphysics is indicative of a certain secularisation of Christian natural law – in the sense that Leibniz’s more intensely Platonistic construction was designed for use beyond the sacral confines of the theology faculty – it is also symptomatic of a profound spiritualisation of civil jurisprudence.

The metaphysics of law



Leibniz applies this method of abstraction to the construction of natural law by treating justice as one of the hidden perfections. To uncover the intelligible notion or formal reason of justice, it is necessary to withdraw from the domain of empirical or positive laws and seek the pure concepts on which ‘universal justice’ is based. Universal justice, Leibniz declares, is a pure concept formed from the combination of wisdom, love, and goodness. Wisdom in fact comprises metaphysical knowledge of the perfections or hidden forms emanating from God’s intelligising of the cosmos, while love is the happiness intelligent beings find when conforming themselves to these perfections, and goodness ‘that which serves in the perfection of intelligent substances’ (PW, ). Rather than viewing it as a mere semantic clarification, Leibniz thus regards his formal definition of justice – justititia est caritas sapientis, justice is the love of the wise man – as actually recovering the perfection of pure justice from the husks of empirical law, and, presumably, as perfecting the one who recovers it. Leibniz’s ‘formal’ or a priori construction of the ‘intelligible notion’ of justice – the notion of caritas sapientis or love governed by wisdom – thus provides the architecture for a particular exercise in intellectual selftransformation. This is designed to lead those ‘worthy to be philosophers’ from their experience of empirical law to the intellection of the pure form of justice. Leibniz offers a remarkable short demonstration of this exercise in a letter to the Electress Sophie of Hanover in : Justice is charity conformed to wisdom. Wisdom is the science of felicity. Charity is a universal benevolence. Benevolence is a habit of loving. To love is to find pleasure in the good, perfection, the happiness of another. And by this definition one can resolve . . . a great difficulty which is important even in theology – how it is possible that there be a nonmercenary love, detached from hope and from fear, and from all concern for our own interest. It is that the felicity, or the perfection of another, in giving us pleasure, enters immediately into our own felicity. For all that pleases is desired for itself, and not through interest. It is a good in itself, and not a useful good. It is thus that the contemplation of beautiful things is agreeable in itself, and that a painting by Raphael moves him who looks at it with enlightened eyes, though he derives no profit from it. (Leibniz in Riley , –)

The key to this construction of formal justice lies in a doctrine that we first encountered in our brief observation of the metaphysics of Albert the Great (.). This is the doctrine that humans may only participate in the divine perfections or intelligibles – here the perfection of justice –



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

to the extent that they perfect that part of themselves which they share with the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge, God. They do this, it will be recalled, by purging their intellects of all those sensory images and inclinations that tie them to the mere worldly utility of things. In this way they rise to contemplate the intelligible at the point of its emanation from God, where it brings happiness, or is good, merely by being beheld. This figure of thought is the source of the longstanding ‘anticonsequentialist’ character of metaphysical ethics. For, unlike material beings, whose ends lie outside them in the form of a multiplicity of goods or desires, divine intelligible being contains its own good, or, equivalently, is ‘good in itself ’, hence constitutes the highest good simply by realising its own end. For such a being there is no gap between acting in accordance with the law and realising its own desires – between goodness and happiness; for, in realising an immanent end, intelligible being wills only its own perfection, possessing only good inclinations. In the case of Leibniz’s metaphysics of law, knowledge of the ‘perfection’ or pure concept of justice (as wise love) is thus dependent on one perfecting oneself. This requires purging one’s love of all sensuous interest, so that it becomes nonmercenary happiness in intellectual perfections, and purging one’s wisdom of all sensory-empirical adhesions, so that it becomes the a priori science of this happiness. To see this concept of justice one must therefore look on it with ‘enlightened eyes’. In concrete historical terms this means that only those individuals who have undertaken these specific self-purifying intellectual exercises – associated with the cultivation of an ‘illuminated’ intellectual deportment – will be deemed to have insight into the pure concept of justice. This intellectual ethos and deportment is of course that of the university metaphysician. By offering a new way of reconciling philosophy and theology, this figure began to emerge as an authoritative moral–social personage, characterised by the possession of what may be termed ‘secular holiness’. In validating his wisdom through the personal purity he displays in rising above merely ‘interested’ or utilitarian conceptions of law (as the means to social peace), the metaphysical sage warrants the higher concept of justice, as wise love, through the moral and epistemological prestige of his persona. He thus functions as humanity’s proxy in the divine order, mediating its supra-mundane concept of justice not through his human understanding but via the condition that he must imitate divine wise love in order to know it. This tying of the abstract or pure concept of justice to the spiritual purity of the metaphysical philosopher was already a feature of the

The metaphysics of law



Lutheran metaphysics of law on which Leibniz was drawing. In his criticisms of Osiander, Rachel, for example, treats abstraction as the means by which the philosopher passes from the actual (‘positive’) law suited to man’s fallen state to the natural law governing his incorrupt or regenerate condition. ‘Herein, unless I err, he [Osiander] has come to grief through defining the Law of Nature as Habituation (habitum) and saying that it resides like something habitual (his own word) in the mind of man, the result being that he does not contemplate the Law of Nature in itself and in the abstract [in se & in abstracto], nor the mind of man as it ought to be, but the latter in a corrupt state and the former (habit forsooth!) contaminated and, so to say, submerged by a flood of vices’ (Rachel , ). That men often act contrary to natural law as a matter of fact is thus no impediment to the teaching that man’s reason or imago Dei contains a pure version of the law. For observation of facts, Rachel argues, pertains only to man’s conduct as a fallen creature – indeed, is itself symptomatic of this conduct – while the natural law is acceded to by a rationality that returns man to his regenerate state, revealing the a priori norm by which he ought to act: ‘Nor can any objection be based on acts done contrary to the Law of Nature . . . For in such cases attention must be directed not to what is actually done but to what ought to be done, there being all the world of difference between Fact and Law’ (). Leibniz’s normative-rationalist separation of the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’ – of the facts of ‘law’ (loi, Gesetz) from the norms of ‘right’ (droit, Recht) – is thus indicative of something far more momentous than a theoretical or methodological imperative. For it arises in fact from the gap that university metaphysics opens between human and divine intellection. This in turn is the pedagogical condition for the purifying self-transformation that validates the metaphysician’s insight into what justice ought to be – the love of the wise – through the manner in which this personage imitates the quasi-divine perfection of wise love. The metaphysician’s claim to accede to the pure or formal concept of justice is warranted only by the self-purifying exercise in abstraction through which he acquires ‘enlightened eyes’. The content of this concept may then be provided by the Christian caritas doctrine, because the metaphysician is now himself the personification of Christ’s ‘loving’ way of thinking and willing justice. On the one hand, this procedure subjects the New Testament theology of love to a philosophical sublimation, as it now appears as the content of the formal philosophical concept of justice. On the other hand, though, the same procedure forces civil jurisprudence to undergo



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

a profound spiritualisation; for now the formal concept of justice is only available to a personage who has completed the self-purifying ascent to its divine intellection. The formalisation and spiritualisation of jurisprudence are thus inseparable in Leibniz’s legal metaphysics. They are held together by the ascetic link between the formal purity of a concept that reveals itself prior to all experience and the moral purity of the special personage in whom such a concept can be thought. Leibniz’s normative legal metaphysics – his ‘anti-empiricism’ or ‘anti-positivism’ – is thus really a symptom of the legal metaphysician’s morally prestigious intellectual ethos and self-exalting spiritual deportment. It is this method of speculative self-purification that allows Leibniz to treat the empirical civil legal order as the devolved or imperfect level of an onto-theological hierarchy grounded in God’s rational intelligising of a cosmic legal order. Like the Lutheran natural jurists and political theologians on whose work he drew, Leibniz finds a jurisprudential foothold for his metaphysics by superimposing this hierarchy on the central precepts of Roman law. Using these (now) transcendentalised principles of Roman law, he is able to construct a natural law that subordinates positive civil law to the Christian metaphysics of a cosmic legal order. Leibniz’s rational construction of natural law thus takes the form of a metaphysical–moral ladder, converting the three Roman law precepts – hurt no-one (neminem laedere), give each his due (suum cuique tribuere), and live honourably (honeste vivere) – into an ascent from empirical–utilitarian forms of justice to the ‘universal justice’ characteristic of God’s rational governance of the cosmos. At the lowest level, strict justice, characterised by the precept to refrain from harming others, and typical of the natural law theories of Hobbes and Pufendorf, has as its object only the preservation of civil peace. One step up from this we find the level of equity or charity, characterised by the precept of rendering each his due, and finding its object in the state’s conversion of mutual benevolence into reciprocal rights (PW, pp. –). Love only becomes truly disinterested, however, when we pass beyond the level of ‘political’ law altogether. Here we reach the ultimate stage of natural law which is characterised by the precept to live piously, and which requires insight into God’s rational governance of the cosmos in order to reveal the ‘legal’ character of duties having no bearing on civil peace. Leibniz’s metaphysical hierarchy thus permits him to pass from civil law to a synthesis of natural and Christian law, using his method of abstraction from the empirical to the transcendent in order to establish the continuum:

The metaphysics of law



It is on this ground that justice is called universal, and includes all the other virtues; for duties that do not seem to concern others, as, for example, not to abuse our own bodies or our property, though they are beyond [the power of] human laws, are still prohibited by natural law, that is, by the eternal laws of the divine monarchy, since we owe ourselves and everything we have to God. Now, if it is of interest to the state, of how much more interest is it to the universe that no one use badly what is his? So it is from this that the highest precept of the law receives its force, which commands us to live honorably (that is, piously). It is in this sense that learned men have rightly held . . . that the law of nature and of nations [ius naturae et gentium] should follow the teachings of Christianity, that is, ␶␣ ␣␯␻␶␳␣, the sublime things, the divine things of the wise, according to the teaching of Christ. (PW, )

Despite the similarity of this construction to those developed by the Lutheran natural jurists and political theologians, we have observed that some commentators regard Leibniz’s natural law as a major secularisation and rationalisation of his theological sources (Riley , ; Schneider , ). Leibniz, they argue, while not completely secularising natural law, provides rational concepts or Gründe for the theologically authorised doctrines of his predecessors. This gives rise to an ‘enlightened’ scientific conception of natural law, while simultaneously repelling Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s more fully secular, but merely empirical and utilitarian conception. Yet, without denying the secularising aspect signalled in Leibniz’s natural law – specifically, the transfer of a sacral doctrine from theologians to academics and savants – we may nonetheless propose that these commentators underestimate the degree to which Leibniz sought to preserve the sacral character of this doctrine in its new secular setting. For Leibniz, we recall, the giving of rational Gründe is itself a sacralising exercise in intellectual self-purification – ‘Knowledge of reasons perfects us’ – leading him to conceive enlightenment as a refurbishing of the spark of divine intellection or imago Dei. We have already observed the closeness of Leibniz’s rationalism to its theological sources, noting in particular Rachel’s treatment of the imago Dei as the remnant of ‘right reason’ through which man ‘recognised and promulgated the Law of Nature which is written on the heart, and controlled and curbed by its authority the activities of the soul’ (Rachel , ). For both Leibniz and Rachel, access to the pure or formal concept of justice requires a pure or regenerate reason – requires, that is, the intellectual ascesis the determines what counts as purity of thought and will for a certain theocentric culture – which is precisely what makes their rationalism theological. The main difference between them is that



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

Leibniz’s more purely ‘philosophical’ (Platonistic) conception of selfpurifying abstraction allows him to expand the ambit of the regenerate to include metaphysical intellectuals as a type of secular holy estate. Finally, therefore, it is quite misguided to treat Leibniz’s rationalist conception of justice as inherently superior to Pufendorf ’s empirical– voluntarist one – as if Leibniz had in fact recovered the rational ground of positive law, while Pufendorf ’s ‘failure’ to do so condemned him to accept the irrational exercise of power. We have already noted that this view – deploying the characteristic rationalist distinctions between law and justice, power and reason – is very widespread in post-Kantian philosophical history. Just how close this historiography is to Leibniz’s own hostile view of the civil philosophers is clear in these remarks from the ‘Meditation’: The error of those who have made justice dependent on power comes in part from confounding right and law. Right cannot be unjust, it is a contradiction; but law can be. For it is power that gives and maintains law; and if this power lacks wisdom and a good will, it can give and maintain quite evil laws: but happily for the universe, the laws of God are always just, and he is in a position to maintain them, as he does without doubt, although this has not always been done visibly and at once, for which he has, no doubt, good reasons. (PW, )

Yet, in the light of our reconstruction of the ascetic role of abstraction in his legal metaphysics, Leibniz’s claim to have insight into the pure concept of justice should be understood in terms of the moral–epistemological prestige of the metaphysical personage. For it is a claim that may be credited only within the ethos that treats this abstraction as the self-purifying ascent to the divine intelligibles, undertaken by a being who is deemed to mediate between divine and human justice. This way of understanding Leibniz’s legal rationalism re-establishes its historical symmetry with Pufendorf and Thomasius’ voluntarist and empirical construction of natural law. For, as we have suggested, their voluntarism and empiricism is also fundamentally a moral doctrine linked to a certain comportment education. This education, however, was dedicated to forming intellectuals who would no longer presume to subordinate civil law and politics to transcendent moral truths acceded to in the quasi-sacerdotal person of the metaphysician. In other words, Leibniz’s rationalism and Pufendorf ’s ‘empiricism’ are not in fact contradictory theories, but rival and autonomous ways of configuring the relation between religious and political laws, operating through the spiritual grooming of the personages responsible for administering these laws.

The metaphysics of law



.. The continuum of spiritual and civil governance The final obstacle to an adequate historical understanding of Leibniz’s natural law is the widespread view that in maintaining a continuum between civil and theo-rational law, Leibniz provides a necessary moral corrective to Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s desacralising restriction of natural law to ‘utilitarian’ commands issued by the sovereign for the end of security. In presuming that the continuum between law and morality is founded in reason, this view fails to comprehend its true grounds – in the resacralising cultural politics of metaphysical natural law. We have observed that Leibniz’s reconfiguration of the relation between civil and religious governance takes place by tying the just exercise of civil power to the spiritual–intellectual superiority (purity) of the personage who is to exercise it. The personage in question is of course the sage who, in accordance with longstanding Christian-Platonic topoi, is regarded as qualified to influence the exercise of civil authority on the basis of his self-sacralising ascent to transcendent concepts of justice and goodness (Brown a, –). In concrete historical terms, the figure of the metaphysical sage provided the Lutheran natural jurists such as Alberti and Veltheim with a comportment-ideal suited to their own claims to a role in the civil governance of the godly state. In extending the rights of this quasi-sacral figure to the ‘philosopher’ more broadly, Leibniz was adapting this ideal to his own role as political metaphysician and court savant to several German Kleinstaaten. In tying civil authority to the moral superiority of the sage, Leibniz’s natural law begins to exhibit some of the central features of German political metaphysics. In the first place, this figuration leads to the chiliastic doctrine of the ‘withering away of the state’, or the redundancy of legal coercion for beings who have fully recovered their capacity for rational self-governance. In the course of his attack on Pufendorf, we thus find Leibniz insisting that: ‘Whoever, indeed, does good out of a love for God or his neighbour, takes pleasure precisely in the action itself (such being the nature of love) and does not need any other incitement, or the command of a superior; for that man the saying that the law is not made for the just is valid. To such a degree it is repugnant to reason to say that only the law or constraint make a man just’ (PW, ). At the same time, the same figuration leads Leibniz to claim political authority for the sage himself. For, to the extent that not all individuals will be capable of achieving the level of spiritual self-purification needed



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

for rational self-governance, then they will have to be subjected to the purified will of the sage: After this one can say absolutely that justice is goodness conformed to wisdom, even in those who have not attained to this wisdom. For, apart from God, the majority of those who act according to justice in all things, even against their own interest, do in effect what a wise man would demand who found his pleasure in the general good; but in certain cases they will not act as sages themselves, not being sensible of the pleasure of virtue. And in these cases, where their disinterestedness would not be compensated either by praises or honors, nor by fortune, nor otherwise, they would not have acted in a way most conforming to prudence. But as soon as they consider that justice conforms to the will of a sage whose wisdom is infinite and whose power is proportioned to it, they find that they would not be wise at all (that is, prudent) if they did not conform themselves to the will of such a sage. (PW, )

In fact, says Leibniz, ‘it must be conceded that those who have not reached this point of spiritual perfection are only susceptible of obligation by hope and fear’ (PW, ). In other words, by providing a metaphysical grounding for political obligation in rational self-governance, Leibniz provides a metaphysical rationale for the exercise of political coercion, treating it as compensating for the lack of intellectual perfection required for self-governance. He thereby re-establishes the sacral linkage between political and spiritual governance, which now appears in the demand that political authority be exercised to enforce the capacity for rational self-governance that will eventually make such authority redundant. The twin icons for this envisaged reunification of politics and morality are the sage–prince and the ‘unlimited’ or total society. If justice is a perfection fully manifest only in the self-perfecting personage of the metaphysical sage, and if the exercise of civil power is legitimated through its capacity to compensate for the lack of such perfection in others, then a just political order requires the unification of reason and power, the sage and the prince. For Leibniz, coercion is only legitimate insofar as it is used to turn ‘right into fact’, and this requires the unification of power and reason in a single person: ‘Those to whom God has given at once reason and power in a high degree are heroes created by God to be the promoters of his will, as principal instruments’ (Leibniz in Riley , ). With the figure of the sage–prince, Leibniz recapitulates the political-theology of godly government in its modern form, as government driven by the desire to realise reason and advised by political metaphysicians.

The metaphysics of law



At the same time, if human society is ultimately ordered by the universal justice of man’s ‘society with God’, then the civil authority governing human society must apply universally, to all areas of life. The sage–prince will thus rule over an unlimited or total society: ‘Every society is either unlimited or limited. An unlimited society concerns the whole life and the common good. A limited society concerns certain purposes, for example, trade and commerce, navigation, warfare, and travel’ (Lm, ). We also recall Leibniz’s assertion contra Pufendorf that social justice may not be limited to the end of ‘human tranquillity’, but that ‘in a universal society governed by God every virtue . . . is comprehended among the obligations of universal justice; and not only external acts, but also all of our sentiments are regulated by a certain rule of law’ (PW, ). In other words, through his image of the sage–prince ruling over an unlimited or total society, Leibniz is envisaging the resacralised state in its modern enlightened form. This would be a state in which politics could be grounded in morality through the enforcement of a metaphysical ethics, perhaps in the form of a civil religion. Several commentators have argued that in maintaining a continuum between civil and theo-rational law, Leibniz provides a necessary corrective to Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s desacralising restriction of natural law to ‘utilitarian’ commands issued by the sovereign for the end of social peace. Riley, for example, argues that in maintaining a continuum between the lower forms of justice dedicated to the negative preservation of security, and the higher form oriented to universal benevolence and the perfection of society, Leibniz offers a more rational, generous, and benevolent vision of the legal–political order than Hobbes or Pufendorf (Riley , –). Similarly, Sève claims that by establishing a hierarchical ascent from the ‘narrow sense’ of justice, as the maintenance of security, to higher form of caritas sapientis, Leibniz supplements the merely negative conception of justice with the positive ethic of doing good for others. Sève regards this as opening up the prospect of a complete moral transformation of society. For his part, Hervé Barreau argues that because Leibniz’s natural laws form a graduated hierarchy leading from civil security to spiritual perfection, so too do the natural rights founded on them: ‘One must conceive this gradation as the call of moral consciousness in each person, who sees the degrees of good, and undertakes to actualise them by beginning with the lower degrees, without ever repudiating them, since the higher degrees contain the lower ones, which they bring to greater perfection’ (Barreau , ). In fact, Barreau goes so far as to suggest that without this call to a higher moral consciousness, the



Leibniz’s political metaphysics

mere ‘Hobbesian’ grounding of justice in security contains the ‘germ of totalitarianism’, as can be seen from Hobbes’ interference in the affairs of the church. In neglecting the historical circumstances in which law was first uncoupled from morality, however, this viewpoint forgets a crucial lesson. Once a continuum has been established between the exercise of civil authority and the pursuit of a higher moral good, then the desired outcome – the moral elevation of political power – is inexorably shadowed by its far less desirable twin: namely, the exercise of civil authority in order to enforce (someone’s) higher moral good. Yet it was their experience of the catastrophic consequences of such enforcement that had led the civil philosophers to break the nexus between civil authority and transcendent morality in the first place. We catch a glimpse of the constitutive ambivalence of rationalist political metaphysics in this regard in Leibniz’s attitude to the decriminalisation of heresy. In a little-cited text reviewing Thomasius’ arguments for such decriminalisation, Leibniz takes Pufendorf ’s most famous follower to task for failing to see that purity of will may be dependent on purity of doctrine (Gr, , –). Thomasius had argued, firstly, that as an intellectual error heresy lies beyond all civil compulsion and, second, that even where it arises from corruption of the will, heresy is not a punishable offence; for only conduct disturbing the republic falls into this category, and the prince may not use intellectual or moral error as a criterion for such conduct (ADS, –, –). In rejecting these arguments – that heresy concerns intellectual errors lying beyond human judgment and outside the reach of civil coercion – Leibniz contends that the ‘theoretical heretic’ can be compared to the law-breaker who refuses to look at the laws the prince has proclaimed for his salvation: ‘Hence, to the degree that in heresy he might fail to understand a question of great importance for his salvation, wickedness is combined with lack of learning and, what is more, through this insight we cannot deny that heresy deserves punishment’ (Gr, , ). If, thus, not downright evil, intellectual error is nonetheless deserving of punishment as it arises from culpable negligence and results in the great evil of damnation. Recalling our earlier discussion of the reciprocal relation which Leibniz establishes between intellectual error and the corruption of the will, it is not surprising that he regards this culpable failure of learning as itself arising from a prior failure to purify the intellect: ‘Again, the will to learn can arise from the intellect if anyone pays attention to the great importance of having the intellect purified for things to be done well’

The metaphysics of law



(Gr, , ). Given, though, that metaphysical philosophy is the means by which the intellect and will are purified, then it follows that if heretics may be punished for lacking the will to learn saving truths, they may be compelled to undergo the purifying discipline of metaphysics in order to acquire this will. The real danger residing in Leibniz’s rationalist identification of heresy with crime, or sin with error, is thus not the one imagined by the Theologian in the Confessio – that sins might be excused. It is rather that error might become punishable and metaphysics enforceable. Leibniz’s conception of heresy as a crime is thus inseparable from a conception of rationalist metaphysics as the secular theology for an enforceable ‘rational faith’. In its battle with civil philosophy to resacralise the state, rationalist metaphysics would be tempted to become the natural theology for a new kind of confessional society.

   

Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

 .       Born in  and coming to intellectual maturity in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years War, Samuel Pufendorf found himself confronted with the task of developing an ethics and politics suited to life in the descralised states sanctioned by the Treaty of Westphalia. As a political–jurisprudential councillor at the courts of Sweden (–) and Brandenburg-Prussia (–), he had first-hand experience of the problems such states confronted in attempting to establish deconfessionalised civil orders in the wake of protracted confessional conflict. In this context, Pufendorf encountered university metaphysics – with its claim to ground political right in philosophically known transcendent reasons and laws – as a major intellectual obstacle and institutional enemy. In order to render moral and political philosophy capable of comprehending the gap that had been opened between civil and religious authority, Pufendorf had to ‘detranscendentalise’ it in a manner that would parallel the desacralising of law and politics. This task – whose central texts are the De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo (On the Law of Nature and Nations in Eight Books) of , its epitome of the following year, the De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law in Two Books), and the De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem (Of the Disposition of Religion in Relation to Civil Life) of  – entailed a fundamental and far-reaching reconfiguration of philosophical, political, and moral culture. If today the true character and full extent of this reconfiguration are only just emerging, that is because, since its academic marginalisation at the end of the eighteenth century, Pufendorf ’s natural law has remained obscured, put in the dark by the interpretive canons of neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian metaphysics. In this chapter we show just how profound Pufendorf ’s reshaping of the early modern intellectual landscape really was. 

Introduction



If modern commentators have underestimated the scale of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of moral and political philosophy, that is because they have failed to comprehend the gulf separating Pufendorf ’s natural law and the line of metaphysical natural law running from the neoscholastics through Leibniz to Wolff and Kant. As a result of this failure, it is widely assumed that Pufendorf ’s natural law was a continuation of the moral–philosophical attempt to contain the positive legal commands of the sovereign within overarching moral norms. This assumption is particularly marked in modern Aristotelian and Kantian interpretations, which assimilate Pufendorf ’s natural law to the metaphysical line by treating it as an attempt to formulate absolute norms for politics based on the figures of the moral community or the moral law. We will discuss representative instances of these interpretations in the following section. For the moment, we may propose that both lines of interpretation fail to observe the degree to which Pufendorf ’s conception of natural law is designed in fact to free the sovereign’s law-making commands from any effective appeal to higher moral norms. It is true that Pufendorf distinguishes natural law from both (positive) civil law and moral theology: ‘From the first flow the most common duties of man, particularly those which render him capable of society [sociabilis] with other men; from the second flow the duties of man as a citizen living in a particular and definite state [civitas]; from the third, the duties of a Christian’ (DOH, Pref., ). Yet it soon becomes clear that Pufendorf ’s prime concern is to drive a wedge between the duties of the Christian and those of the citizen, while the duties of the man and the citizen are in fact treated as convergent. For, we shall argue, in giving natural law and positive law the same end – social peace – and in granting the sovereign sole discretion to determine how the natural law should be enacted in the state’s positive laws, Pufendorf in effect makes natural law norms immanent to the process of political governance through which citizens are formed. In showing how deeply embedded it was in the political and theological circumstances of post-Westphalian Germany, political and theological historians provide us with a sharper insight into the historical disposition of Pufendorf ’s natural law. In the illuminating introduction to his edition of the De Officio, James Tully argues that after the emergence of the post-Westphalian deconfessionalised sovereign territorial state, ‘the question which underlies and orients Pufendorf ’s theory (and the theories which he followed) is . . . how does one conduct oneself so as to become a useful member of such a society and polity’ (Tully ,



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

xx–xxi). For his part, recalling Thomasius’ arguments on the complicity of metaphysics in the formalisation and enforcement of religion in the confessional state, Detlef Döring argues that Pufendorf ’s voluntaristic expulsion of moral theology from natural law should be seen as a means of prising the levers of civil coercion from the hands of the clergy; that is, as an instrument for the secularisation of political governance (Döring b). The truly remarkable characteristic of Pufendorf ’s enterprise, however, is that he undertook this desacralising separation of transcendent morality and civil authority by reconstructing the very discipline that had been designed to hold these spheres together, natural law. This observation holds the key to understanding Pufendorf ’s natural law as a comprehensive civil philosophy. In the first place, it provides an appropriate understanding of the relation between Pufendorf ’s natural law and the other civil sciences that were engaged in the desacralisation of politics – Lipsian neo-Stoicism and Helmstedt political Aristotelianism in particular. In relegating Christian natural law in favour of a Stoic political psychology or a technical–instrumental science of political order, these civil sciences in effect secularised politics by creating new foundations for it outside the sphere of Christian moral and political theology. But while this strategy may have succeeded in forging a detheologised political science and demeanour for a ruling elite – Dreitzel characterises Helmstedt political science as an intellectual regime for the political nobility of absolute states – in marginalising natural law it left untouched the very discipline that provided politics with moral legitimacy. In detranscendentalising natural law itself, therefore, Pufendorf ’s aim was to provide the new desacralised forms of political governance with a broad-based moral intelligibility. His reconstruction of natural law was intended to make it hospitable to the idea that both ethics and politics were legitimately grounded in the commands of a superior issued in accordance with the end of social peace. It is for this reason that the De Jure functions as a clearing-house for the other civil sciences – Lipsian political psychology, Helmstedt political instrumentalism, Hobbesian anti-clericalism, Bodinian sovereignty theory, positive Staastrecht – assembling their several secularising tactics, via the architecture of voluntarist natural law, into a single desacralising strategy. Pufendorf thus refers to his natural law as including ‘all moral and civil teaching [doctrinam moralem & civilem] that is genuine and solid’ (DJN, .ii., ). The object of this strategy was not to marginalise the domain of natural law but to transform it, confining ethics and politics to the horizon of social peace and civil governance, and consigning

Introduction



the desire for salvation and transcendent truth to the separate sphere of private piety. Now we are better placed to grasp the historical circumstances from which Pufendorf ’s natural law arose and that it was intended to meet. We recall that the endeavour to pacify the warring confessional states and communities found its most potent intellectual instrument in positive political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht), which offered the central means of partitioning civil authority and transcendent truth, the search for civility and the pursuit of salvation. In the great struggle to find religious peace that stretched from the Treaty of Augsburg in  to the Treaty of Westphalia in , it was the Protestant political jurists who gradually secularised the Empire’s legal and political culture and laid the constitutional groundwork for the system of sovereign territorial states. They did this, Martin Heckel argues, not through a new rational or secular philosophy – most jurists remained committed Lutherans – but through a series of measures, driven by force of circumstance rather than force of reason, aimed at securing the legal–political coexistence of the confessions. The most important of these measures were the acceptance of jurisprudence rather than theology as the prime political discourse; the establishment of legal parity between the confessions within the juridical and political apparatus of the Empire; and, above all, the exclusion of the question of theological truth from the legal–political settlements that ended religious Bürgerkrieg (Heckel , –). Still, despite resulting in a profound secularisation of the judicial and political apparatus, these changes were not aimed at the secularisation of society as a whole. Driven by the exigencies of social pacification rather than an all-embracing ideology, and typically motivated by the desire of the faithful to preserve their particular confession amid the wholesale carnage of the religious wars, this was a secularisation that stopped at the cathedral door. It left the churches free to pursue their transcendent aims as voluntary associations, while excluding these aims from the sphere of civil governance (Heckel , –). This gradual disarticulation and re-ordering of the institutions of political and religious governance – which was the work of hundreds of nameless lawyers and statesmen and for which no philosophical genius may claim the glory – was arguably the most important cultural and intellectual transformation to take place in early modern Germany. In fact it produced the characteristic political and moral topography of the modern state. This emerged in the form of an apparatus of legal and political governance from which all ‘higher’ theological and metaphysical ends



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

had been excluded in favour of the single end of security. Inside this agnostic security envelope an array of religious, academic, and other ‘social’ associations were free to pursue their absolute truths, so long as they did so within the limits of social peace. If, therefore, Pufendorf ’s natural law doctrine enacts a fundamental partitioning of the ‘civil kingdom’ from the ‘kingdom of truth’ – the exercise of civil coercion from the pursuit of transcendent morality – this is not because he fell short of the dialectical reconciliation of philosophy and theology. Neither is it because, in excluding all appeals to transcendent right, his voluntarism drove him into the arms of a state based on might alone. Rather, by enacting this separation Pufendorf was attempting to reshape the learned culture’s prime discipline of ethical and political reflection, giving it a form that would comprehend the fundamental desacralisation of government and privatisation of religion that had already taken place in the political–jurisprudential domain. Now we begin to see the scale of the reconfiguration of ethical and political culture contained in Pufendorf ’s natural law, and the depth of the gulf separating it from its metaphysical rival. In continuing to ground civil authority in transcendent moral philosophy, metaphysical natural law – whether neoscholastic or rationalist – represented a cultural formation of great intellectual strength and social power. The intellectual strength of this metaphysical natural law lay in the manner in which its Christian Platonic anthropology permitted the privilege of transcendent insight to be claimed by the metaphysical personage, who thereby acquired a quasi-sacerdotal authority as a secular sage. Its social authority arose from the fact that through this anthropology ‘rationalist’ metaphysics remained in touch with the central Christian symbols and rituals – particularly those associated with moral regeneration and salvation. Through the training of a metaphysically imbued clerisy, university metaphysics could thus engage a population whose moral physiognomy was still deeply informed by these symbols and rituals. On the basis of the spiritual prestige attached to the metaphysical personage, rationalist university metaphysics could instruct citizens in how they might achieve moral perfection, even if this meant acting in accordance with a conception of justice ‘higher’ than that embodied in the positive laws of the state. If, therefore, Pufendorf ’s De Jure begins by cutting the knot of metaphysical anthropology, that is because this is where the threads joining civil authority and transcendent truth are tied the tightest. Replacing this anthropology with his own conception of man – as a being whose

Introduction



passional nature is imposed by the divine sovereign and necessitates the commands of the earthly sovereign – was the first step in Pufendorf ’s extraordinarily ambitious attempt to reshape the landscape of early modern German ethical and political culture. In showing how civil authority could be separated from transcendent truth, this quasiEpicurean anthropology held the key to a natural law designed to reflect the desacralisation of government and the privatisation of religion, by forming a new kind of civil deportment for rulers and citizens: But by far the greatest difference [between natural law and moral theology] is that the scope of the discipline of natural law is confined within the orbit of his life, and so it forms man on the assumption that he is to lead this life in society with others [hanc vitam cum aliis sociabilem exigere debeat]. Moral theology, however, forms a Christian man, who, beyond his duty to pass this life in goodness, has an expectation of reward for piety in the life to come and who therefore has his citizenship [politeuma] in the heavens while here he lives merely as a pilgrim or stranger. (DOH, Pref., )

We still have difficulty comprehending the depth of the changes to moral and political philosophy entailed by this project. For, in order to fashion a persona for the citizen that would allow individuals to accede to their civil obligations independently of their Christian moral personality, Pufendorf had to displace the Christian–metaphysical figuration of the person with a pluralistic construction that was perhaps unprecedented in early modernity. This is a construction that relativises duties to the several statuses or personae occupied by individuals in the course of civil life, while maintaining the duty of obedience to the civil state as the ultimate parameter within which this variation takes place. In thus detaching political and legal governance from transcendent morality, Pufendorf earned the hostility of metaphysicians from Leibniz to Kant and beyond. Regardless of their attacks on the allegedly ‘tyrannical’ or ‘totalitarian’ implications of Pufendorf ’s doctrines, and notwithstanding their righteous defences of ‘freedom’, the cardinal sin of Pufendorfian natural law in the eyes of metaphysical intellectuals has always been its uncoupling of political sovereignty from moral truth. For in this separation these intellectuals have seen both the dissolution of the ‘moral commonwealth’ and of their own prestigious role in it, as the guardians of a rational moral politics. In continuing to frame civil duties by theorising the self-governing moral personality or a self-perfecting moral community – the modern avatars of purified reason and the godly state – today’s moral philosophy remains inimical to the desacralisation of civil governance undertaken



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

by Pufendorf. In fact, in an unhappy historical irony, it has used these figures of thought as its means of interpreting Pufendorf, thereby posthumously assimilating him to the culture of metaphysics that he sought to destroy. The central symptom of this assimilation is the discussion of Pufendorf ’s conception of political obligation in terms of either the selfrealising community or the self-legislating personality. We can begin to excavate the depths of Pufendorf ’s natural law by recovering his conception of political obligation from beneath these neo-Aristotelian and neoKantian treatments of it. .                        Pufendorf formulates his conception of political obligation in a wellknown passage in the De Jure Naturae et Gentium: An obligation is properly laid on the mind of a man by a superior, that is, by one who has both the strength to threaten some evil against those who resist him, and just reasons [justae causae] why he can demand that the liberty of our will be limited at his pleasure. For when a person has such power, after he has once signified what reward awaits those who obey his will, and what evil consequences those who resist it, there must necessarily arise in the faculty of reason a fear mingled with reverence [metum reverentia temperatum]; a fear occasioned by such a person’s power, and a reverence arising from consideration of the causes, which should be sufficient, even without the fear, to lead one to receive the command on grounds of good judgment alone. (DJN, .vi., )

Modern commentators have reclaimed this conception for moral philosophy by interpreting the superior’s ‘just reasons’ in terms of morally justifying and justified reasons, as they variously understand the latter. In his influential neo-Aristotelian account, Horst Denzer explicates the justness of the superior’s reasons in terms of man’s ‘rational and social nature’ and the state’s role in cultivating or completing this nature. Its role in perfecting man’s moral nature gives the state itself a natural moral character: ‘For Pufendorf there are conditions attached to the fact that the nature of man demands the state. The concept of nature must be taken in its teleological sense, [meaning] namely that man strives for perfection rather than indulging his inclinations and passions. The natural character of the state is therefore the final consequence of human nature’s capacity for cultivation’ (Denzer , ). For Denzer, therefore, the superior’s reasons are just to the extent that his commands order the kind of society in which man’s rational and social faculties may be perfected, but not otherwise. On this basis, Denzer interprets

Moral philosophy and political obligation



Pufendorf ’s version of the ‘social contract’ as one that establishes reciprocal rights and obligations, between individuals possessing natural rights to development, and a political sovereign who must be obeyed to the extent that he develops the moral nature grounding these rights (, , –). In the most important of the neo-Kantian interpretations, J. B. Schneewind construes the justness of the superior’s reasons not in terms of the realisation of a natural good, but in terms of the autonomy of the rational faculty responsible for issuing laws: ‘Pufendorf is here saying that the good God intended us to achieve with our special nature is not restricted to natural good. It must include a good indicated by the higher aspect of our nature – reason and will’ (Schneewind , ). Stressing the non-teleological character of Pufendorf ’s conception of entia moralia, Schneewind treats the superior’s commands as anticipations of Kant’s self-legislating reason, ascribing their justness to the ‘higher’ rational part of human nature in which they originate. On this view, mere recognition of the higher rational source of the superior’s commands should be enough to create the sense of obligation: ‘Here Pufendorf seems to be suggesting that simple recognition that a law is a divine command should awaken a motive for compliance in us’ (). As a result, Schneewind treats Pufendorf ’s recourse to political sanctions as the outcome of his failure to grasp how reason itself might impose political obligations, ascribing this failure to Pufendorf ’s inability to reconcile moral entities and physical beings: ‘Obligation is a moral entity. As such it has no causal power of its own. Desires, as part of our physical nature, can cause us to act in space and time; but recognition of obligation gives us a consideration or reason for action that does not operate in the field of force in which desires operate’ (). We have heard this critique of Pufendorf before, of course, in Leibniz’s comment that: ‘If reasons restrain even by themselves, why did they not restrain by themselves, before fear arose?’ (PW, ). Apparently, moral and political philosophy could not solve the problem of how moral reason has force in the political world until Kant formulated his doctrine of self-legislating reason and our ‘reverence’ for it, thereby providing a final explication of the ‘justness’ of the superior’s commands. For all their subtlety and interest, neither of these readings captures Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority. In fact both of them reimport the categories of moral philosophy to a civil ethics from which they have been expelled. For the ‘just causes’ warranting the superior’s imposition of obligation are neither those provided by the telos of man’s



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

rational and social nature, nor those flowing from a higher self-obligating aspect of his nature, ‘reason and will’. Rather, in the summary formulation of the De Officio, they are the relations of vulnerability and protection, need and care, linking beings seeking tutelage to an agent possessing the power to provide it: The reasons which justify a person’s claim to another’s obedience are: if he has conferred exceptional benefits on him; if it is evident that he wishes the other well and can look out for him better than he can himself; if at the same time he actually claims direction of him; and, finally, if the other party has voluntarily submitted to him and accepted his direction. (DOH, .ii., )

In keeping with their moral–philosophical outlooks, the neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian accounts interpret the civil power’s justness in terms of its moral superiority. But, while ruling out sheer force as a legitimate source of political duties, Pufendorf simultaneously rules out moral excellence: ‘We are of the opinion, consequently, that the right to lay an obligation upon another, or, in other words, to command another and to prescribe laws, arises not merely from strength alone, or even from ␷␲⑀␳␱␹␩ [superiority], or excellence of nature’ (DJN, .vi., ). Moreover, despite Schneewind’s claims to the contrary, it seems clear that the superior’s right to command through laws is indeed specifiable in terms of a good independent of the laws themselves. This good, though, is not the summum bonum of the perfection of man’s rational and social nature, but something far more restricted – political security. We may propose then that the just causes which, together with the power to coerce, constitute superiority and obligation are grounded not in the ‘higher nature’ of man’s rational or perfectible being, but in a different normative source altogether: namely, in the relations of dependency and protection linking a being in need of security to one who is in a position to provide it. For Pufendorf, it is not their conformity to a self-legislated moral law or a self-perfecting moral community that justifies the superior’s commands. Rather they are justified by the fact and to the degree that they are issued by an agent who claims and has been granted the absolute right to govern others in exchange for the care and protection that he offers them. Pufendorf ’s construction of obligation should thus be seen as part of his larger rescaling and reconfiguration of the relation between transcendent rationality and civil governance, moral philosophy and political jurisprudence. Through this construction he seeks to detach the justification of civil governance from its moral–philosophical moorings

Moral philosophy and political obligation



– the person’s perfectible moral nature, self-legislating moral reason – and to tie it instead to the concrete relations of dependency and protection established in order to achieve security. There can be little doubt that this was Pufendorf ’s way of reconstructing academic ethics and politics in response to the period of confessional warfare and the subsequent political–jurisprudential desacralisation of civil governance. The reconstruction of political obligation in terms of the provision of security alone may be regarded as Pufendorf ’s way of building the historical reality of murderous moral communities into the foundations of ethics and politics, transforming the ‘is’ of the Thirty Years War into the ‘ought’ of a detranscendentalised ethics and secularised politics. Pufendorf ’s programme remains obscured in modern Aristotelian and Kantian commentaries because they are grounded in moral anthropologies – of the self-perfecting community and the self-governing rational being – dedicated to maintaining the synthesis of moral and political governance that he was intent on destroying. In order to recover Pufendorf ’s conception of obligation the historian must therefore be careful not to allow these rival anthropologies to infiltrate his historical reconstruction. Historians who presume, for example, that in eschewing the notion of self-legislated moral law Pufendorf ’s project collapsed into political utilitarianism, are declaring their de-facto adherence to the anthropology of self-governing rational being. But, as I have indicated, this anthropology was explicitly repudiated by Pufendorf as inimical to his desacralising programme. The same remarks apply to the presumption that Pufendorf ’s conception of obligation was, or should have been grounded in the Aristotelian anthropology of man’s self-perfecting rational and social being. As we shall soon see in more detail, Pufendorf ’s construction of obligation is grounded in its own moral anthropology. This has little in common with the Aristotelian figuration of man’s socially perfectible moral nature or the Platonic image of his self-legislating rational being. Instead, Pufendorf elaborates a quasi-Epicurean anthropology of man as a being whose weakness (imbecilitas) dictates that he requires sociability to survive, but whose vicious passions and divided mind erode sociability and leave him prey to extravagant violence and mutual destruction (DJN, .i.–, –; DOH, .iii.–, –). Pufendorf thus derives the natural law norms of sociability solely from the need to achieve civil peace, exclusive of the requirements to perfect man’s moral nature or respect the enactments of his ‘higher’ rational being. This is the way he sought to exclude moral theology and philosophy from the domain of natural law. In doing so he conceives of a politics independent of all



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

higher moral ends – purely in terms of the relations of obedience and superiority required for the security of beings whose capacity for mutual violence is no less definitive of them than their need for sociability. Understood in this way, Pufendorf ’s construction of political obligation allows no space for the gap that Leibniz and Schneewind posit between the superior’s ‘just causes’ and his ‘strength to threaten some evil against those who resist him’. In deliberately rejecting the metaphysical anthropology – and, with it, the division between man’s higher selflegislating rational being and his lower sensuous inclinations and desires – Pufendorf ’s natural law is untroubled by the split between rational self-governance and instrumental coercion formulated within this Christian-Platonic doctrine of man. In accordance with his Epicurean anthropology, Pufendorf treats human nature as fundamentally driven by rationally uncontrollable and socially dangerous passions. Further, in keeping with his voluntarist repudiation of metaphysical rationalism, Pufendorf treats human reason not as a higher self-legislating intellectual nature, but as a limited capacity for empirical knowledge and deductive ratiocination: ‘Man’s nature, then, is so constituted that the human race cannot be secure without social life and the human mind is seen to be capable of ideas which serve this end’ (DOH, .iii., ). Man possesses just enough reason to know that his passionate and dangerous nature is incapable of attaining sociability through reason. In explicating his conception of obligation Pufendorf indeed says that ‘a reverence arising from a consideration of the causes . . . should be sufficient, even without the fear, to lead one to receive the command on grounds of good judgment alone’ (DJN, .vi., ). But this is not the articulation of a rational–moral source of obligation incommensurate with the administration of fear. For the consideration of causes is understood not in terms of philosophical reflection on self-governing rational being, but in terms of political reflection on the debt of obedience arising from the relations of guardianship and dependency, sub- and super-ordination: ‘For no man can well avoid having respect for the one from whom he has received many favours, and so if it appears that the same person wishes me well, and can take better care for my future than can I, and he also claims at the same time a right to direct my acts, there is no apparent reason why I should wish to question his power’ (DJN, .vi., ). It is the incapacity of human beings to accept political obligation on the basis of such consideration – an incapacity arising from the strength of their jealous and ambitious passions – that establishes the continuity between justifying considerations and the power to coerce.

Moral philosophy and political obligation



Rather than representing a ‘Hobbesian’ principle ambiguously distinct from the capacity for ‘rational’ consideration of the just causes, the power to coerce which compensates for this incapacity actually forms a continuum with such consideration. For man’s inability to obligate himself through such consideration is itself one of the determinants driving the institution of an office of sovereignty possessing the power to coerce. The capacity to punish non-compliance, and the justness of the causes for issuing commands, are thus conjoint determinants of the superiority that creates obligation: From what has been said, one must surely agree that mere strength is not enough to lay an obligation on me at the desire of another, but that he should in addition have done me some special service, or that I should of my own accord consent to his direction . . . From these two sources, we believe, flows the force of obligations, which, as generally understood, restrain as by an inner bond the liberty of our will. But because the natural liberty of the human will is not destroyed by any moral bond, and because also among the vast majority of mortals the inconstancy or wickedness is so great that they prevail over these reasons for command, something else is needed to control the wild passions of men, with a greater force than a feeling of shame and an appreciation of what is right . . . Now we feel that nothing could have such an effect, but the fear of some evil to come, upon the breach of an obligation, from the hand of a stronger person, to whose interest it was that there should be no departure from that obligation. And so, in the final analysis, obligations get their stability from force, and from the consideration that the one who desires to procure their observance has so much power, either inherent in him or given him by others, that he can bring some grave evil upon the disobedient. (DJN, .vi., –)

For Pufendorf, then, the normativity of political obligation – the justifying ground for the superior’s commands – comes not from the imperatives of a rational nature that is good in itself, or, indeed, from a rational and social nature that requires such commands for its perfection. Rather, it comes from the relations of dependency and protection that human beings have established on the basis of empirical knowledge of their passionate and destructive nature and in pursuit of the end of security. There is thus no unbridgeable gap between just reasons and political discipline for Pufendorf. This is in part because the reasons in question arise from concrete political circumstances rather than self-legislating Kantian reason. But it is in part because the ‘reasons’ – of vulnerability and protection – legitimating the superior’s command of his subjects are also those legitimating his use of coercion against them, should they fail to obey. For, in basing the political pact on the chastened recognition of their own incapacity for rational self-governance, the subjects not only



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

give the sovereign the right to determine what is in the interest of their collective security, they also give him the right to exercise a supreme coercive power over them, whenever their self-interest threatens to deviate from this collective one. It is not, therefore, that Pufendorf fails to explain how moral entities can have effects in the physical world – how reason alone can move the will. It is, rather, that this problem has no meaning for him, being precluded by his self-conscious rejection of the notion of man’s higher rational nature or self-legislating moral reason. For Pufendorf, political duties are not grounded in transcendent moral norms, but in norms of political discipline. These are norms immanent to the historical circumstances in which the sovereign state emerged as the bulwark against man’s limitless capacity for self-destruction and civil mayhem. In short, the sovereign is not the moral superior of his subjects, only their political superior. The justness of the sovereign’s use of political coercion thus flows neither from man’s failure to obey a moral law that should be respected on rational grounds, nor from his failure to adhere to the law of a moral nature that impels him to ‘strive for perfection rather than indulging his inclinations and passions’. Rather, it comes from man’s chastened recognition of his rationally ungovernable and permanently flawed passional nature. It is this recognition – the knowledge that consideration of the justness of the superior’s right to command will not by itself lead to obedience – that allows Pufendorf to build political coercion into the offices of sovereign and subject, thereby redefining the contours of political right. The continuum joining the consideration of just causes to the exercise of political coercion is thus provided not by man’s rational being but by his passional nature. For it is in a series of progressively more powerful ways of governing this fractious and violent nature that consideration of the sovereign’s just causes for command joins forces with his use of coercion, when consideration alone proves insufficient to secure compliance. This means that political coercion acquires its legitimacy not as a means of enforcing the self-governance that rational beings should be able to exercise by and on themselves – the rationalist model that continues to tie civil authority to transcendent truth. Instead, coercion acquires legitimacy as a means of enforcing the relations of dependency and guardianship that human beings have imposed on themselves, via the institution of civil sovereignty, as a means of achieving social peace. As far as Pufendorf is concerned, the need for political coercion is not just a temporary phenomenon, arising from the failure of rational selfgovernance. Rather, it is a permanent and constitutive feature of political right and of a civil state which will never ‘wither away’.

Moral philosophy and political obligation



To conclude this reconsideration of Pufendorf ’s conception of political authority, we must return to the centre of our attention something that remains off-stage in moral–philosophical interpretations of Pufendorf: namely, his ‘privatisation’ of salvation or moral regeneration. We have already observed that Pufendorf ’s restriction of civil right to the political relations required for social peace was reciprocally and inseparably related to a second act of demarcation: his restriction of the pursuit of moral regeneration to the non-political sphere of religious faith or private moral striving. This partitioning of civil governance from transcendent morality – whose crucial formulation is provided by the De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem – was Pufendorf ’s central response to the problem of religious civil war. If, as some critics have claimed, it divorces political governance from transcendent morality then it does so in order to place transcendent morality beyond political enforcement. The religious neutrality of the state and the political neutralisation of the church are the twin pillars of Pufendorf ’s natural law. This larger partitioning of civil and spiritual governance needs to be kept in mind when considering the nature of the continuum that Pufendorf establishes between the just causes for the sovereign’s commands and the use of coercion to enforce them. For, given that these just causes refer only to the relations of dependence and protection required for civil peace, then their enforcement never touches the pursuit of transcendent morality and religion. This remains free of political coercion precisely to the extent that it has been detached from the exercise of civil power, which offers us a good pointer to the statist character of Pufendorf ’s liberalism. From Pufendorf ’s viewpoint, in seeking transcendent moral grounds for the exercise of political coercion – in selfperfecting moral community or self-legislating rational being – moral philosophers risk making transcendent morality politically enforceable. As we have seen in our discussion of Leibniz’s theory of punishment and his treatment of heresy, this was not a groundless fear. We cannot appreciate the true character Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of ethics and politics until we realise that he is no longer in the business of attempting to derive political obligation via metaphysical reflection on man’s rational and moral being. In fact his objective is to ensure that this would no longer occur. Pufendorf was among the first to see that the desacralisation of civil governance meant that individuals would have to learn to accede to their civil duties independently of cultivating an ‘integral’ moral personality – a practice which would have to be restricted to the domain of private spiritual striving. From now on human beings would have to accede to their civil duties not through self-purifying



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

recovery of a higher metaphysical being, but through empirical reflection on their violent historical nature, for whose governance they had instituted a new moral persona – that of the citizen. In the system of post-Westphalian states, political authority could have only one end – security – and political obligation only one source: obedience to the supreme power that provided it. All attempts to justify obligation via a true philosophy of man’s rational and moral being – attempts that grounded obligation in a self-perfecting moral community or a self-legislating rational being – would therefore be inimical to the new disposition of civil governance and civil duties. Such attempts refuse to accept Pufendorf ’s desacralising segregation of the political subject from the subject of truth – the ‘civil kingdom’ from the ‘kingdom of truth’ – and they continue to obscure our understanding of this objective today. To reach this objective the citizen had to be transformed from a person who accedes to his civil duties through insight into moral truth to one who does so through acceptance of his need for civil security. This could not be done without removing metaphysical moral philosophy – neo-Aristotelian and neoPlatonic – from academic ethics and politics and replacing it with a civil philosophy suited to the moral comportment of the subject of the deconfessionalised state. That is the fundamental task of Pufendorf ’s natural law. To understand the manner in which he carried out this task we must come to terms with three fundamental features of this natural law, features which are also decisive points of departure from metaphysical moral philosophy. First, we must observe that for Pufendorf the bearer of duties is no longer an integral moral personality or community through which access might be gained to an ultimate rational or moral ground for obligation. Rather, the bearer of duties has become the ‘imposed’ status or ‘office’, the entia moralia; and the duties attaching to offices have no integrating source or form in such figures as the rational being or the moral community. They take their shape instead from the ends for which the offices have been imposed – pre-eminently from the end of security. Second, as a result of this, human beings may not accede to the natural law – that is, to the duties attaching to the ‘natural status’ imposed on them by God – through philosophical reflection on the rational and moral grounds for this imposition. As human reason and morality are internal to the nature created by this imposition, man may and can only deduce natural law through chastened observation of his ‘empirical’ nature and the conduct most likely to preserve it. Finally, this

From moral personality to civil personae



means that the pact through which man enters the ‘civil state’ is not a means of enacting or perfecting his higher rational being. Rather, this pact is the form in which human beings impose a new moral being on themselves: the ‘compound moral person’ of civil sovereignty – the citizen and the sovereign. In imposing a new ‘civil status’, the stateforming pact institutes new personae and a new way of governing liberty. As such, although it is reached in accordance with the natural law goal of security, civil sovereignty is not effectively accountable to natural law. For, as a result of the transformative powers of the pact, the sovereign is the only civil person possessing the capacity to decide the measures needed for social peace. In discussing each of these features in turn, we shall build up an interpretation of Pufendorf ’s natural law that is more in keeping with its historical role as both instrument and outcome of the early modern desacralisation of politics. .        The first chapter of the first book of Pufendorf ’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium executes a short but fundamental expulsion of the Christian– metaphysical concept of the person from the domain of civil ethics and politics. Drawing on the Roman-law notion of persona as a dutybearing status, and the associated Ciceronian notion of ‘office’ (officium) as the duty attached to a civil position, Pufendorf constructs a concept of civil moral duty in terms of the conduct required by the occupancy of a civil status. Wolfgang Röd has suggested that here Pufendorf may have been drawing on the work of one of his teachers, Erhard Weigel (Röd ; Röd ). For Weigel had sketched a (partially) conventionalist account of social order in which moral norms are treated as artefactual ‘moral entities’ – Weigel also calls them entia civilia or civil entities – instituted by human agreement for the purpose of securing social order and cohesion (Weigel , –). In any case, in Pufendorf ’s hands this construction was unexpected and unwelcome in many Lutheran theology and philosophy faculties, rejecting as it did the Christian metaphysics of the person root and branch. Protestant neoscholastic metaphysics had construed the concept of person in terms of the Aristotelian ontology of substances and accidents. Here person is understood as the substance or ‘supposite’ of an intellectual being (R. Schröder , ). But it is metaphysical Christology which provides the seminal patterns for later philosophical



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

conceptions of the unity of the person. In this setting, the pressure to unify divided ‘offices’ (divine and human) and ‘states’ (of exaltation and inanition) comes from the imperative of mediation and salvation, which helps to explain the extraordinary importance of the ‘two natures one person’ formula to all Christological debate during the seventeenth century (Baur ; Sparn , –). In fact the conception of moral personality in the early modern metaphysics of morals – the line running from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – may be regarded as a series of elaborations of this soteriological conception of personal unity (Kobusch ). Leibniz’s monadology, for example, may be treated as a ‘secular’ improvisation on the Christological metaphysics of personal unity; for, as a result of the division between their spontaneous apperception and their passive sensing, the monads echo the neoscholastic division of Christ’s divine and human natures, fuelling the same drive for unifying mediation (Sparn ). Despite his ongoing attempts to provide a definitive metaphysics of the Eucharist, Leibniz’s monadology allowed him to shift the drama of mediation and salvation to the twin natures of homo duplex, where the pursuit of saving unity could take place as a philosophical spiritual exercise. Nonetheless, as we have argued, given its Platonic–ascetic form, this philosophical pursuit of personal unity retains a strongly religious character. In any case, rather than anticipating the further ‘subjectivisation’ of the metaphysical conception of the person – which would occur in Kant’s notion of self-legislative rational being – Pufendorf ’s construction of civil persona or officium severs his natural law from this entire line of development. The opening chapter of the De Jure is the sundering blow. Launching a corrosive intervention into the neoscholastic Weltanschauung, Pufendorf denies that the ontology of substances and attributes has any relevance to the moral domain and the understanding of personhood, thus relegating it to the domain of natural or physical entities. This marks the beginning of a remarkable anti-metaphysical tour de force, in which he sets out to destroy the whole programme of deriving moral duties from a moral nature embedded in the person and acceded to through reflection on divine or transcendent reasons. Pufendorf ’s central weapon is the distinction he draws between physical and moral entities. Physical entities (entia physica) are created, and their properties flow from the substances subtending them. Moral entities (entia moralia), however, arise through ‘imposition’ (impositionis), and their properties (moral duties) flow not from an essential moral nature (form, entelechy,

From moral personality to civil personae



soul), but from the purposes for which they have been superadded to physical beings: ‘We seem able, accordingly, to define moral entities most conveniently as certain modes, added to physical things or motions, by intelligent beings, primarily to direct and temper the freedom of the voluntary acts of man, and thereby secure a certain orderliness and decorum in civilised life’ (DJN, .i., ). Reason and morality thus do not flow from an intelligible substance (‘rational being’) imbricated in the order of being, but represent capacities for inventing and improvising in relation to the circumstances and needs of man. Pursuing his desubstantialisation of morality by a daring analogy, Pufendorf comments that if physical things have their properties through the manner in which their substances or supposites occupy space, then moral entities – specifically moral persons (personae morales) – exist through their occupancy of a particular state or status (statu), which is the ‘space’ in which moral qualities and actions are possible. As the mode of bearing a particular configuration of duties, status is either natural or adventitious – the former being the status imposed on man by God, the latter comprising those imposed on man by himself. But Pufendorf is careful to point out that not even the natural status represents an unfolding of an ontological nature or essence, being rather the mode God has willed to shape man’s conduct and govern his natural liberty: ‘Hence the active force which lies in [moral entities] does not consist in their ability directly to produce any physical change in any thing, but only in this, that it is made clear to men along what line they should govern their liberty of action, and that in a special way men are made capable of receiving some good or evil and of directing certain actions towards other persons with a particular effect’ (DJN, .i., ). Pufendorf thus replaces the metaphysical conception of the person as the substantial origin of all its offices and conditions with an account of offices tied only to an instituted status or condition. This enables him to reject the idea of duties unfolding from a single source of spiritual being or intellectual reflection in favour of a conception of their multiple origins in invented statuses. It is quite misleading, therefore, for Theo Kobusch to interpret Pufendorf ’s conception of moral entity as if it were a development of the neoscholastic conception of the person as moral substance, bearing inalienable rights and duties, and set apart from natural being only by its Kantian capacity for free self-determination (Kobusch , –). Far from attempting to provide a moral–ontological anchor for moral freedom and natural rights, Pufendorf ’s separation



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

of moral from natural being is intended to divorce duties and rights from all ontological foundations and salvific aspirations, grounding them instead in imposed offices which originate in a civil rather than a metaphysical order. As Haakonssen explains: ‘Officia in the broader sense are thus not simply “duties”, as the term is normally rendered in English. They are the offices of life which encompass clusters of specific duties and rights, and we are bound to them by an obligatio, or moral necessity’ (Haakonssen , –). In explicitly rejecting the neoscholastic and rationalist metaphysics of natural law, Pufendorf uses this conception of moral offices in order to displace the Platonic–Aristotelian conception of ‘universal justice’ – understood as both the plenary form of the virtues and the recovery of self-governing moral personality. Writing to his young admirer Christian Thomasius on  July  he comments that: ‘If I can demonstrate that they are only suited to a certain kind of republic [i.e., the Greek polis], I regard it as a strong argument among rational people that one should not set up morality in accordance with Aristotle’s eleven virtues. And in general it is my opinion that one should institute and manage morality not in accordance with virtues but in accordance with offices [officia].’ Reminding us of the rival moral anthropology underpinning this shift from metaphysical virtues to civil offices, Pufendorf continues: ‘In any case, Epicurean ethics is without doubt better than Aristotelian. But the name of Epicurus is so hated by the idiots that one must fear that Bileam’s horse would mount the pulpit and preach if one said anything good of Epicurus’ (GW, , –). Pufendorf leaves us in little doubt regarding the central objective of his relegation of moral personality in favour of civil personae. He seeks to secularise and pluralise the basic ethical tool used in the shaping of moral comportments – the figuration of personhood. Cut loose from its vertical integration in spiritual substance and rational being, and freed from its salvific role in the ‘Christology’ of homo duplex, personhood could be distributed horizontally across a variety of statuses imposed for the ends of civil governance. The reconfiguration of moral personhood arising from this transformation is so profound, and so counter to the Christian–metaphysical inheritance, that the outrage it provoked in early modern moral philosophers has only been stilled by the efforts of their modern counterparts to re-absorb it into the metaphysics of morals. For this reconfiguration allows Pufendorf to separate the philosophical concept of the subject – as transcendental rational being – from the civil conception of the person, as a comportment imposed for the

From moral personality to civil personae



bearing of obligations. In doing so it allows him to establish an ethics and politics independent of the moral philosophical treatment of duties in terms of self-conscious and self-governing moral personality. Pufendorf ’s voluntarist anthropology thus precludes the kind of selfrelation programmed by Leibniz’s transcendental psychology. It denies that individuals can accede to their moral duties through self-unifying redemptive recovery of their inner imago Dei, rational being or moral personality, insisting instead that they must recognise their duties in the array of offices or personae imposed on them for the purposes of civil governance. By separating the concept of moral person from that of human (rational) being, Pufendorf is able to argue that a single human being may be the bearer of several moral personae – civil and ecclesiastical, commercial and familial, public and private – each with its own duties arising from the purposes for which it was instituted (DJN, .i., –). Further, the obligations clustered around a given status or persona need have no single unifying principle, arising instead from the variety of civil ends terminating in the persona. Conversely, on the same basis, many human beings may be represented by a single moral person, as in the case of civil associations and states, where individuals subordinate their particular wills to the will of the sovereign as a ‘composite moral person’ (persona moralis composita), again instituted for a certain purpose, here the achievement of social peace and security (DJN, .i., ). In deriving obligations from multiple principles or ends lying outside the individual in the officia of civil life, Pufendorf ’s civil anthropology places the array of duties to which an individual might be subject beyond the reach of a single integrating judgment to which they might aspire. This detranscendentalising and pluralising of moral personhood holds the key to the separation of civil and religious offices needed for the governance of newly deconfessionalised states. Pufendorf ’s prime purpose for arguing in this way is to deny that there is any transcendent moral personality anchored in the nature of man – no moral or rational being, no imago Dei, no Christian conscience – that might permit individuals to unify and rank all their offices from a single point of rational insight. Moreover, in Pufendorf ’s central example of the illegitimate unification of offices – the figure of the priest – we catch sight of the historical circumstances driving this anti-metaphysical anthropology: Also we should not forget, that, just as one person may at the same time be in different states [pluribus statibus], provided only that the obligations accompanying those states do not conflict, so the obligations attached to any one state may in their parts be derived from different principles. Hence he who gathers the



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

obligations flowing from any one principle, and omits all others, does by no means immediately form a state [statum] to which no obligations can or should adhere, save those which he himself recollects [meminit]. So he who has gathered from the Sacred Scriptures alone the parts of the duty of priests [partes officii sacerdotum], assuredly cannot deny that those priests are also obligated to perform such duties as are required by the constitutions of individual governments [civitatum]. And so we also who are here treating merely of the duties of man [hominis officia], which can be shown to be necessary by the light of reason, do by no means maintain that any such state of man, which includes such obligations alone [i.e., those ‘recollected’ from a single principle or source], ever did exist, can exist, or should exist. (DJN, .i., –)

The duties attaching to a moral persona may arise from a plurality of principles, and it is unacceptable for anyone – priests in the first instance – to unify their duties using the method of inner self-reflection, as if the obligations they were under had no external civil determinants. Those neoscholastic theologians and rationalist philosophers who sought to subordinate civil duties to the cultivation of a transcendent moral personality stood in the way of the pluralisation of offices required by life in deconfessionalised states. In confessional society the inward cultivation of spiritual unity had its external correlate in the efforts of religious intellectuals to subordinate all the spheres and duties of life to the religious or transcendental–moral. This moral unification of life had fuelled the unbridled intensity of the conflicts between the different confessional communities. The separation of religious and civil governance at the level of the state was thus conditional on the secularisation and pluralisation of personhood at the level of the individual. Rather than representing a stage in the development of (Kantian) moral philosophy, Pufendorf ’s anti-metaphysical anthropology should thus be seen as directly engaging with specific religious and political circumstances. Through his frontal assault on the paideia of metaphysical anthropology – through his rejection of self-formation via the inner ascent to quasi-divine concepts of morality and justice – Pufendorf was laying the groundwork for the separation of religious and civil governance that lies at the heart of his natural law. It should already be clear that if the confessional theologian was the first target of this attack then the metaphysical philosopher would be the next. For, no less than the religious, the metaphysical sage is prone to determining his obligations for himself, imagining that the duties of the philosopher have a single transcendent source – in the conceptual contemplation of pure ideas – to the exclusion or assimilation of the duties imposed by historically existing governments.

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



.                    Like Leibniz’s, Pufendorf ’s method of constructing or ‘knowing’ natural law is deeply embedded in his moral anthropology. Pufendorf ’s conception of man as the bearer of imposed statuses or offices, however, is associated with an intellectual method differing profoundly from Leibniz’s exercise in transcendental rationalism. Drawing in part on the doctrine of fallen man’s incapacity for transcendent knowledge, but more centrally on his doctrine of the imposed nature of moral entities, Pufendorf insists that the science of natural law may not be derived from insight into theo-rational concepts or norms existing prior to the imposition of laws. Pufendorf ’s voluntarist insistence that ‘scientific’ knowledge of morality is possible without positing objective values – things considered good or bad ‘in themselves’ without reference to the laws making them so – is not simply an epistemological doctrine. In fact it is central to his strategy for the civil ‘rescaling’ of natural law, providing the means of including it in the same (‘imposed’) domain as the civil state’s positive law: Now in order that this knowledge of natural law with which we are now concerned, and which includes all moral and civil knowledge that is genuine and solid [& quae genuinam ac solidam doctrinam moralem & civilem absolvit], may meet the full requirements of a science, we feel that we need not declare, with certain writers, that some things are noble or base of themselves without any imposition, and that these form the object of natural and perpetual law, while those, the good repute or baseness of which depends upon the will of a legislator, fall under the head of positive laws. (DJN, .ii., )

It is possible to have certain knowledge in the moral sciences, Pufendorf argues, but such certainty is internal to the domain of knowledge created by the a-rational imposition of laws: ‘For since good repute [honestas], or moral necessity, and turpitude, are affections [qualities] of human actions arising from their conformity or non-conformity to some norm or law, and law is the bidding of a superior, it does not appear that good repute or turpitude can be conceived to exist before the law, and without the imposition of a superior’ (DJN, .ii., ). To suggest that the moral quality of actions exists independently of God’s gratuitous imposition is to ‘join to God some co-eternal extrinsic principle which He Himself had to follow in the assignment of the forms of things’; and this is impossible because ‘God created all things, man included, of His free will’ and could have assigned ‘whatever nature He wished to this creature whom



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

he was about to create’. Pufendorf accepts that there is such a thing as natural good, which consists in the naturally beneficial powers contained in man’s physical nature, and, indeed, all moral goods are based in natural goods. The converse is not true however – that is, not all natural goods are moral goods – because natural goods cross the threshold of morality only via the imposition of some law aimed at governing man’s natural liberty. Natural actions, including the acts constituting adultery, theft, and murder, are thus morally indifferent as physical actions, and acquire moral qualities only through the imposition of law (DJN, .ii., –). The key to Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising of moral and political philosophy, therefore, lies in his voluntaristic rejection of transcendent–objective moral norms. This does not mean, however, that his voluntarism constitutes a rival theory of moral truth to the rationalist one championed by Leibniz and the Lutheran neoscholastics. For the effect of Pufendorf ’s theological voluntarism is not to launch a (possibly) true theory of man’s moral nature; rather it is to transform the manner in which philosophers will accede to truth in this domain. If it is accepted that man’s moral nature is a status imposed on him by God – and is not a form of rational being shared with God’s – then man must come to knowledge of the moral laws from within the confines of this ungrounded ‘historical’ nature. Man must accept that the flawed and vicious nature he possesses as a matter of fact is the only one relevant for deducing of natural laws of morality, which must be laws governing a creature with just this kind of nature. In other words, man must come to knowledge of his ethical duties from within the confines of the nature imposed to fit him for society with other men, rather than adopting the viewpoint of a being privy to the reason or goodness out of which God imposed this nature. Pufendorf ’s voluntarism thus forms part of an ethical exercise designed to impel natural jurists to detranscendentalise their discipline by turning from the contemplation of the transcendent ‘perfections’ shared with God to the observation of the historical flaws immanent to humanity. This is the intellectual-historical light in which we must view Pufendorf ’s ‘deduction’ of the natural law in the third chapter of Book  of the De Jure. This deduction is immediately preceded by Pufendorf ’s version of man in his ‘natural condition’ (statu hominum naturali). Pufendorf presents his account of man in the state of nature as exemplifying the empirical standpoint needed to derive the natural law from chastened observation of the moral nature man actually has. In this

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



regard his version is specifically opposed to the neoscholastic depictions of the natural condition, which, in equating it with the Christian state of innocence (status integritatis), orient natural law to the religious commandments governing man in his fallen condition. In relying on revelation, Pufendorf argues, this account belongs in the domain of moral theology and has no place in the ‘civil science’ of natural law (DSH, §§–, –). Pufendorf thus refuses to construe the natural condition in terms of the Christian conception of a state of innocence, defining it instead through opposition to the civil state, as ‘that condition for which man is understood to be constituted, by the mere fact of his birth, all inventions and institutions, either of man or suggested to him from above, being disregarded’ (DJN, .ii., ). The content of Pufendorf ’s version of the state of nature does not, of course, arise from observation in the sense of the modern empirical natural sciences. In fact it derives from Epicurean and Stoic sources compiled in the classic humanist manner; for Pufendorf ’s approach is observational or empirical in an ethical rather than an epistemological sense, dedicated to confining natural law to knowledge of a nature in need of political rule rather than one capable of governing itself through reason. In the summary version of the De Officio, Pufendorf thus characterises natural man as a creature whose weakness (imbecilitas) necessitates sociality for survival but whose ‘vices render dealing with him risky and make great caution necessary to avoid receiving evil from him instead of good’. Unlike the beasts, man’s appetites for sex and food are limitless and impossible to satisfy. Moreover: ‘Many other passions and desires are found in the human race unknown to the beasts, as, greed for unnecessary possessions, avarice, desire of glory and surpassing others, envy, rivalry and intellectual strife. It is indicative that many of the wars by which the human race is broken and bruised are waged for reasons unknown to the beasts’ (DOH, .iii., ). Man’s petulance, his capacity for giving and receiving offence, combined with his extraordinary capacity for violence, makes his natural condition a very dangerous one, particularly when one takes into account the great divisions in human beliefs and ways of life. In short: ‘Man, then, is an animal with an intense concern for his own preservation, needy by himself, incapable of protection without the help of his fellows, and very well fitted for the mutual provision of benefits. Equally, however, he is at the same time malicious, aggressive, easily provoked and as willing as he is able to inflict harm on others’ (DOH, .iii., ). Man’s life in the state of nature would thus indeed be miserable,



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

unadorned, and short. It would not, however, be ungoverned by natural law or bereft of friendship as a primitive form of sociality. This is because man is indeed equipped by nature to know the natural law, even if he is not equipped to govern himself in accordance with it. In providing the state of nature with this kind of disposition, Pufendorf is distinguishing his version of it from two others. First, he uses it to criticise Hobbes’ naturalistic description of the state of nature as one of ungoverned war, and Spinoza’s parallel metaphysical account of the natural state as one of radically conflicting individual rights arising from uncontrolled natural desire. Against these Pufendorf argues that even in the state of nature humans possess a reason and will informed by natural law. This gives rise to minimal obligations and rights – to preserve oneself and not to harm others – which means that the natural state inclines to peace, even though it is perpetually threatened by war through man’s incapacity to adhere to these obligations in the absence of a superior (DJN, .ii., –). Second, Pufendorf ’s prime opponents, however, are the neoscholastic natural jurists. By invoking the state of innocence as a bulwark against Hobbes’ war of all against all, these metaphysicians claimed that man was capable of governing himself through right reason, which means that government (sovereignty) itself is a feature of man’s natural condition. Clearly Pufendorf ’s view of man’s incapacity for self-governance is fundamentally opposed to this argument, but here he concentrates on its unacceptable political consequences. To accept right reason as a principle of government in the state of nature would be to infringe the supreme authority of the government that emerges with the transition to the civil state; for right reason would then be ‘something superior even to what is supreme’. As such it would undermine the sovereignty of civil government, which consists in its capacity to rule over men ‘free from any interference on their part’ (DJN, .ii., ). In short, both Hobbes and his neoscholastic opponents fail to see that despite being natural in contradistinction to civil, man’s condition in the state of nature remains an imposed status – a mode of bearing duties instituted for the governance of his liberty. This means that the natural state is neither lawless nor of itself capable of giving rise to civil sovereignty, which arises from the imposition of a new kind of status or condition on man. We will return to this last point in the following section. Pufendorf ’s deduction of the natural law is thus meant to exemplify how man as the bearer of an imposed moral nature can derive its laws from the ‘inside’, through observation of what it takes to preserve

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



a creature of the kind man happens to be. It comes as no surprise therefore that Pufendorf prefaces his deduction by remarking that the law of nature can be obtained through straightforward observation of man and the requirements of his nature: There seems to us no more fitting and direct way to learn the law of nature than through careful consideration of the nature, condition and desires of man himself, although in such a consideration other things should necessarily be observed which lie outside man himself, and especially such things as work for his advantage or disadvantage. For whether the law was laid upon man in order to increase his happiness or to restrain his evil disposition, which may be his own destruction, it will be learned in no easier way than by observing when man needs assistance and when he needs restraint. (DJN, .iii., )

On the basis of the Epicurean anthropology that supplies the content of this observation, Pufendorf proceeds to derive the general form of natural law in this way: After the preceding remarks it is easy to find the basis of natural law. It is quite clear that man is an animal extremely desirous of his own preservation, in himself exposed to want, unable to exist without the help of his fellow creatures, fitted in a remarkable way to contribute to the common good, and yet at all times malicious, petulant, and easily irritated, as well as quick and powerful to do injury. For such an animal to live and enjoy the good things that in this world attend his condition, it is necessary that he be sociable, that is, be willing to join himself with others like him, and conduct himself towards them in such a way that, far from having any cause to do him harm, they may feel that there is reason to preserve and increase his good fortune . . . And so it is a fundamental law of nature, that ‘Every man, so far as in him lies, should cultivate and preserve toward others a sociable attitude, which is peaceful and agreeable at all times to the nature and end of the human race’. (DJN, .iii., –)

Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law thus serves two interrelated functions. First, in deriving the law from an ‘empirical’ nature that God has gratuitously imposed on man, rather than from a rational nature that man shares with the divine being, this deduction sloughs off all the transcendental aspirations of ethics, leaving only the duty of cultivating a peaceable deportment in the interests of civil peace. Second, by deriving the law from ‘observation’ of man’s ‘empirical’ condition, rather than through philosophical abstraction to his higher rational being, the deduction seeks to remodel the intellectual deportment – the mode of conducting the intellect – through which civil duties are recognised. It drops exalted philosophical self-reflection as the appropriate mode of acceding to civil duties, replacing it with chastened recognition of the obligations imposed in the interests of sociability. Given their centrality



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

to Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising of ethics and politics, each of these functions requires further clarification. In rejecting the idea that natural law flows from a rational nature that man shares with God, and treating it instead as a rule for governing an ‘empirical’ nature gratuitously and inscrutably imposed on him, Pufendorf launches a frontal assault on the central doctrines of neoscholastic natural law. To this end he divides those writers ‘who search for the prototype of natural law in God himself ’ into two classes: The one finds its prime origin in the divine will, and since this is in the highest sense free, they conclude that the law of nature can be changed by God, nay, its very opposite can be enjoined, just as is the case with positive laws. The other maintains that it is based on the essential holiness and justice of God, so that the law of nature expresses these attributes like a kind of ⑀␬␶␷␲␻␮␣ (copy) [ectype]; and from this proceeds also the immutability of natural law, because the justice and holiness of God reject all alteration and change. (DJN, .iii., )

The first position – unrestrained theological voluntarism – is flawed, Pufendorf argues, because it fails to understand that while God is free to create beings with any nature he pleases, once God has created a being with man’s nature, he is not free to change the laws whose observance preserves this being. God thus refrains from altering natural law not – as the rationalists argue – because it binds the divine will to an unchangeable metaphysical order, but because natural law is the means of maintaining the being produced by God’s act of free creation (DJN, .iii., ). But it is the second – ‘theo-rationalist’ – position that Pufendorf is at greatest pains to attack; for, in regarding human nature and its law as continuous with divine nature and its law, this view is inimical to Pufendorf ’s treatment of natural law in terms of norms immanent to man’s worldly empirical nature. Pufendorf deploys two related arguments against this view. First he attacks it for vainly and impiously claiming to judge divine justice and holiness by human standards. Then he argues that it wrongly presumes a continuity between the legal obligations established among men and the willed imposition establishing these obligations, which is a free creative act knowing no obligations (DJN, .iii., ). It is only apparently paradoxical that Pufendorf ’s own theological voluntarism issues in a fundamental de-theologisation of natural law. For the result of viewing man’s moral nature as gratuitously imposed by God is that one cannot inquire into the theo-rational grounds of the moral

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



laws governing this nature. Such laws must therefore be treated as wholly immanent to the ‘observable’ or ‘empirical’ moral nature accessible to a being lacking all transcendental–rational insight; rather than as ‘eternal truths’ or ‘moral necessities’ common to human and divine reason and permitting man’s participation in the latter. Conversely, we have already observed that in grounding natural law in transcendent reasons common to man and God, metaphysical rationalism is responsible for a profound theologisation of natural law; for in doing so it invokes a model of rational being – as the intellection of the intelligibles prior to their devolution into the world of the senses and their utilities – whose prototype is the divine mind and whose beneficiary is the metaphysical clerisy. Pufendorf ’s attack on the central emblems of neoscholastic and rationalist legal metaphysics – the figures of the status integritatis and the imago Dei – is thus integral to his voluntarist detranscendentalising of ethics. Pufendorf rejects utterly the doctrine that man can or may accede to his natural law duties by burnishing the image of divine justice and holiness in his own person. The reason is clear: human justice and goodness arise from acting in accordance with imposed laws but, as the untrammelled source of this imposition, God’s will is just and holy in a quite different and incommensurate way (DJN, .iii., –). Hence, while God has created man to be just, human justice is not continuous with divine; and, while man is destined for society with God in another world, divine society cannot be the model for the societies of this world. The anti-scholastic intent of Pufendorf ’s theologically derived voluntarism is made clear in some off-the-record remarks that he addressed to Thomasius in a letter written in April . These remarks arise in the context of Pufendorf ’s response to his young admirer’s plans for his own natural law work – the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae that would appear in . Here, it will be recalled, Thomasius was in part defending Pufendorf ’s natural law against Valentin Alberti’s neoscholastic attack, which makes it all the more significant that Pufendorf should congratulate his young follower for scrutinising the doctrine of the status integritatis: Among other things, my esteemed sir, it pleases me greatly that the same [work, i.e., the Institutiones] explains the theory of the incorrupt state [status integri]. Because if this [theory] is distinctly outlined in accordance with the hypothesis of our theologians, human life receives such a different shape from that of today, that our natural laws would make no sense for it. And because most parts of our law distinguish the two human institutes, absolute sovereignty and



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

human government [nempe dominum et imperium humanum], whether and how far they would have obtained in the state of incorruption is very hard to determine . . . My esteemed sir otherwise does well if he avoids all conflict with the theologians and its accompanying retaliation, and maintains merely that holy Velten [Valentin Alberti] errs beyond doubt, and wishes to introduce a mixture that is against all reason. (GW, , )

In rendering natural law immanent to man’s worldly empirical nature – in excluding all recourse to his divine imaginal nature – Pufendorf thus aims to restrict moral and political philosophy to the horizon of conduct required for the maintenance of civil peace. If natural law reaches no further than the preservation of man’s sociability, and if moral responsibility reaches no further than the external performance of acts required by law, then moral and political philosophy must be restricted to public actions imputed as good or bad, just or unjust in accordance with the rules of social peace. In this way Pufendorf disconnects his version of natural law from all concern with a justice higher than the maintenance of external social security; and, as we have seen, he removes his natural law sociality from all concern with a goodness higher than that attaching to external action in accordance with the law. In short, Pufendorf disconnects civil ethics from the pursuit of holiness, whether in the explicitly theological form of the neoscholastic pursuit of the imago Dei, or in the implicitly theo-rational forms of Leibniz’s metaphysical ascent to the ‘pure’ concept of justice. It is, however, the second aspect of Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising of morality – his refusal to accept that natural law is acceded to via principles of reason and goodness common to God and man – that was most destructive of seventeenth-century academic moral philosophy, and remains so in relation to today’s versions. For, by insisting that moral norms be derived from and for an impaired worldly nature lacking all transparency to transcendent reason, Pufendorf is attempting to restrict the forms of philosophical reasoning themselves to the horizon of civil peace. Not even the comparatively benign theo-rational conception of natural law offered by Lambert Velthuysen escapes Pufendorf ’s strictures in this regard. Pufendorf seizes on Velthuysen’s comment that: ‘The supreme right of God over His creatures is made known to the natural reason by those principles which form among men the foundation of natural law and equity.’ Such a view is untenable, Pufendorf argues, because it confuses the absolute right exercised by God in imposing man’s moral nature with the ‘hypothetical’ (immanent, relative)

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



rights and obligations arising among men as a result of this imposition. For Pufendorf, this confusion arises from the assumption that God’s actions are subject to the same laws as man’s. Velthuysen had argued that ‘God should of necessity consider natural laws to be just, the order of this universe being established and constituted as it now appears to the eyes of every man.’ He had supported this by commenting: ‘Because all things which we can picture in our minds always have a ␴␹⑀␴␫␯ or relation, arising from the intrinsic nature of the thing, which cannot by sound judgment be separated from the thing.’ In criticising this attempt to show the transcendent rationality of natural law, Pufendorf comments that God himself is not subject to the moral necessity of natural law since ‘with Him there can be discovered no necessity other than that which he derives from the divine pleasure’. Further, there is no intrinsic moral relation or quality attaching to things, and thereby giving man natural knowledge of divine law, ‘since things do not have such a nature and accompanying relation of themselves, but only at the will of the Creator, and the decision of His will cannot properly be called a law’. He thus concludes: Thus the reason why, among men, a favour obligates one to gratitude, and why a violation of agreements, savagery, pride, and contumely can never be lawful, is because God has appointed for man a sociable nature, and so long as this is untainted, what is agreeable to it is reputable [honesta], and what does not agree with it is unlawful and base. But this does not imply any right common to God and men, or any endowment or ␴␹⑀␴␫␯ [relation] of things which is not based upon the divine will. (DJN, .iii., )

The depth and scale of Pufendorf ’s programme for detranscendentalising moral philosophy now becomes clear. It is not just neoscholastic moral theologians who fall beneath the wheels of Pufendorf ’s juggernaut but, by implication, the entirety of rationalist moral and political metaphysics – to the extent, that is, that it continued to derive natural law duties through reflection on principles of reason and goodness common to God and man or man and the cosmos. For Pufendorf ’s central argument is that man has to accede to his natural law duties via a contingent nature that offers him no continuity with or insight into the rational and moral nature of its creator. The depth of Pufendorf ’s voluntarism – his insistence that the certainty of man’s moral knowledge occurs inside the moral and epistemological universe created by arbitrarily imposed laws – holds the key to his criticism and transformation of Grotius’ construction of natural law. Despite Grotius’ insistence on the normative pre-eminence of sociability,



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

his famous rationalist formula in the Prolegomena to De jure belli ac pacis – that natural law would be valid even were God not to exist – is, as Tierney argues, a direct echo of the neoscholastic natural law (Tierney , –). It is precisely at this point that Pufendorf parts company with his honoured predecessor. Grotius goes astray, Pufendorf argues, when he claims that we can test the goodness of natural laws themselves by seeing whether the actions they prescribe agree with ‘sound reason’ or man’s ‘rational and social nature’. This cannot be done, firstly, because sound reason in moral affairs always assumes the existence of such laws and, secondly, because man’s moral nature is no less the result of gratuitous imposition than the laws it is supposed to justify. There is, therefore, no way of ascribing an absolute goodness to legislated actions by discerning their agreement with a nature that is ‘good in itself ’ or carries the seeds of its own perfection in the Aristotelian manner. Rather, the goodness of such actions is only ‘hypothetical’ – that is, good relative to a nature whose own goodness is a function of its imposition for the governance of conduct (DJN, .ii., ). Despite first appearances, then, the fact that Grotius is prepared to entertain the conjectural independence of natural law from divine command is a sign of his residual attachment to the transcendental–rationalist line. Conversely, by treating natural law as the gratuitous expression of the divine will, Pufendorf is actually breaking with this line. For in doing so he renders natural law immanent to moral offices that betray no trace of the higher rational nature that has imposed them, thereby treating man’s moral nature as an empirical phenomenon to be managed in accordance with the pragmatic rules required for its sheer preservation. The appeal to divine will as the inscrutable source of moral nature is Pufendorf ’s way of removing the transcendent–rational justifications from morality and natural law. Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law from man’s need for sociability does not, therefore, operate in the standard ‘teleological’ manner. It is not an attempt to justify moral norms by showing that they are necessary to realise or perfect a natural good. In observing his need for sociality man is only observing his moral end from within the limits of his worldly nature. In recognising that he must conform to the laws of sociability required for his worldly flourishing, man is not deducing their necessity from a good known independently of them. Rather he is observing their utility for a nature that we take to be good because it forms the moral horizon for our ethical judgments. ‘Right reason’ is thus not a procedure for deriving the law from a rational or moral end known independently of the law, but an attempt to conduct the intellect along

Transcendent reflection to chastened observation



the moral path formed by a gratuitously imposed nature and law: ‘Therefore the law of nature may be called the dictate of right reason only in the sense that the mind of man has the faculty of being able clearly to understand, from the observation of his condition, that he must of necessity order his life by that law, and at the same time to search out the principle whereby its commands can be convincingly and clearly demonstrated’ (DJN, .., ). The question of why man finds himself in his needy–vicious condition – the question of what lies beyond the ethical horizon formed by the laws of man’s worldly flourishing – is not open to reason. So profound is this rejection of rational justifications for natural law that it even applies to the principle of utility. Pufendorf indeed advances the utility of natural laws as the condition of our knowing them, yet he denies that this constitutes a rational justification for them. The relevant remark runs: ‘But, although by the wisdom of the Creator the natural law has been so adapted to the nature of man, that its observance is always connected with the profit and the advantage of men, and therefore also this general love tends to man’s greatest good, yet, in giving a reason for this fact, one does not refer to the advantage accruing therefrom, but to the common nature of all men’ (DJN, .iii., –). NeoAristotelian and neo-Kantian commentators cite this passage as evidence that Pufendorf (partially) refused the utilitarian conception of natural law in favour of one investing it in a nature ‘good in itself ’ (Denzer , ; Schneewind , ). But this represents a misconstrual of the passage’s intent. Pufendorf refuses utility as a rational justification for natural law not because he accepts the notion of an absolutely (teleological or deontological) good nature, but because he denies that human beings are capable of providing any kind of (transcendent) rational justification for natural law, including a utilitarian one. We have already seen Pufendorf taking Grotius to task for purporting to justify natural law by testing it against man’s moral nature. Such a procedure is impossible not because this nature or its imposition is ‘good in itself ’, but because it has been arbitrarily imposed on us by a superior. The imposed character of man’s moral nature means that while he can deduce natural law by observing what it takes to preserve his nature, he cannot offer a rational or moral justification for the law through rational insight into the goodness of this nature; for, as we have seen, man’s sense of goodness arises from the arbitrary imposition of this nature and is therefore internal to it. The goodness of natural law, and the advantage man derives from it, meet not in a reason he shares with God but in the



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

nature imposed on him at God’s pleasure. It is not belief in God that holds goodness and utility together, though. Rather, it is recognising that, as a result of moral reason’s immanence to a gratuitously imposed moral nature, man has no choice but to call ‘good’ that which allows a creature with this kind of nature to survive and flourish. Man can deduce the natural law by observing its utility for attaining the sociality required for his preservation. He cannot know, however, that the preservation of his nature is a good intended by God. For God’s acts are not bound by (human) ends and man’s sense of the good is internal to the nature arbitrarily imposed on him, although natural religion dictates that he should treat this imposition as sign of God’s providence. Man must therefore derive his own understanding of natural law by observing its utility for his sociable nature. At the same time he must eschew all attempts to treat this derivation as revealing the reason for God’s imposition of this nature, which must be treated as gratuitous and inscrutable. The difficulty that moral philosophers – modern and early modern – have in coming to terms with Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law is that they treat it as another attempt to provide a philosophical justification for ethics. It is, however, something almost diametrically opposed to this interpretation: namely, an attempt to show that ethical duties can and must be acceded to independently of philosophical justifications. Moral philosophy purports to accede to natural law duties through purifying reflection on a nature that connects man to a higher rational and moral being – to the perfect ends man shares with God, to the order of things that harmonises him with the cosmos, to the holy moral law of his own intellect. For Pufendorf, however, man must accede to such duties through sobering recognition of a nature that requires mutual assistance but threatens mutual destruction. Only thus can he avoid the self-exalting delusion that his duties arise from the dignity of his rational and social being, accepting instead that they come from the requirements of preserving his civil nature through restrained sociability with other men. In short, the persona of the (metaphysical) moral philosopher is an inappropriate model for the deportment of the deconfessionalised citizen.  .                                       Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of the scope of natural law duties and of the mode of acceding to them has profound consequences for his conception of political authority or the state. We have seen that by treating

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



man’s natural state as an imposed status Pufendorf construes the law of sociality as a purely this-worldly rule of security, disconnected from all higher rational and moral law. In doing so, he clears the way to treat the civil state not as the expression of man’s rational and moral being but as the result of a new willed imposition, the sovereignty pact. In agreeing to impose the status of civil sovereignty on themselves, men do not construct the political state in accordance with a rational and moral nature they share with God or reason. They were doing so on the basis of a dangerous and contingent nature that can be reshaped through sovereignty in pursuit of security. As we shall see, the ‘absolute’ character of Pufendorf ’s conception of political authority – his insistence that a supreme or sovereign power must be exercised independently of the moral judgments of those over whom it is exercised – is not well understood by modern commentators, particularly those whose calling as moral philosophers commits them to the primacy of individual moral judgment. But then neither do these commentators understand the manner in which Pufendorf ’s absolutism harbours a ‘liberal’ conception of religious toleration. Pufendorf construes the political state as a human artifice imposed by men on themselves as an instrument of this-worldly security. This construction fits well with our account of the larger historical task that he had undertaken: the fashioning of a civil philosophy capable of comprehending the desacralisation of the state that had already occurred at the level of law and politics. Pufendorf ’s undertaking was fundamental as it involved overturning the way in which existing natural law doctrine – neoscholastic and rationalist – organised the relations between the individual’s religious, ethical, and political obligations. His strategy is to reshape these relations around the figure of a fundamental agreement or pact whose form and outcome accord with natural law without being rationally or morally prefigured by it. At the heart of Pufendorf ’s account of the civil state or status lies his conception of the political pact as the willed imposition of a moral entity, civil sovereignty. This pact is analogous to God’s gratuitous imposition of man’s natural state or status and, like it, provides a means of governing man’s natural liberty through the imposition of new moral persona on him. In fact it is the imposed character of the civil state that holds the key to its secularised – desacralised and detranscendentalised – form. In creating civil sovereignty as a new ‘compound’ moral entity, consisting of the citizen (subject) and the sovereign (ruler), the compacting individuals are in fact transforming the basis on which they exercise their liberty and accede to their obligations.



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

Centrally, in agreeing to enter the civil state in accordance with natural law, individuals give up their capacity to decide whether henceforth the state is being governed in accordance with natural law. For Pufendorf, this holds the key to uncoupling civil from religious governance, the rule of the sovereign from the rule of conscience. Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of civil sovereignty is focused in Book  of the De Jure Naturae et Gentium. He begins in his usual manner, by clearing away the alternative accounts of the state offered by Hobbes and by anti-Hobbesian neoscholastic political theology – here represented by J. F. Horn’s De Civitate. In claiming that in the state of nature ‘natural laws are silent’, Hobbes argues that the state arises not from the need for sociality but from the pursuit of individual advantage and the struggle for supreme power, which goes to the strongest individual. This means that individuals must give up their natural rights on entering the civil state, which gives political right immunity against the destabilising appeal to natural rights. According to Hobbes’ Protestant–Aristotelian opponents, however, natural law itself gives rise to the state. As the law of a rational and sociable being whose capacities can only be perfected in the state – the zoon politicon – neoscholastic natural law assumes a ‘natural’ teleological development of the civil from the natural state, thereby grounding political right in natural rights. Against Hobbes, Pufendorf reactivates the arguments of the second chapter of Book . These, it will be recalled, are designed to show that humans are indeed aware of the natural law in the state of nature and attempt to conform their conduct to it, even if only a few succeed in doing so. Sovereignty should thus not be regarded as a prize going to the most powerful in the universal war (DJN, .i., –). Once again, though, it is Hobbes’ neoscholastic opponents who are Pufendorf ’s real target. He is particularly concerned to combat Horn’s version of the Aristotelian doctrine that the state arises from man’s rational and social nature, at the behest of natural law, as the means of perfecting this nature. Against this doctrine Pufendorf argues that while man is indeed commanded to sociability by the law of his nature, his fractured mind and fractious passions mean that he is not naturally adapted to the public-spirited and peaceable role of the citizen: ‘Nay, rather, no animal is more fierce and uncontrolled than man, more prone to vices which are calculated to disturb the peace of society’ (DJN, .i., ). A further reason ‘why the mere law of nature cannot encompass the peace of mankind’ is that man’s natural liberty is such that his judgments cannot be made to agree through the exercise of individual reason. Deliberation

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



on man’s nature and its ‘permanent advantage’ may indeed point to the need for civil sovereignty. Few, however, are capable of such deliberation – the pursuit of personal gain giving rise to a chaos of judgments regarding man’s true good – which means that human reason is not the source of the agreement that leads to the state: ‘But since reason alone, as it is found in individual men, is unable to compose such great differences, some sort of agreement of opinions must be sought by a different course’ (DJN, .i., ). What this course is will soon become apparent. While man’s natural condition gives rise to the desire for sociality – and in fact to such lower forms of society as the family and the clan – it does not of itself give rise to the civil state, as for this a certain comportment is required, consisting in ‘trust and pacts’. The source of the restrained comportment attending political society is, however, not readily understood by those living within it. In a striking observation, animated perhaps by his sense of how quickly the horrors of the Thirty Years War were being forgotten, Pufendorf comments of states: ‘Their force is not realised by children or the unlearned, or their advantages by those who have never experienced the losses consequent upon their nonexistence. This the reason why the former, because they do not understand the nature of a civil society, cannot enter into it, while the latter, because ignorant of its advantages, give no heed to it, or at least live in it in such a way as not to value its excellence.’ In fact the latter group themselves remain political children, and their insouciance regarding the conditions of their pacified existence suggests what it is that compensates for the immaturity of their natures: ‘Therefore, all men, being born as infants, are by that fact unsuited to civil society, and most of them remain so all their lifetime, while it is discipline, not nature, that fits a man for such a society’ (DJN, .i., ). This indicates the course by which men will reach the agreement that gives rise to civil society or the state. If it is discipline and not nature that gives rise to the peaceable and public-spirited deportment of the citizen, then Aristotelian political theologians such as Horn are wrong to claim that the state is the realisation of man’s rational and sociable being. It is not only early modern Aristotelians, however, who will fall victim to Pufendorf ’s interposition of discipline as the condition of political subjecthood. In attempting to interpret Pufendorf ’s own conception of this state as the instrument of man’s moral realisation, modern moral philosophers suffer collateral damage. In this regard we can recall Denzer’s argument that in Pufendorf the ‘concept of nature must be taken in its teleological sense . . . that man strives for perfection’ so that: ‘The natural



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

character of the state is thus the final consequence of human nature’s capacity for cultivation’ (Denzer , ). We can also take note of Simone Zurbuchen’s similar claim that for Pufendorf: ‘As the most perfect human community . . . the state is natural in the sense that it belongs to the completion of humanity’ (Zurbuchen , ). In fact, this is precisely the teleological account that Pufendorf is at pains to reject, commenting in his essay De Statu Hominum Naturali (On the Natural State of Men) of  that such a view ‘presupposes a kind of civil state wherein citizens are without any fault and wickedness, when in fact states are a sort of remedy for human imperfection’ (DSH, § , ). The imperfection for which states are a remedy is not the immaturity of an essential endowment or teleological ‘nature’, but an incapacity that shows up in relation to an imposed purpose. Man, says Pufendorf, can be brought to the status of the citizen in the same way that a horse can be taught to prance, a parrot to talk, a field to bear crops and a hillside vines – that is, not through the teleological realisation of a natural capacity that is good in itself, but through the disciplined transformation of natural capacities in accordance with an imposed end (DJN, .i., –): ‘Yet no one is so ignorant as not to recognise how ill-adapted are the characters of most men to this end [of peaceable public-spirited citizenship]. To few is it given to meet all the requirements of a good citizen; most men are restrained by the fear of punishment, and remain their life long poor citizens and non-political creatures’ (DJN, .i., ). For Pufendorf, then, man is not a political animal in the Aristotelian sense of requiring the state to perfect his rational and social being. Rather, he is so in the starker and more restricted sense of having a nature capable of being disciplined to the end served by the formation of states – security: It is sufficiently clear from all this in what sense then man can be called a political animal: Not because there resides in each and every one a natural aptitude to act the part of a good citizen, but because at least a part of mankind can by nature be fitted to that end, and because the safety and preservation of mankind, now become so multiplied, can be secured only by civil societies. Into these, nature always intent upon its own preservation, impels men to enter, just as also it is the first fruit of civil society, that in it men may accustom themselves to lead an orderly life. (DJN, .i., )

It is not through the cultivation of man’s rational and moral nature therefore that nature composes individual wills to that agreement by which they enter civil society, but through a quite different kind of instrument – the discipline of mutual fear: ‘Therefore, the real and principal

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



reason why the fathers of families left their natural liberty and undertook to establish states, was in order that they could surround themselves with defences against the evils which threaten man from his fellow man . . . [A]gainst those ills with which man in his baseness delights to threaten his own kind, the most efficient cure had to be sought from man himself, by joining men into states and establishing sovereignty’ (DJN, .i., ). We are now better placed to understand Pufendorf ’s account of the pacts through which men leave the state of nature and enter the civil state. These consist not in a rational agreement and exchange of rights and obligations between two natural individuals – the people and the sovereign – but in a series of fear-driven decisions that results in the creation and imposition of a new status or moral person. For a state to be possible there must be a body of men large enough to defend itself against other groups, and these men must be able to agree on the best means of their common defence. The divided and fractious nature of men’s minds, however, means that mutual consent alone will not be sufficient to allow them to reach and adhere to such an agreement (DJN, .ii., –). Unlike bees, men are incapable of the natural harmonisation of their political wills and, despite what the philosophers say, men are incapable of arriving at such a harmonisation through ‘the dictates of sane reason’ having ‘fully subdued all their passions and base lusts’. ‘Surely’, says Pufendorf, ‘those men erect states upon shifting foundations, who show too great respect for men’s moderation and weigh all other men, and especially the vile mob, upon the scales of their own probity’ (DJN, .ii., ). In fact, given the two evils threatening man’s pursuit of political security – the diversity of his inclinations and the torpor of his will – the only way to achieve and maintain the state-forming agreement is via the constitution of a single artificial will equipped with the power to compel the performance of civil duty: ‘The first of these evils may be cured by uniting the wills of all in a perpetual bond, or by so constituting affairs that there will be for the future but one will for all in those matters which serve the end of society. The second may be alleviated if some power be established which is authorised to inflict upon those who hesitate before the common advantage some present evil and such as will impress itself upon their senses.’ In striking contrast to all those who attempt to ground sovereignty in a ‘general will’ – Althusius, Rousseau, Kant – Pufendorf insists that the sovereignty pact is not the expression of an actual or ideal union of wills: ‘Now a union of wills cannot possibly be encompassed by the wills of all being naturally lumped into one, or by only one person



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

willing, and all the rest ceasing to do so, or by removing in some way the natural variation of wills and their tendency to oppose each other, and combining them into an abiding harmony.’ This union is rather the result of the fear-driven agreement of all individuals to subordinate their wills to a single agency of political decision: ‘But the only final way in which many wills are understood to be united is for every individual to subordinate his will to that of one man, or of a single council, so that whatever that man or council shall decree on matters necessary to common security, must be regarded as the will of each and every person’ (DJN, .ii., ). In the same way, a sovereign power ‘as may be feared by all’ is created when all individuals have obligated themselves to use their strength only at the behest of a single man or council. This is the light in which we must understand Pufendorf ’s account of the two pacts and one decree that give rise to the state. It is in the crucial first pact – sometimes misleadingly called the ‘social’ pact – that individuals agree to enter the state by subordinating their political wills to a single individual or council. This pact is followed by a decree deciding whether the form of government will be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic – that is, whether the sovereign power will be administered by a prince, a council of nobles, or an assembly drawn from the people. This decision having been taken, sovereignty is then conferred on some individual or council through a second pact in which ‘the rulers bind themselves to the care of common security and safety, and the rest to render them obedience, and in which there is that subjection and union of wills, by reason of which a state is looked upon as a single person’ (DJN, .ii., ). The key to understanding Pufendorf ’s conception of the formation of civil sovereignty is that he regards it not as the realisation or execution of a natural capacity but as the invention and imposition of a new moral entity or status. Pufendorf rejects the idea that sovereignty pre-exists the state-forming pact – residing in the individual’s natural freedom and power or in God’s majesty – treating it instead as a creation of the pact itself. By agreeing to subordinate their wills to that of a single individual or council in exchange for the security pledged by the latter, the assembled individuals create civil sovereignty as a new ‘compound moral person’. This composite moral personality consists of the persona of the citizen defined by the duty of obedience, and the persona of the sovereign defined by the duty of care and protection. While it is true that in imposing this new moral entity on themselves men act in conformity with the law of nature – which always seeks man’s preservation – they

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



do so not in accordance with the laws of their rational and social being, but out of fear and exigency, which compels them to transform their being in pursuit of security. Pufendorf is now free to reject all attempts to derive sovereignty from some source higher than or independent of the pact that forms it. His central targets are Hobbes’ account of sovereignty arising via individuals ‘donating’ their natural sovereignty (freedom and strength) to the Leviathan, and Horn’s opposed view of it originating in a transfer of a metaphysical sovereignty from God to the prince who rules by divine right. According to Pufendorf, in viewing civil sovereignty as arising from the donation of natural freedom and rights, Hobbes is forced to posit a non-reciprocal pact in which the people is extinguished as bearer of natural rights, all of which pass over to the sovereign who therefore exercises them unconditionally. For a reciprocal pact might allow individuals to reclaim their donation, thereby functioning as justification for rebellion. Still, despite sympathising with Hobbes’ fear of rebellion – arising, Pufendorf suggests, from his experience of religious civil war – Pufendorf regards Hobbes’ conception of sovereignty as fundamentally flawed. What Hobbes fails to understand, argues Pufendorf, is that sovereignty – a single and supreme locus of political decision and power – is not something that individuals possess in the condition of natural freedom, but something they create and impose in the agreement that gives rise to the civil condition. There is no need therefore to posit a nonreciprocal pact in which the people is extinguished as a bearer of natural freedom and rights, because freedom is not the condition or ‘quality’ by virtue of which they enter the pact or by virtue of which the sovereign is obligated to them: ‘And yet when a free people transfers sovereignty to a king, that people does not cease by natural death, nor is the obligation of the king founded upon that quality of the people whereby it is understood to be free, but whereby it will thereafter continue to be a group of citizens subject to one man’s sovereignty’ (DJN, .ii., ). The property of individuals relevant to the pact and foundational for political obligation is not their natural freedom and rights – as attributes of their rational and moral or irrational and desiring being – but their need for security, arising from their partially sociable but mutually destructive nature. Political obligation arises from the fact that, with the first pact, individuals delegate their capacity for self-defence to another, agreeing in doing so that the sovereign alone should decide the best means to this end, and that he should have absolute power to coerce those who subsequently dissent from his decisions. The personae of



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

citizen and sovereign thus do not pre-exist the first agreement. Rather, they are imposed by it, as a means of transforming the mode in which men will govern their liberty in pursuit of security. Citizens and ruler thus do not enter the second pact as bearers of natural freedoms and rights that must be traded off to produce sovereignty – and may later be reclaimed – but as bearers of the reciprocal duties of obedience and protection that compose civil sovereignty as a moral person: ‘When I subject myself to a prince, I promise him obedience, and stipulate for myself defence, while the prince in accepting me as a citizen promises me defence and stipulates from me obedience. Before that promise, neither of us was under an obligation, at least not a perfect one, I to obey him, or he to defend me’ (DJN, .., ). Commenting on the distinctiveness of Pufendorf ’s political pact in this regard, James Tully has remarked: ‘Therefore, unlike doctrines of corporate popular sovereignty, the people, although it possesses unity, never possesses supreme authority and so cannot be said to “delegate” it to a ruler and repossess it if the ruler breaks the agreement’ (Tully , xxxiii). There is thus little support for Denzer’s argument that Pufendorf rejects Hobbes’ one-pact model because it fails to allow for a reciprocal exchange between citizen and sovereign as natural-rights-bearing persons (Denzer , –). As far as Pufendorf is concerned, the complementary duties of the citizen and sovereign – to obey and to protect – are artefacts of the agreement that allows individuals to enter the civil status by providing them with new personae. As a result, the complementarity of these two kinds of obligation is such that ‘the legitimate power of a king and the duty of citizens exactly correspond, and we emphatically deny that a king can lawfully command anything which a subject can lawfully refuse. For a king cannot command anything more than agrees, or is supposed to agree, with the end of instituted civil society’ (DJN, .., ). Hobbes’ problem is that his conception of the people’s rights and freedoms is too natural – that is why he is so concerned with destroying them. The arguments that Pufendorf deploys against Hobbes are even more devastating, however, when applied to the latter’s neoscholastic opponents. For if sovereignty does not pre-exist the formation of states as a natural condition of individuals, then it is nonsensical to regard it as preexisting the state as a metaphysical substance inherent in God or the order of being. Pufendorf is thus by turns scathing and mocking of Horn’s account of civil sovereignty devolving from divine majesty – an account which sees political agreements among men as providing merely

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



the empirical occasion for the attribute of divine sovereignty to flow into a king. This view of sovereignty as a divine right ‘tears to shreds all the conventions and fundamental laws which are agreed to between kings and subjects, touching the administration of sovereignty’ (DJN, .iii., ). More fundamentally, it fails to understand that sovereignty is a moral entity instituted by human agreement, not a metaphysical substance emanating from the divine. Quoting Horn’s assertions that God ‘pours it [sovereignty] forth directly upon kings after their election by the people’, and that sovereignty is a ‘creation of God, so that no other creature in an equal or superior kind of causation, nor from any innate principle, has made any contribution to the institution of this type of administration’, Pufendorf comments that making such statements ‘only betrays a crass ignorance of moral matters’. He then continues in a more sarcastic vein: Now if a man will consider this more deeply, he will see that such men as Hornius have conceived majesty to be a physical entity, which, upon being created by God, wanders about over the world with no home or resting-place until it lights upon a king, who has been selected by a people, and invests him with its august splendour. And such a man will surely be in difficult straits if he should be pressed as to whether that majesty, before it finds a seat in some king, is substance or accident, and if the latter, how it can exist without a subject. Furthermore, when was it created, at the beginning of the world, or later? Is there also but one majesty in the entire world, bits of which are distributed to individual kings? Do different kings have their own special and entire majesty? When a king dies does his majesty perish with him? Or does it survive him, separated like the soul from the body, or finding by a kind of metempsychosis a dwelling in a new king? . . . But it is idle to inquire about the immediate cause of majesty, or supreme sovereignty, abstractly considered, since it exists only in a concrete form. (DJN, .iii., –)

Lying behind this piece of boisterous anti-metaphysical invective is of course Pufendorf ’s entirely serious argument that civil sovereignty is an artefact of human agreement aimed at achieving a purely this-worldly security. As we have seen, lying at the heart of this argument is his treatment of civil sovereignty as imposed by individuals in accordance with the natural law end of security. This imposition gives rise to duty-bearing personae unknown in the natural condition, the citizen and the sovereign – personae incapable of carrying moral or religious norms into the civil condition, where they might be used for or against the state. This reconstruction of sovereignty in terms of the fear-driven imposition of new political personae is the condition of Pufendorf ’s desacralisation of politics and the state. For it is the means by which he detaches the exercise



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

of sovereignty from all claims to political authority lying beyond that required for the worldly end of the state – security – and from moral and religious claims in particular. Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority is thus equally inimical to popular-sovereignty conceptions and to divine-right theories. If sovereignty is not the expression of supra-political capacities and rights, then it cannot reside in the people, whether in accordance with the ‘pessimistic’ doctrine of Hobbes, or the ‘optimistic’ ones of Althusius, Rousseau, and Kant. For the same reason, however, sovereignty cannot not reside in God or the metaphysical order of being, thence being transferred to princes. In viewing sovereignty as the mode of realising a moral capacity originating in an extra-political domain, both popular-sovereignty and divineright theories sacralise the state. Conversely, in treating sovereignty as an artificial deployment of supreme political power – rooted in social danger and created by fear-driven pacts – Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority is dedicated to desacralising the state. Clearly this reconstruction is no less inimical to the efforts of modern moral philosophers to treat the sovereignty pact either as an agreement between natural-rightsbearing moral persons or as the general will that arises from the rational harmonisation of all particular wills. For Pufendorf, it is ‘discipline, not nature, that fits a man for such a society’. Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty gives rise to three striking and far-reaching transformations in our understanding of the state and political authority. First, as Tully has argued, it leads to the separation of sovereignty – as the supreme unified locus of political decision and power – from government, as the particular form in which sovereignty is administered (Tully , xxxiii–xxxv). Pufendorf thus argues that, to the extent that they are all capable of managing a supreme and unified exercise of political decision, then each of the three forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy, democracy – is an appropriate bearer of sovereignty: ‘The capacity and inclination of one or more men, who exercise sovereignty by their own right, or as it is delegated to them, do indeed affect or modify the administration, but in no way the form of a state’ (DJN, .v., ). If the sovereign power is an artefact of the political pact, and is not donated to government by its natural or metaphysical bearer – God, the king, the people, the general will – then neither monarchy, nor aristocracy nor democracy is its natural expression. Hence despite the fact that each of the forms of government is subject to the forms of incompetence characteristic of the different ruling persons or groups, none is inherently more or less legitimate than the others.

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



Pufendorf thus rejects Horn’s claim that monarchy is the naturally legitimate bearer of (divine) sovereignty by remarking that the people, having created sovereignty by agreement, are surely free to bestow it on a council or assembly if they choose. In fact this causes Pufendorf to modify the temporal differentiation of his two pacts, observing that if sovereignty does not pre-exist the first pact then it may be regarded as being created and conferred at the same time: We realise, of course, that election is properly and exactly but a form of securing sovereignty, and yet nothing appears to prevent a certain person from being selected, and sovereignty, now first coming into being, from being conferred upon him by one and the same act. For surely it is childish to hold that in moral things, when some right or moral quality is said to be conferred upon another, it must first have existed somewhere in separate form. Nay rather, it is clear to all that rights and other moral qualities come about by pacts from a mutual agreement of wills. (DJN, .iii., )

By parity of argument, however, neither can democracy be said to be the naturally legitimate form of government; for here too sovereignty does not pre-exist the state, in the moral sovereignty of the people. Moreover, even though it is physically drawn from the people, a democratic assembly is (or should be) an autonomous moral person, and therefore cannot be understood as the people governing themselves. For, to the extent that it governs absolutely and in the interests of security, then the assembly occupies the persona of sovereign, while the people continue to have the single obligation of obedience to the sovereign (DJN, .v., –). In short, Pufendorf ’s separation of civil and moral sovereignty allows him to adopt a detached and pluralistic view of the relation between state and government, refusing all attempts to idealise any particular form of government as the naturally legitimate bearer of (moral) sovereignty. Once the state has been reconceived in terms of its political function – the maintenance of security through a unified and irresistible deployment of political authority – then any form of government exercising sovereignty in this manner may be regarded as legitimate. In fact, Pufendorf is not concerned with (morally) legitimate and illegitimate forms of government, only with regular and irregular forms of state: ‘We hold that the regularity of states lies in this: that each and every one of them appears to be directed by a single soul, as it were, or, in other words, that the supreme sovereignty, without division and opposition, is exercised by one will in all the parts of a state, and in all its undertakings’ (DJN, .., ).



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

The second, no less striking consequence of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of sovereignty is that it sequesters government from the moral judgment of individuals. It is perhaps here that the ambivalence of Pufendorf ’s relation to Hobbes shows through most clearly. For, unlike Hobbes, Pufendorf insists that natural law judgments are operative in the natural state and that natural law informs law-making in the civil state. Pufendorf agrees with Hobbes, however, that it must not be left to the individual judgment of subjects to determine whether the sovereign is legislating in accordance with natural law: ‘[T]he question is not, which is of greater value, the person of the king or the entire people . . . but whether, in view of the fact that civil sovereignty has been invented for the profit of all, the decision as to how to secure that end resides in those who have subjected their will to the will of the king, or in him to whose judgment and conscience the government has been entrusted’ (DJN, .vi., ). For Pufendorf, only the sovereign is in a position to make this judgment, which he does in accordance with the fundamental end of the state – security. Under circumstances threatening the existence of the state, the sovereign will even be justified in infringing some of the citizen’s natural law rights – for example, sacrificing some to war – to the extent that this is in the long-term interests of public safety. Clearly Pufendorf assumes that the dictates of natural law and those of ‘reason of state’ will generally coincide in the sovereign’s duty to make civil law in accordance with natural law. In fact he seeks to hold these together by treating public safety as both the end of natural law – ‘the reason for which states were founded’ – and the end governing the sovereign’s commands, even though these are beyond all effective moral and legal accountability. The difficulty with this solution is that the concept of sovereignty entails that only the sovereign can decide whether his actions are in fact in accordance with public safety or the security of the state. Some commentators treat this apparent tension as indicative of Pufendorf ’s inability to integrate the doctrines of natural law and reason of state (Meinecke , –; Krieger , –; Denzer , –). Others, as we have noted, regard Pufendorf ’s natural law as too normative to contain a fully autonomous or ‘utilitarian’ conception of politics (Dreitzel ). In light of the preceding interpretation, however, it is possible to propose that none of these accounts manages to clarify the issue. In fact the power of decision that Pufendorf ascribes to the state comes not from a theory of sovereignty or Staatsräson super-added to his doctrine of natural law, but from the manner in which he construes the natural law

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



pact itself. We have seen that Pufendorf treats this not as a rational agreement between two moral persons but as a pact between individuals to create two unequal personae, the subject and the sovereign. It is as a result of this creation that citizens may not judge and dissent from the sovereign’s commands, to the extent that prima facie these agree with the end of the state. For the fundamental condition of this end being realised is that individuals give up this power of judgment. It as at this point that Pufendorf renders natural law immanent to the exercise of sovereignty, thereby opening the doctrine of natural law to the theories of ‘absolute’ (secular) sovereignty elaborated by Bodin, Arnisaeus, and Conring. The tension in Pufendorf ’s account of the relation between sovereignty and natural law judgment arises therefore from the fact that he must posit the latter as a condition of pacts being made and adhered to, while simultaneously treating the pact as annulling the individual’s right henceforth to make such judgments regarding the sovereign’s civil laws. The decisive factor here, however, is not any putative capacity individuals might have to govern themselves but something quite different: namely, security, which is ‘the intention or thought with which men made up their minds to establish states’. Pufendorf continues: Therefore, it is held that no more power was voluntarily bestowed upon that prince than what a man of reason may judge to make to that end [of security]; although what may at any particular moment work to that end is a matter for decision not for those who do the transferring, but by him on whom that power was transferred. Therefore, the supreme sovereign can rightfully force citizens to all things which he judges to be of any advantage to the public good. (DJN, .vi., )

Consequently, while denying Hobbes’ assertion that civil-law commands are themselves the source of the individual’s moral sense – as this sense is present in the natural condition – Pufendorf nonetheless accepts Hobbes’ unflinching doctrine that it is seditious for individuals in the civil state to make their obedience to the sovereign conditional on their knowledge of good and evil: Yet in another sense the thesis of Hobbes can be allowed, if, that is, good and evil be taken as that which does or does not work to the advantage of the commonwealth. For then that is surely a seditious opinion that ‘the knowledge of good and evil’, that is, of that which is good or evil, advantageous or disadvantageous to the state, ‘belongs to individuals’. That is, that each individual is empowered to pass judgment as to the aptitude of the means which a prince orders to be undertaken so as to secure the public good, with the effect that the obligation of each person depends upon that judgment. (DJN, .i., )



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

For, if this were the case, then the civil state would cease forthwith, conditional as it is on the mass of individuals giving up their right to determine the best means of their common security to a single individual or council. If the desacralisation of political authority entails withdrawing the state from the sphere of moral judgment, then it also entails withdrawing moral judgment from the sphere of the state. Finally, if Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of political authority thus renders the state absolute in the political arena, then it simultaneously gives birth to a ‘liberal’ sphere of extra-political rights and freedoms. Those commentators who imagine they see the ‘germ of totalitarianism’ in Pufendorf ’s desacralising of politics could not be wider of the mark. For, as we have already observed, this secularising of politics was accompanied by a no less powerful privatising of religion. If Pufendorf ’s uncoupling of civil governance from transcendent morality renders the state absolute in the political domain, then it simultaneously precludes the exercise of political power in the moral domain. Civil society, Pufendorf argues in the De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem (), was not instituted for the end of religion – to achieve man’s salvation and eternal happiness – but solely for the end of worldly security (DHR, § , –). It is therefore improper for any state to make civil rights and duties contingent on the fulfillment of religious rights and duties; just as it is unacceptable for the civil authority to be opposed on religious grounds (DHR, § , –). For civil duties depend only on the commands of the civil sovereign, issued for the end of civil peace, and limited to man’s external conduct in civil life; while religious duties depend only on the laws of God, issued for man’s eternal felicity, and concern only his inner spiritual condition. The civil sovereign may not, therefore, command man’s inner religious life, unless this issues in conduct threatening to the republic, whereupon it ceases to be religious. Leibniz’s iconic unity of reason and power, the sage and the prince, thus finds its mirror inversion in Pufendorf ’s insistence that the teacher and the prince represent distinct and mutually exclusive offices. On the one hand, drawing on his spiritualistic Lutheranism, Pufendorf argues that the teacher’s relation to his students is characterised by love and emulation, to the exclusion of all coercion and all dogma, thereby allowing them to seek saving truth in complete freedom, just as Christ taught the disciples in the primitive church (DHR, §§ –, –). On the other hand, on the basis of his own ‘statist’ natural law, Pufendorf confines political authority to the personae of the subject and ruler, bound together by asymmetrical duties of unconditional obedience and absolute command, in so far as the ruler remains indifferent to saving truth

Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty



(DHR, §§ –, –). Pufendorf thus reconfigures the relation between the pursuit of transcendent saving truth and the exercise of civil governance by consigning each to different statuses or zones of ‘moral space’ – the ‘kingdom of truth’ and the ‘civil kingdom’: The kingdom of Christ therefore is a kingdom of truth, where he, by the force of truth, brings over our souls to his obedience; and this truth has such powerful charms, that the kingdom of Christ needs not to be maintained by the same forcible means and rules by which subjects must be kept in obedience to the civil powers. And for the same reason, there need not be established a particular state in order to propagate and preserve truth, no more than it is necessary to set up a separate commonwealth where philosophy and the other sciences are to be taught. (DHR, § , )

Pufendorf ’s disarticulation of civil power from transcendent truth thus precludes the possibility of an ‘unlimited’ or total society, in which all areas of life, unified by their common dependence on God’s universal justice, are equally open to governance. Instead, he effects the fundamental ‘liberal’ separation of political and religious life. He does so, however, not to protect individual freedom from the state, but to render the state ‘absolute’ in the political domain, by establishing that neutrality to religion which signifies the expulsion of the church from the state apparatus. This is the ‘authoritarian’ basis of Pufendorf ’s construction of a zone of liberal religious freedoms. We may agree with Döring, therefore, that Pufendorf ’s conception of toleration is politically based and of limited scope, with Pufendorf refusing to extend toleration to the Catholic church, on the grounds of its refusal to accept the state’s religious neutrality (Döring ). This does not mean, however, that Leibniz’s conception of an ecumenical faith grounded in transcendent reason would support a more liberal form of religious freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, in continuing to make political authority conditional on transcendent truth, Leibniz is tempted to make such truth politically enforceable. Conversely, in extending the state’s power by rendering it indifferent to transcendent truth, Pufendorf had opened a domain of liberal rights – the domain of conduct incapable of threatening the republic – which could be further expanded. This expansion was undertaken by Pufendorf ’s most famous follower, Thomasius, whose arguments for the toleration of various heresies contrast sharply with Leibniz’s views in this regard. The scale and significance of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of moral and political philosophy should now be apparent. In order to detranscendentalise practical philosophy, in accordance with the desacralising of



Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

political governance, Pufendorf had to re-invent it. It was to this end that he sought to replace the Christian–metaphysical cultivation of moral personality with a pluralised conception of offices, distributed in civil space in accordance with the ends of civil life. This also led Pufendorf to reject the moral–philosophical mode of acceding to civil duties – via the individual’s self-recovery of their higher rational and moral being – in favour of a chastened recognition of the conduct that best serves a social being in need of security. Finally, this need to reconstruct ethics led Pufendorf to construct political sovereignty not as the means by which man perfects his natural being, or expresses his rational being in the political sphere, but as the means by which his moral nature is transformed in accordance with the end of civil security. Pufendorf argued that the detranscendentalising of morality and politics was conditional on excluding neoscholastic and rationalist moral philosophy from the domain of civil ethics. We must observe, however, that three centuries after Pufendorf ’s campaign latter-day versions of this kind of philosophy maintain dominant positions in the humanities academy – a dominance felt most immediately and most ironically in the hermeneutic assimilation of Pufendorf himself to the agendas of neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian moral philosophy. Still, this dominance notwithstanding, the question of the success of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of academic ethics and politics remains open. For it is not immediately clear whether the power of modern moral philosophy is confined to the academic sphere itself, where its sway might be treated as symptomatic of the ‘privatisation of religion’ that attended the desacralisation of politics. Alternatively, it might be that Pufendorf ’s desacralising strategy was never completely successful, and that the governmental means of isolating the exercise of civil authority from the pursuit of moral truth have proved far more fragile than Pufendorf hoped. In discussing these possibilities we turn to two very different kinds of philosopher: Christian Thomasius, sometimes described as Pufendorf ’s greatest disciple, and Immanuel Kant, who was responsible for passing the metaphysics of morals and politics into the ‘modern’ period.

   

Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

.     Christian Thomasius (–) was the leading exponent of Pufendorfian civil philosophy in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenthcentury Protestant Germany. Given that he was also a famous – or notorious, depending on one’s viewpoint – anti-scholastic educational reformer, and considering the standing he achieved as an academic, cultural commentator, and jurisconsult to the Brandenburg-Prussian state, one of the most puzzling aspects of Thomasius is his current relative obscurity. Until very recently, in the Anglophone academy the significance of his multifaceted work has been known only to a handful of specialists (Barnard ; Barnard ; Beck , –; Haakonssen ; Schneewind , –). The appearance of important new studies by younger scholars suggests that this situation might be changing (Ahnert ; Hochstrasser ; P. Schröder ). Even in Germany however Thomasius has been described as ‘forgotten’ (W. Schmidt ). It is true that the Germanists of the s claimed him as a hero of the Frühaufklärung, yet Frank Grunert’s bibliography suggests that serious attention to Thomasius’ jurisprudential, political, and ethical work is largely a post-war development, picking up momentum during the seventies and eighties (Grunert ; Grunert a). It is likely that this renewed interest in Thomasius, and in early modern natural law and practical philosophy more generally, has been driven by German moral philosophy’s post-war concern to recover an ethical basis for politics (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ). This, as we shall see, turns out to be a somewhat ironic light in which to view a political jurist whose prime concern was to find a political basis for ethics. There are several reasons for Thomasius’ relative obscurity in the modern period. In the first place, unlike Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius’ works did not receive European-wide dissemination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Here several contributory factors come into 



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

play. Most of Thomasius’ works were written in German rather than Latin, which made them less open to translation and dissemination than Pufendorf ’s accomplished Latinity. Pufendorf was also earlier in the field than his follower, publishing the definitive civil reconstruction of natural law in his De Jure sixteen years before Thomasius’ Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae of . These factors combined to secure the translation and dissemination of Pufendorf ’s natural law into other Protestant European countries which were seeking a solution to the problem of confessional conflict via some form of desacralisation. Jean Barbeyrac’s French translations of Pufendorf ’s De Jure () and De Officio () – intended to make the new civil ethics and politics available to the Huguenot Diaspora – and Gershom Carmichael’s related annotation of the De Officio () for teaching duties in the Scottish Enlightenment, point up the more localised cultural setting within which Thomasius’ works circulated: Protestant Germany (Mautner ; Moore and Silverthorne ; Othmer ). Basil Kennet’s English translation of the De Jure () and Andrew Tooke’s of the De Officio () – no doubt feeding into English debates over the ‘religious question’ – tell a similar story. This does not mean, however, that Thomasius’ work was narrow or provincial. On the contrary, his decision to lecture and write in German, like Barbeyrac’s to translate Pufendorf into French, was governed by the desire to expand the audience for civil philosophy. Both men sought to reach beyond the Latinate readership of the universities – which they regarded as mired in scholasticism and confessionalism – in order to address other vernacular publics, especially the politici and administrative nobility, many of whom were not inured to Latin. Nonetheless, the fact that Thomasius’ works were not translated into other national languages in the early modern period helps to explain why they remain untranslated today. The second reason for Thomasius’ comparative obscurity is more intrinsic, arising from the difficulty of clarifying his intellectual relation to Pufendorf and an associated ‘unevenness’ in his intellectual positions. In our earlier discussion of the Preliminary Dissertation that he prefixed to his Institutiones, we have already taken note of Thomasius’ own account of his conversion to Pufendorfian natural law. In experiencing the full desacralising force of Pufendorf ’s arguments, Thomasius took sides in the intellectual civil war that was unfolding between civil and metaphysical philosophy. Further, in dedicating himself to the study of politics and German Staatsrecht – while nonetheless remaining committed to a pietistic form of Lutheranism – Thomasius was heir to a mix of ‘statist’ jurisprudence and spiritualistic theology very similar to Pufendorf ’s

Introduction



intellectual sources. Nonetheless, there are important differences in the manner in which the two thinkers configured and used their common sources. As jurisconsults, both men belonged to the stratum of gelehrte Räte or academic advisors to government, in which university duties were routinely combined with political ones. Without renouncing his pedagogical interests and activities, Pufendorf ’s life carried him from the academic to the political end of this career spectrum – as can be seen in his roles as privy councillor, secretary of state and royal historian at the court of Charles XI of Sweden (–), and then as court historian and judicial privy councillor at the Brandenburg-Prussian court (–) (Döring , –; Döring ). Despite his occasional forays as a practising advocate and his own role as a judicial adviser to the Brandenberg-Prussian court, Thomasius’ activities were concentrated at the academic end of the spectrum, in his role as a founding law professor in Brandenburg’s new University of Halle. Established by the Hohenzollerns in , as an institution for the training of jurists and clergy independent of the orthodox Lutheran universities, Halle provided Thomasius with a relatively safe haven from which to launch a programme of academic-cultural reform that was broadly in keeping with Hohenzollern Religionspolitik (Hammerstein ; Schindling ). From here he could conduct a remarkable one-man campaign to dismantle the neoscholastic curriculum and replace it with one suited to forming the future jurists and statesmen of a deconfessionalised princely territorial state. If his intense engagement with the problem of cultural pedagogy gave Thomasius’ civil philosophy a different emphasis to its Pufendorfian model, then his version was also set apart by an associated difference in intellectual and theological emphasis. Both writers drew on Lutheran theological voluntarism – the doctrine of the will’s dominance of reason and reason’s consequential incapacity for thinking transcendent ideas – as a means of attacking metaphysics and admitting statist civil sciences to the ethical domain. We have already suggested that Lutheran voluntarism was the source of an important parting of the ways in German academic culture. For while the insistence on the inaccessibility of the divine attributes to human understanding supported a strong separation of revealed and natural knowledge, this could be used for two quite different purposes. On the one hand, Lutheran fideists like Daniel Hofmann, and later the Halle Pietists with whom Thomasius was associated, could use it to attack neoscholastic metaphysics in order to defend a spiritualistic theology; that is, a theology grounded in a biblicistic



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

inwardness hostile to all metaphysical and rational theology (Brecht ; Sparn ). But, on the other hand, the separation of revealed and natural knowledge and rejection of metaphysical rationalism could also be used to secure the intellectual autonomy of ‘empirical’ sciences, as Arnisaeus had done in his ‘instrumentalist’ political science, and Pufendorf in his ‘empiricist’ reconstruction of natural law. Unlike Pufendorf, in his early natural law work Thomasius remained in transition between these two anti-metaphysical strategies. In the Institutiones of , Thomasius thus attacks the metaphysical confusion of theology and philosophy in order to provide a secular foundation for natural law. Yet he also uses this attack in order to admit positive biblical commandments, as compensations for the incapacity of natural knowledge, thereby deviating from Pufendorf ’s strict exclusion of revealed Christian law from the domain of natural law. The transitional character of Thomasius’ thought in this regard accounts, perhaps, for its greater unevenness in comparison with Pufendorf ’s – an unevenness that sees him oscillating between a number of different intellectual and theological positions during the s. We will return to these issues below. If, however, Thomasius’ transition to a detranscendentalised natural law was less clear cut and elegant than Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius nonetheless contributed something important to his mentor’s agenda. Pufendorf had indeed realised that for the desacralisation of civil governance to succeed it would be necessary to sever the configuration of civil duties from the cultivation of Christian moral personality. We have seen, moreover, that he made a fundamental contribution to this programme through his relegation of the unified Christian–metaphysical concept of the person in favour of the pluralised construction of civil personae. It was Thomasius’ achievement, however, to recognise the depth of the academic-cultural transformation that would have to take place if Pufendorf ’s projected pluralisation of civil personhood were to take root in the educational institutions where young Protestant jurists, officials, and statesmen acquired their intellectual deportments. These were the circumstances in which Thomasius developed his Affektenlehre – or doctrine of the passions. Through this moral therapeutics he sought to take over Pufendorf ’s voluntarist and pluralist conception of civil ‘offices’, while simultaneously grounding this conception in a paideia of passional restraint capable of displacing the intellectualist paiedeia of Protestant neoscholasticism. As we noted in our Introduction, Thomasius’ Preliminary Dissertation to the Institutiones contains a good biographical pointer to the larger historical significance of his programme. In attacking Alberti’s heresy

Introduction



allegation against Pufendorf, Thomasius identifies the two central errors of his neoscholastic opponents. In making this charge, which depends on the metaphysical doctrine that divine and human justice form a single order, Alberti was applying moral–theological categories in the domain of civil jurisprudence, where they have no business. Further, in doing so, he was usurping ‘the power and right to declare someone a heretic [which] belongs to no private person – even if they were great and famous – but only to the prince’, who would himself be best advised not to use it (PD, § , –). In these remarks we can discern the central characteristic and driving force of Thomasius’ programme. This lies in his recognition of the historical complicity between the merging of the theological and civil sciences in scholastic metaphysics and the merging of religious and political authority in confessional society (Döring b). This recognition in turn holds the key to understanding the relation between the two wings of Thomasius’ remarkable programme: on the one hand, his cultural–pedagogical campaign to replace metaphysical scholasticism with an ‘eclectic’ array of civil sciences and a privatised religion of faith and grace; and, on the other, his political–jurisprudential campaign to strip all civil power from the religious estate, transferring this power wholly and solely to the secular sovereign territorial state (Dreitzel ; Wiebking ). For Thomasius, these campaigns formed the dual wings of a single programme of deconfessionalisation because, perhaps more clearly than any of his contemporaries, he saw that the catastrophic linkage between the exercise of political authority and the pursuit of holiness had been forged in the theology and philosophy faculties of the confessional university. Thomasius thus saw the struggle between metaphysical rationalism and civil voluntarism as something far more consequential than a clash between rival theories of moral being. He realised that, in programming the ethical regimen through which young intellectuals relate to themselves and accede to their duties, these doctrines gave shape to different deportments of the person, different kinds of moral being. In particular, by training young intellectuals to accede to their civil powers and duties through self-sanctifying insight into true faith or pure reason, the metaphysical rationalism of Schulphilosophie gave rise to an intellectual deportment inimical to the governance of deconfessionalised states. For this mode of governance required that individuals accede to their civil duties on the basis of their status as subjects of the desacralised Rechtsstaat. Here, though, we reach the third and least tractable of all the difficulties confronting modern attempts to understand Thomasius. For, as we have already observed in our Introduction, since Kant the history



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

of moral philosophy has been written as if metaphysical rationalism and civil voluntarism were indeed nothing more than conflicting ideas or theories, destined to be reconciled in Kant’s final discovery of the categorical imperative – a pure thought giving rational law to the will. In treating the metaphysics of transcendent insight and the ‘civics’ of political command as the partial viewpoints of a single moral subject – thereby setting the scene for their reconciliation in the person who commands themselves through transcendent insight into the moral law – postKantian philosophical history renders itself incapable of comprehending the historical struggle between metaphysical and civil philosophy. For this was not a struggle within the moral person, open to resolution via a self-reflexive moral philosophy. It was a contest between rival cultural–political groups locked in a bitter struggle to control and configure the cultural institutions in which different moral personae were fashioned. So great, though, is the obstacle posed by post-Kantian philosophical history to our understanding of Thomasius, that it demands a dedicated discussion.  .                      For those of us living in ‘liberal democratic’ states, where the problems of social pacification and social discipline have receded behind the educational, health, welfare, disciplinary, and electoral systems that continue to solve them, it requires a major effort of historical understanding to come to terms with the cultural and political circumstances in which Thomasius elaborated his version of civil philosophy. In this regard, we should recall Pufendorf ’s comment regarding the state: namely, that those ‘who have never experienced the losses consequent upon [its] nonexistence . . . because ignorant of its advantages, give no heed to it, or at least live in it in such a way as not to value its excellence’ (DJN, .i., ). Thomasius was confronted by circumstances in which the emergent princely territorial states, operating within the Empire as a federation of independent political enterprises, were still centrally preoccupied with the post-Westphalian problems of social pacification, deconfessionalisation, and state-building, looking to the universities for the jurisprudential, political, cultural, and economic expertise that might help solve them. The challenge to historical understanding posed by this difference between Thomasius’ circumstances and our own becomes insurmountable, however, if liberal democracy is joined to the telos of post-Kantian history of philosophy, written in terms of the progressive reconciliation

Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy



of intellectualism and empiricism, rationalism and voluntarism. For under these conditions Thomasius’ programme only becomes visible to the extent that it anticipates or deviates from a single normative line of historical development: the reciprocal emergence of democratic society and philosophical truth, joined in the trope of a society of rationally selflegislating individuals. Werner Schneiders’ Naturrecht und Liebesethik; Zur Geschichte der praktischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf Christian Thomasius (Natural Law and the Ethic of Love: On the History of Practical Philosophy with Reference to Christian Thomasius) is the most important and influential study of Thomasius to date, and one from which I have learned much. Nonetheless, despite its wealth of insights, this study remains too heavily indebted to the protocols of post-Kantian philosophical history to free Thomasian civil philosophy from the web of misunderstanding spun around it. For all his efforts to show Thomasius’ independent importance, Schneiders fails to do justice to the conflictual cultural context of Thomasius’ intellectual programme, placing him instead within the history of moral philosophy which, in turn, remains a history of the struggle to reconcile rationalism and voluntarism. As a result, Thomasius’ central preoccupation – his concern to develop a statist political jurisprudence of church law (Staatskirchenrecht) – is marginalised by Schneiders’ account. In fact it finally settles into its accustomed post-Kantian place, as a symptom of the ‘failure’ to reconcile voluntarism and rationalism, coercive law and self-governing morality. In briefly negotiating Schneiders’ account, we will find a way to relocate Thomasius outside the history of moral philosophy. Schneiders sets his story of Thomasius’ splitting of law and morality or jurisprudence and moral philosophy against the teleological backdrop provided by a philosophical–historical account of their original harmony. According to Schneiders this harmony was first forged in the patristic synthesis of natural law – as a body of universal rational rules of moral and social conduct – and the philosophico-theological tradition of Caritas ordinata, or well-ordered love (Schneiders , –). This harmonisation of natural law and moral philosophy was in turn dependent on the prior synthesis of the two philosophical theologies that fed into the teaching of Caritas ordinata: the doctrine of Platonic eros which conceived knowledge of God in terms of the adept’s ascent of the hierarchy of being through self-purifying intellectual love; and the Christian agape doctrine, centred in the command to love the supreme being as the key to salvation (–). Ignoring Thomasius’ own view that such



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

syntheses amount to a ‘mish-mash of theology and philosophy’, Schneiders treats Augustine’s version as reconciling natural law and the ethic of love, jurisprudence and moral philosophy – just, indeed as Riley does (). For this, Schneiders argues, allowed the Platonic hierarchy, ascended through intellectual love of God, to be superimposed on the ontological order of the cosmos established by divine natural law. The Augustinian synthesis thus provided love with a ‘right’ or ‘just’ order – supplementing sheer affect with a normative-cognitive dimension – while simultaneously supplying the formal order of natural law with a moral content: love of God and one’s neighbour (Schneiders , –). It simultaneously permitted the ascetic or therapeutic ars of Platonic erotics to undergo a theoretical sublimation, by grounding them in a rational theology of the moral order, or a philosophical theory of the moral law (–). Transposed into the Schneiders’ philosophical history, it is not surprising that Thomasius’ entire jurisprudential, pedagogical, and political programme is made to turn on his moral philosophy, principally on two works: the Einleitung zur Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics, ) and the Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics, ). Schneiders regards Thomasius’ use of the concept vernünftige Liebe or ‘reasonable love’ in the Einleitung as a late blooming of the Caritas ordinata tradition. In continuing to affirm man’s capacity to conform his will to a rational knowledge of ‘just love’, this concept maintains the priority of moral theory over moral therapeutics and, with it, the priority of moral philosophy over positivist jurisprudence (, –). The disintegration that Schneiders sees occurring with the Ausübung of  is therefore marked by the autonomising of Thomasius’ therapeutics of passional self-restraint, now wholly oriented to the achievement of inner tranquillity independent of rational knowledge of the good (–, –). Under these circumstances law can no longer attempt to enact the ‘loving justice’ originating in individual moral consciousness and becomes, by default rather than design, a purely external discipline serving the end of civil order – a development that Schneiders locates in Thomasius’ late natural law work, the Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium of  (–). Cut loose from moral theory by a voluntarist doctrine of the pre-eminence of the will over reason, and giving succour to a statist doctrine of the pre-eminence of public security over individual reason and rights, it appears that Thomasius’ Affektenlehre shattered the original harmony of law and morality, leaving us moderns with only the shards: a practice of private ethical therapy, and a system of public legal coercion.

Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy



At this point, however, we should pause and take stock of the fact that we have passed through the post-Kantian looking-glass. In the world that Schneiders sketches for us on the other side, Thomasius’ separation of law and politics from the metaphysics of morals has lost its historical anchorage in the campaign to desacralise the culture and politics of the early modern state. Instead, it floats before us in the distorted and anachronistic form of a philosophical mistake: the positivist divorce of ethical practice from moral theory, political governance from individual selfgovernance. It is time to restore our sense of historical perspective. In the first place, the Caritas ordinata doctrine encountered by Thomasius and Pufendorf was not a manifestation of an early-Christian synthesis of natural law and the Platonic love-ethic. Rather, as we learned from our discussion of Leibniz and the neoscholastic natural jurists (..), this doctrine was a product of the early modern conflict between civil and metaphysical natural law. In fact it was elaborated by such metaphysical jurists and theologians as Placcius, Veltheim, Prasch, Rachel, Alberti, and Leibniz expressly to attack the ‘profane’ line of natural law running from Grotius through Pufendorf to Thomasius (Schneider ). Far from representing some sort of quasi-timeless wisdom, the doctrine and discipline of a self-purifying ascent of the ladder of being to the vision of God’s just love – at whose apex Leibniz could pronounce Justitia est caritas sapientis – was in fact elaborated to combat Pufendorf ’s rival civil derivation of duties. This, we recall, derives political obligation from the rules required to preserve civil peace, and was intended to uncouple law and politics from moral philosophy. The historical genesis and role of the early modern Caritas ordinata doctrine are revealed in an attack on Thomasius’ Affektenlehre, published in  by someone using the nom de guerre of ‘an old theologian’. According to this critic, in focusing on the governance of the passions Thomasius’ doctrine removes the self-purifying pursuit of holiness from natural law, thereby allowing even statists and atheists to qualify as ethical: So, firstly, it does not suffice for a complete Christian ethics to know how to discipline the affects – in which Herr Thomas[ius] claims the whole of ethics consists – because occasionally the utterly un-Christian statists and atheists are capable of this in a quite masterly way. But ethics also includes the doctrine of the highest good and true felicity, whose attainment is the principal reason for teaching and learning ethics. Further, the theory of the virtues (through which true happiness is attained) should also illuminate a man’s immortal soul with the brilliance of the true light of virtue, and implant there these virtues so that the



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

soul may turn to God – [the God] from whom these virtues came and whose grace and holy dwelling they lost through original sin – again ascending to reunite with him, once more able to appear worthy and capable before God. Just as among the pagan philosophers Plato had recognised and taught that the true felicity consists in union with God. Because of this and other excellent doctrines he was called the Divine Plato. Then if I have God, so I certainly have / That which will eternally delight me. Namely, the highest good, the highest pleasure, and the highest tranquillity of the soul. (KTS, –)

Even in Leibniz’s rendering – focused in the claim that civil duties should be derived from the sage’s enlightened insight into the theo-rational conception of justice – the role of this doctrine was to defend the right of Protestant moral theologians and philosophers to provide moral norms for the exercise of civil power. Its abstract beauty notwithstanding, the Caritas ordinata doctrine was in fact a theo-rationalist weapon of resistance to the detranscendentalising of ethics and the desacralising of politics. It was wielded in a ferocious and uncompromising manner by ‘Christian philosophers’ intent on preserving the civil authority of the clerical–academic estate. Thomasius thus encountered the historical reality of the doctrine of ‘just love’ in Alberti’s heresy allegation against Pufendorf, and in the machinations of a phalanx of enemies – Alberti, Johann Benedict Carpzov (the younger), and Carpzov’s brother Samuel, pastor to the Saxon court – who succeeded in having the court ban Thomasius from lecturing on theological topics, effectively depriving him of his livelihood and compelling him to leave Leipzig for Halle in  (Grunert b; Lieberwirth ). It compromises the neutrality of scholarship therefore if the formal–theoretical character of the Caritas ordinata doctrine is allowed to function as the telos of philosophical history or as a norm of historical judgment; for this leads Thomasius’ self-conscious rejection of this doctrine to be seen as a philosophical mistake, as a deviation from the true history of moral philosophy. By identifying this normative doctrine with the priority of moral theory over ethical culture – and by treating Thomasius’ rejection of it as the source of the ‘fragmentation’ of morality and law – Schneiders fails to understand the actual role of formal theorisation in neoscholastic metaphysical natural law. Here, as we have seen, formalisation is itself a type of ethical culture, tying the intellectual purity of concepts to the moral purity of the one who is to think them (.., ..). As for the ‘old theologian’, so for Leibniz and the neoscholastic natural jurists, formalising abstraction is a means of grooming the purified or illuminated intellectual deportment required for

Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy



intelligising the pure ideas from which empirical ethics, law, and politics are supposed to devolve. Thomasius’ explicit rejection of formal moral theory must therefore be seen as symptomatic of a conflict between two autonomous intellectual cultures: namely, the civil philosophers’ regimen of passional selfrestraint – grounded in their Epicurean anthropology of the rationally uncontrollable affects – and the metaphysicians’ culture of intellectual self-purification, grounded in the Christian–Platonic anthropology of the body-darkened senses. In his depiction of reason and the senses, the ‘old theologian’ is doing no more than invoking the figure of homo duplex and thus setting the anthropological scene for an exercise in contemplative self-purification: ‘Reason which has not been enlightened by God is a false, deceptive light . . . bears a fleshly cast and is darkened by the cloud of fleshly affects. It looks only to its own honour, praise and interests, through which man . . . becomes fickle and volatile’ (KTS, ). For all its greater philosophical sophistication, Leibniz’s construction of rationalist enlightenment is an improvisation on the same anthropological theme and self-formative culture: ‘The divine perfections are concealed in all things, but very few know how to discover them there. Hence there are many who are learned without being illumined, because they believe not God or the light but only their earthly teachers or their external senses and so remain in the contemplation of imperfections’ (Lm, ; Gu, , ). As we have noted in our discussion of his Foreword to Grotius, far from failing to master this Christian–Platonic anthropology, Thomasius was fully conversant with it as a ‘secret theology’, dividing its practitioners into the orthodox, who used it to formalise doctrine, and the esoterics, who used it to practise a secret form of spiritual direction: ‘The orthodox in fact [descend] from refining Platonic disputations regarding the divine being, the esoterics though from the Platonic doctrine regarding the end of true wisdom: namely, union with God through the way of purification and enlightenment. So everything leads either to idle speculation or enthusiasm and, thereby, simple active Christianity is forgotten’ (VG, ). Further, as we shall soon see in more detail, Thomasius was acutely aware of the role of Christian–Platonic anthropology in constructing concepts of justice common to the divine and earthly realms. Ascribing to this Christian metaphysics of law precisely the mixing of theological and civil sciences he held to be complicit with the blurring of religious and civil discipline in confessional society, Thomasius repudiated it as unsuited to the formation of the young politici of a desacralised



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

state. In failing to grasp this historical state of affairs, and in marginalising Thomasius for not grounding his positive ethics and jurisprudence in a pure moral theory, post-Kantian history of philosophy provides an uncanny echo of the original attacks made on Pufendorf and Thomasius by their self-exalting metaphysical opponents. We are now in a position to reformulate Thomasius’ relation to the history of moral philosophy. Accepting for argument’s sake the metaphysical conception of moral philosophy – as the discipline responsible for uncovering the norms of moral conduct in formally theorised moral concepts or laws – we can say that, far from failing to realise this conception through the unripeness of his time or intellect, Thomasius analysed and repudiated it, as formative of an intellectual deportment unsuited to those charged with the political–jurisprudential governance of civil society. Rather than deviating from the history of metaphysical moral philosophy, Thomasius’ civil philosophy collided with it, encountering it as an obstacle to the secularisation of culture and politics. Moreover, he located its weak point at precisely that place where metaphysical speculation doubled as confessional enculturation: its formation of an intellectual deportment that tied the performance of civil offices to the pursuit of moral purity. Thomasius’ partitioning of law and morality – his programme for expelling neoscholastic metaphysics of morals from the teaching of jurisprudence and the operation of the law – was thus not something he fell into by default, after dropping out of the true synthesis of law and the love-ethic achieved by the metaphysics of Caritas ordinata. On the contrary, it was something that he spent his life working towards, gradually configuring the right array of civil sciences and ethical disciplines required to form jurists capable of separating their civil and religious duties – this being the pluralistic deportment to which neoscholastic and rationalist metaphysics were jointly inimical. Thomasius’ appearance in post-Kantian philosophical history – where he personifies a process of cultural fragmentation triggered by the failure to develop a transcendental moral philosophy – thus masks a quite different reality: a programme of cultural secularisation and pluralisation triggered by philosophy’s failure to detranscendentalise itself. If, then, we are to begin to understand the historical reality of Thomasius’ deconfessionalising programme, we must forgo the framework of post-Kantian philosophical history in its entirety. This must be replaced with one capable of comprehending the way Thomasius used the intellectual resources and social position to which he was heir, to deal with the volatile religious and political circumstances in which he found

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



himself. Rather than treating Thomasius as a minor figure in a tradition of moral philosophy that he strenuously repudiated, we shall explore four lines of inquiry that position him as a major force in the political–jurisprudential deconfessionalisation of early modern society. First, we shall observe that if Thomasius launched a campaign to destroy metaphysical rationalism and the neoscholastic curriculum – replacing it with an eclectic education in the civil sciences – this was because he regarded the intellectual deportment it formed as one inimical to the civil–pluralist comportment required by the young jurists and statesmen of a deconfessionalising state (.). Second, in discussing the role of Thomasius’ Affektenlehre in his reconstruction of the academic curriculum, we shall concentrate on its role as an alternative paideia to the metaphysical anthropology of neoscholasticism. This was one intended to replace the ‘monkish’ intellectualism of metaphysical scholasticism with a culture of self-restraint suited to the plurality of civil sciences the young jurists would study, and the plurality of offices they would occupy as advisers to the territorial sovereign and as citizens of the secular state (.). Third, we shall show that in the domain of natural law, Thomasius’ Affektenlehre, while indeed offering a voluntarist alternative to metaphysical rationalism, nonetheless impeded the uncoupling of jurisprudence from moral philosophy, functioning instead as a new (detranscendentalised) moral-philosophical foundation for natural law (.). Finally, we shall see that this uncoupling took place not in Thomasius’ natural law but in his political jurisprudence or Staatsrecht, specifically in his Staatskirchenrecht or political jurisprudence of church law, which was Thomasius’ central preoccupation and formed the cutting edge of his deconfessionalising programme (.). These are the four areas that now lie open for exploration.  .                    Despite their good spirit and general informativeness, those accounts of Thomasius’ educational reforms couched in terms of his enlightened attitudes, his defence of intellectual freedom, and his concern for his students’ moral welfare can hardly do justice to the scope or trenchancy of Thomasius’ programme to abolish the neoscholastic curriculum and assemble a new one in its place (Schubart-Fikentscher ). Thomasius’ programme was driven neither by his solicitude for his students, nor by any adherence to ‘enlightenment rationality’ – he remained resolutely hostile to metaphysical rationalism – but by his acute sense of the role of



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

Protestant neoscholasticism in the culture and governance of the confessional state. Thomasius probably acquired or at least honed this awareness during his time at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder in Brandenburg where, concerned by the standard of teaching at their home university of Leipzig, his father Jacob had sent him to study law (Lieberwirth , ). Gerhard Oestreich has argued that the academic culture of late-seventeenth-century Frankfurt was informed by a mix of Cartesian philosophy, Lipsian–neo-Stoic political science, Grotian natural law, and moderate Arminian Calvinism – in fact just the combination of statist civil science and spiritualist theology informing Thomasius’ version of civil philosophy (Oestreich ; Thieme b). From this perspective, Leipzig’s reigning Protestant scholasticism – intellectually grounded in Protestant Schulmetaphysik and institutionally anchored in the power bloc of the theology and philosophy faculties – must have seemed particularly offensive to Thomasius’ emerging political and religious sensibility. Certainly, by the time the disaffected prodigal returned to Leipzig in  he was armed with a programme for the root and branch extirpation of this neoscholastic curriculum. After a few years practising as an advocate, he joined the university as a Privatdozent and proceeded to publicise this programme in a series of lectures, disputations, and essays – later collected in the Kleine Teutsche Schriften (Shorter German Writings ) – and in the Introductio ad Philosophiam Aulicam of , translated into German as Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie (Introduction to Court Philosophy) in . If the lectures and essays sketch a wideranging and far-reaching reconstruction of the arts–law curriculum, designed to produce a propaedeutic suited to the formation of political jurists, then the Hof-Philosophie leaves us in no doubt regarding the source of the corruption that had ruined the academic sciences – the discipline of metaphysics. If, in Thomasius’ eyes, the mixing of theological and civil sciences in metaphysics had led religion into a speculative dogmatics lacking all inward ethical power, then it had also corrupted law and politics by implicating them in the miscegenation of religious and civil authority that characterised the confessional state. .. Dismantling the scholastic curriculum The lectures and essays produced by Thomasius between  and  – in which he threw down the gauntlet to Leipzig neoscholasticism and sketched his new curriculum – are programmatic rather than systematic works, by turns far-sighted and combative, satirical and mordant.

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



Nonetheless, they were dedicated to reshaping the institutional culture in which systematic scholarship was produced, and they remain serious and intellectually challenging works. At their centre lies Thomasius’ acute sense of a relationship that those of us coming after Kant have the greatest difficulty in comprehending: the relation between the elaboration and transmission of particular philosophies and sciences (on the one hand) and the formation of particular kinds of intellectual deportment in and through this elaboration and transmission (on the other). The prime focus of Thomasius’ concern in this regard was the neoscholastic philosophical preparation students underwent before entering the three higher faculties; for he regarded this preparation as wholly unsuited to the formation of future jurists and state officials. The character of Thomasius’ concern with his students’ philosophical preparation is signalled in the essay Wie ein junger Mensch zu informieren sei (How a Young Man is to be Educated, ), whose sub-title runs: ‘Christian Thomas makes a proposal to university students in which he sets out how, within a three-year period, he intends to educate a young man – who has decided to uprightly serve God and the world in civil life and to live as an honest and gallant man [honnet und galant homme] – in philosophy and the particular parts of jurisprudence.’ Observing that the university consists of the faculties of law, medicine, and theology, ‘under which philosophy is an instrument of the higher faculties, or at least should be’, Thomasius indicates the philosophical disposition suited to future jurists: ‘Therefore I also demand as my auditors such individuals as do not take the mere shell of philosophy as their final goal – and following the erroneous pagan doctrine seek their highest good in speculation – but such as strive to turn their philosophy to the real benefit of the human race’ (KTS, ). Setting theology to one side – commenting only that he regrets its sectarian controversies and its use of philosophy as an instrument – Thomasius passes quickly over medicine, confessing his ignorance of this noble art but remarking that he regards it as an ethical rather than a scientific discipline. On reaching his own domain of jurisprudence, however, he pauses to reflect that he has long found the philosophical preparation given to his students unsuited to their future calling, and that as a result: for several years I have reflected on how I might provide that necessary instrument, philosophy, in a form that one could use in jurisprudence, and [I have] required as the type of my future auditors such individuals who have resolved to cultivate philosophy to the degree that it is capable of establishing particular



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

benefits in civil life and especially in jurisprudence. This is so that through the propositions of philosophy [Welt-Weisheit] they will be enabled to honestly apply their understanding and will to the needs of humanity, to support the general peace, and to skilfully serve the commonwealth in whatever political offices it determines. (KTS, –).

In fact Thomasius published some of the fruits of this reflection the year before, in his essay Von den Mängeln der aristotelischen Ethik (On the Defects of Aristotelian Ethics, ). Here he provided an acerbic analysis of the limits of neoscholastic moral philosophy, at the same time outlining the new arrangement of disciplines that he was assembling as a post-confessional arts degree for jurists. Thomasius begins by arguing that for young men to acquire the manners and knowledge required for prudent participation in the affairs of life and the state, three conditions must be met: it is necessary first that a young man seek a certain ground for exploring the truth; next that he learn to conform his morals to the laws of virtue; and finally he must apply himself to understanding the state of human affairs and the republic in which he finds himself. Because in so far as men live in the world, they live bound to each other in an orderly fashion in a civil society, and have to observe in this condition not just the duty that binds them to the whole human race, but also their duty to the commonwealth in which they live. They are incapable of doing both obediently, though, unless they have already cleansed their understanding of the common errors and are knowledgeable of the society in which they dwell . . . (KTS, )

Aristotelian practical philosophy serves none of these purposes, according to Thomasius. In the first place it is incapable of making young men virtuous and for this reason does not deserve the name of practical philosophy. A discipline worthy of the title habitus practici (practical competence) should actually form the capacity for moral action. It is not enough for this discipline to teach a young person ‘something of himself and his nature, [and] how capable these are of understanding the action in question’. Rather, ‘it is above all necessary that it display the means and manner through which a natural ability can be put to work’ (KTS, –). Academic practical philosophy is quite incapable of functioning in this way. On the one hand – bogged down in disputes over the summum bonum, taught to youth in the form of metaphysical exercises, proceeding from a cataloguing of the eleven virtues to a classification of the species of justice – Aristotelian moral philosophy reduces to a set of technical terms and axioms lacking all edifying power: ‘I hope therefore that I do no injustice to Aristotelian ethics when I say that it is as incapable of leading a young man to the path of virtue as a gouty foot is incapable of carrying a lame man across a river’ (KTS, ). On the other

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



hand, through its mixing of theology and philosophy, Aristotelian metaphysics can claim a cultural authority that threatens the political order, giving birth to such dangerous hybrids as ‘Christian logic’, ‘which has no other use than to show ill-mannered individuals how they can oppose the territorial sovereign under the cover of a hypocritical religiosity’ (KTS, ). As a result, says Thomasius, displaying a characteristic mix of selfpromotion, intellectual audacity, and political bravado, he will redress the defects of Aristotelian moral philosophy by developing an alternative ethics. We will reserve our discussion of Thomasius’ ethical discipline for the following section, contenting ourselves for the moment with the claim through which he signalled its distinguishing feature and so outraged the ‘old theologian’, namely: ‘That ethics is nothing other than a teaching and instruction in how a man should govern his affects, in order to render them incapable of impelling him to something that would be against the law’ (KTS, ). Thomasius also tells his auditors that his lectures will clarify the nature of the affects and their relation to reason, and will teach ‘the kind of general rules a man must observe to hold his affects in check’ (KTS, ). In short, Thomasius was proposing to remedy the practical incapacity of Aristotelian moral philosophy with an ethical therapeutics. This discipline would relegate the intellectualist anthropology and quasi-religious discipline of metaphysical ethics in favour of a passional anthropology geared to a practice of self-restraint – an Affektenlehre. Secondly, argues Thomasius, Aristotelian practical philosophy is no less inappropriate as a means of informing students as to the nature of the political state and the duties they owe to it. Here, the important thing is that future jurists and statesmen be instructed on the present postWestphalian condition of the German Empire, particularly with regard to its relation to the emergent territorial states and their sovereigns. In using Roman natural law categories and Aristotle’s typology of stateforms to construe the Empire as a type of state – a respublica mixta – neoscholastic political theory is completely unsuited to this task. This construal – maintained, we may observe, by Leibniz and the neoscholastic natural jurists – is both empirically inadequate to the Empire’s actual existence as a federation of states, and politically inappropriate, in favouring a society of Imperial estates over the emergent system of sovereign territorial states. Displaying his own grounding in Conring’s civilis prudentia and Pufendorf ’s natural law, Thomasius declares that neoscholastic political and legal theory must be replaced by the teaching of a new kind of political law or Staatsrecht. This would be a political jurisprudence



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

informed by ‘Monzambano’s’ (Pufendorf ’s) empirical history of the Empire’s actually existing political organisation, and oriented to the now dominant political reality of the sovereign territorial state (KTS, –). Exemplifying the new historical form of jurisprudence that he sought to introduce into the university – and in fact anticipating the history of early modern jurisprudence given by such modern historians as Martin Heckel – Thomasius argues that German Staatsrecht derives not from metaphysical concepts of justice common to the sage and God, but from a quite different order of reality: the history of the Reformation, the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War in particular. It was in this context that deconfessionalised political–jurisprudential principles were gradually assembled, in order to provide statesmen with an agnostic juridical framework capable of containing the fractious doctrines and passions of the warring confessional estates (KTS, –). Emerging as the instrument of this statist deconfessionalisation of society, the new political jurisprudence was constitutionally disposed towards the reality of the system of independent sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia. If, therefore, the rising generation of jurists and statesmen were to understand the nature of the states in which they lived, they would have to have to be taught German Staatsrecht. They would also have to master Pufendorf ’s account of the Empire as a state that was ‘irregular’ or lacking the defining characteristic of the state: supreme sovereignty, or the concentration of all the powers and capacities necessary for the security of the state and its citizens in a single locus of decision and action (KTS, –). As Notker Hammerstein has shown, Thomasius’ historical approach to the study and teaching of Staatsrecht is representative of a more general alliance between the disciplines of law and history that was displacing the deductive framework of metaphysics and Roman law (Hammerstein ; Hammerstein ). This transformation played an important role in Thomasius’ reconstruction of academic practical philosophy. In fact Thomasius proposes that philosophy or arts faculties should continue teaching ethics, politics, and oeconomics, but in a quite new way. Rather than approaching these disciplines through the portals of metaphysics, which led to their being regarded as applied branches of moral philosophy, students would be introduced to them via the discipline of history, which allowed the disciplines an eclectic independence. Through the study of sacred and profane history, and especially through the study of the history of philosophy – the discipline that Thomasius’ father had cultivated in search of a restraining context for rationalist metaphysics –

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



students would learn to approach the different parts of practical philosophy in terms of their historical contexts and objectives (KTS, ). History thus began to emerge as the great disciplinary alternative and rival to metaphysics. It did so by treating historical phenomena as empirically autonomous, rather than as temporal manifestations of a priori or theo-rational ideas, thereby playing a decisive role in the detranscendentalising of philosophy. Situated in the curriculum in this way, the civil sciences were no longer to be seen as devolved branches of the theory of being, in either the neoscholastic or Leibnizian manner. Instead, they were to be taught in the ‘eclectic’ manner, as autonomous historical undertakings, each with its own methodological conditions and practical ends. It was against this backdrop that Thomasius could introduce his versions of the main branches of practical philosophy. His ethics, we have noted, would be one divorced from the metaphysics of intellectual selfgovernance, grounded in the quasi-biological passions it was meant to shape and control, and oriented to a practical end – inner tranquillity – to be achieved by the discipline (KTS, –). For its part, politics was to be taught not as a branch of ethics – in terms of the prince’s role in executing God’s will, or in terms of the state’s role in perfecting man’s moral nature – but as a discipline for managing the state as an empirical–historical entity. In a manner reminiscent of Arnisaeus and Conring, Thomasius argues that political science should focus on how states are maintained and what it is that destroys them; the role of different forms of government in realising the sovereign interests of the state; the benefits and harms of good and bad clergy to the state; the contribution of manufacture and trade, and so on. As a further dimension of this practical political pedagogy he promises to teach his students a type of political prudence (politische Klugheit) – providing them with the means to control their emotions and compose their demeanour in threatening public circumstances, while simultaneously penetrating the dissimulations of others with whom they are conversing or negotiating (KTS, –). Thomasius’ outline of the oeconomics curriculum, though, is far less advanced, reflecting both the limited development of this discipline and his limited interest in it (KTS, –). Oeconomics is treated partly in terms of practical advice to the students on the prudent management of their financial affairs, and partly via the rules of the prince’s ‘statehousekeeping’ (Haushaltungskunst) – conforming to Brückner’s argument that economics had not yet emerged as a fully independent discipline focused on knowing and managing the national economy (Brückner



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

, –). Finally, Thomasius proposed to add a fourth discipline to practical philosophy – one for which the German language had no word but which the Latins called decorum and the French politesse or galanterie. Introduced as a distinct ethical domain alongside morals (honestum) and law (justum), decorum contains the rules for managing conduct that is neither commanded nor forbidden, but is nonetheless necessary for the maintenance of civilised life. The rules of decorum derive from the manners and mores of those persons whose way of living is most esteemed, the gens du court in particular. Decorum teaches students how to avoid incivility and impudence, to cultivate winning ways and manners, and to engage in peaceable social intercourse with those whose religious or moral beliefs they may not share (KTS, ). The prime casualty of this reconstruction of the philosophical curriculum is, of course, the discipline of metaphysics. As the linchpin of philosophical confessionalism and the confessional university, neoscholastic metaphysics is the bête noir of Thomasius’ deconfessionalising programme. Schulmetaphysik both stationed the civil sciences on the lower rungs of the ladder of being and compelled university students to accede to their civil duties via the speculative ascent of this ladder. Thomasius’ curricular and pedagogical reforms were thus intended completely to dismember university metaphysics – reassigning its ontological role to history, relegating its ethics in favour of his Affektenlehre, denying it any role in politics, and expelling it from theology – leaving only its carcass to be picked over by logicians in search of useful categories. Thomasius would settle for nothing less than the utter destruction of metaphysics, in order to make way for a philosophical propaedeutic that would train students in the ethical discipline required to govern themselves and in the civil sciences required to govern the state. Nonetheless, Thomasius’ reform of the arts curriculum was not governed by a simple substitution of social utility for metaphysical truth. By treating it in this way, some commentators have sought to explain Thomasius’ statism as the product of yet another philosophical error: his sacrifice of transcendental norms capable of judging the state to an allembracing political utilitarianism (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –). In fact Thomasius’ prime philosophical concern was not the substitution of utility for truth but a quite different one. He was concerned with the utility – in the broad sense of contributing to ‘human flourishing’ – of different modes of acceding to truth. In other words, Thomasius’ fundamental concern was not to defend a true philosophy, but to describe and criticise particular ways of acceding to philosophical truth in terms

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



of the intellectual deportments to which they gave rise. In fact, in approaching philosophy via an historical description of the intellectual deportments it formed, Thomasius was playing the trump card in his reconstruction of the arts curriculum: the historicisation of metaphysics itself. This is the task that he essayed in the Hof-Philosophie of . .. Historicising metaphysics Rather than anticipating nineteenth-century utilitarianism, the HofPhilosophie represents the fusion of two distinctively early modern intellectual currents. First, it draws on the historical approach to scholastic metaphysics developed by Thomasius’ ‘blessed father’ Jacob, in his Schediasma historicum of . An adherent of the classic Lutheran dualism of revealed and natural knowledge, Jacob Thomasius objected to the rationalist collapsing of this division in (Scotist) Aristotelian metaphysical ontology. For this led to God being treated as a sub-species in a hierarchy of being open to the human intellect, rather than as the ‘highest analogum’ for a reality the intellect could not know directly. Thomasius senior sought to rectify this error by providing a history of it (Santinello , –). Tracing its origins to the Chaldean and earlyGreek dualisms of God and matter, good and evil, Jacob viewed the philosophical ‘sects’ – Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean – as attempts to reconcile the dualisms, treating neoscholastic metaphysical ontology as the most recent such attempt. In a footnote to the Institutiones, the son enumerates the errors which his father had discerned in the neoscholastic metaphysicians: They err when they make intelligence into a species of theoretical disposition [habituum theoreticorum], which happens because they concern themselves too little with practical principles. They err in confusing ontology with metaphysics. [They err] In excising the theory of God from metaphysics, shifting it to a special discipline, namely pneumatology. [They err] In presenting their modern metaphysics as wisdom, because it is nothing more than a dictionary of various terms, which either has no uses or else very bad ones. [They err] In that, in pneumatology, they treat of angels and of human souls separated from the body . . . They err when they treat the moral disposition [habitus morali] or moral virtue [virtute morali] as if it were indistinguishable from a free disposition [wilkührlichen habitu] and once again the forget the art [the ars ethica]. (IJD, .., fn ‘r’, )

At the same time, the Hof-Philosophie is also informed by the kind of anti-metaphysical civil philosophy to be found in Renaissance civic humanists such as Mario Nizoli(us) (Dreitzel , –). This current



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

of civil philosophy combined a nominalist rejection of universals and metaphysical abstraction with an empiricist epistemology, framing both within a rhetorical conception of logic and language as instruments of civil communication (Nizolius ). In fusing his father’s anti-sectarian history of metaphysical ontology and the Renaissance ‘civic–nominalist’ critique of metaphysics, Thomasius’ Hof-Philosophie emerged as a powerful anti-metaphysical tract. By focusing on its sectarian merging of theology and philosophy, Thomasius was able to diagnose university metaphysics as a danger to both private piety and public civility. Thomasius begins the Hof-Philosophie with a history of philosophy whose central function is to provide a genealogy of the contemporary struggle between the neoscholastic philosophia Christiana and the eclectic civil philosophy of Grotius and Pufendorf (Hochstrasser , –). Following closely in his father’s footsteps, Thomasius characterises pagan philosophy in terms of its erroneous treatment of God and the world, and good and evil, as co-eval principles (EHP, –). Not only does this doctrine mark pagan philosophy’s difference from Christian monotheism, it also indicates the original miscegenation of theology and philosophy whose offspring was ‘sectarian philosophy’. Defined by opposition to eclectic philosophy, sectarian philosophy signifies an illegitimate natural (philosophical) appropriation of revealed (theological) truths, giving rise to intellectual authoritarianism, discipleship, and intolerance of other philosophies. Thomasius’ history of philosophy is thus not so much a history of ideas as a history of philosophical sectarianism as a particular way of acceding to ideas. Without attempting to capture the detail of this history we can observe that Thomasius identifies the patristic period as the moment at which pagan (Stoic and Platonic) philosophical sectarianism penetrated Christian theology. It is the Platonising fathers in particular – Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine – who are held chiefly responsible for this crossbreeding, giving birth to the hybrid discipline of metaphysics and, with it, the type of sectarian speculative theology that has brought great disturbance to religion and civil society (EHP, –). Transmitted to the middle ages in the form of the great scholastic systems, this sectarian philosophy has given rise to such recent forms as the ‘papist’ Aristotelian moral philosophy that mixes theology, philosophy, and Roman jurisprudence in misshapen texts that purport to discuss justice and law (EHP, –). It was against this intolerant confessional philosophy that the excellent Hobbes entered the field in England. But it is Grotius and Pufendorf – those ‘two heroic men’ – who have led the renewal of moral

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



philosophy. In grounding natural law in man’s need for a sociable life in this world – rather than in his supposed insight into divine ideas – they have paved the way for a restrained and non-sectarian eclectic philosophy (EHP, –). Here we can see an early sketch of the history of natural law that would inform the Foreword to Grotius. Thomasius’ history of philosophy is thus one that identifies scholastic metaphysics as the key modern form sectarian philosophy, characterising it in terms of an undesirable spiritual and civil comportment. This is the dogmatic zeal that arises when matters of faith are espoused in the form of philosophically demonstrable doctrines, requiring adherence to the truth of a particular master or sect: ‘Experience and history both teach that this sectarian philosophy . . . has provided innumerable occasions for great disturbance in the church and the state’ (EHP, ). For its part, eclectic philosophy is also advocated principally as a mode of intellectual conduct, rather than as a doctrine or theory. This mode, however, is grounded in a confession of the limits of human intellect, which prevents us from treating any philosophy as the absolute truth. It takes place as a restrained exercise of the freedom to choose among various philosophies in accordance with the benefits they bring to man and the commonwealth (EHP, –). Having constructed the history of philosophy as a history of sects, Thomasius proceeds to historicise the concept of philosophy itself (EHP, –). He begins by noting the variety of meanings given to the term. Some have used it to refer to all wisdom no matter what its principles, including revealed theology. Others, though, have defined it in opposition to theology, restricting it to knowledge gained via natural reason. Some, defining it in opposition to law and medicine, have identified philosophy with the arts. Yet others, though, have restricted it to the liberal arts alone. Finally, those who oppose philosophy to logic or mathematics do so in order to identify it with metaphysics or theology. Adhering to this last meaning, the Platonic and Aristotelian sects and their neoscholastic heirs have attempted to make metaphysics into the essential form of philosophy, construing it as the ‘art of arts’ and ‘science of sciences’, but only by treating it as the means of acceding to divine being or ‘being as being’. This only displays the sectarian confusion of theology and philosophy in their teachings (EHP, –). Thomasius uses the multiple meanings of philosophy to justify its operational construal – as the discipline taught under this name in ‘our academies’ – thereby defining it in opposition to law, medicine, and theology and treating it as inclusive of the liberal arts (EHP, ). He then



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

proceeds to configure this empirically defined field via a series of theoretical and methodological distinctions. Theology is distinguished from the other academic sciences both by its end – eternal felicity as opposed to civil welfare – and by its mode of cognition: revelation as distinct from natural knowledge. Philosophy is, then, distinguished from the other ‘rational’ sciences of medicine and (natural) jurisprudence, as they have autonomous ends – the health of the body and the soul – whereas philosophy is contributory to these ends and is hence an instrumental science (EHP, ). This allows Thomasius to characterise philosophy as: ‘that intellectual and instrumental disposition [habitus intellectualis und instrumentalis] which considers God, his creatures, and the natural and moral conduct of men in the light of reason, and which investigates the causes of their conduct for the benefit of the human race’ (EHP, ). If his history of philosophy is intended to show the temporal origins of scholastic sectarianism, then Thomasius’ methodological demarcation of philosophy is meant to reveal the intellectual grounds of this undesirable deportment. As in the later Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius locates these grounds in the mixing of two fundamentally distinct principles of cognition – revealed and natural knowledge – which is reflected in the alliance between the theology and philosophy faculties in the confessional university. This mixing takes two forms: ‘When arguments for things whose knowledge depends on the light of nature are derived instead from the principle of revelation’, and, ‘When arguments for the secrets of faith are drawn from the principles of reason’ (EHP, ). Scholastic theology must bear the blame for the latter confusion, which has been the cause of ‘the many religious troubles which have continued from the beginning of scholastic theology until our time’ (EHP, ). University metaphysics, though, must take responsibility for the former which, although not as harmful, has nonetheless blurred the borders between philosophy and theology. This has given rise to the monstrosity of a ‘Christian philosophy’, characterised precisely by the attempt to derive philosophical doctrines from revealed truths or to elucidate the latter using philosophical means. These attempts have produced such hybrids as the metaphysical distinction between essence and existence – the notion that dogness exists independently of dogs – ‘which does not come from the Holy Ghost’. Further, they have led to such monstrosities as a ‘Christian physics’ and a ‘Christian ethics’, the former purporting to explain the common creation of matter, the latter original sin, both of which are matters of faith not reason (EHP, –). Having shown the historical consequences of the sectarian mixing of

The attack on metaphysical scholasticism



philosophy and theology, and argued the need to confine philosophy to the ends of man’s worldly happiness, Thomasius notes the broad contours of his delimitation of the philosophical domain: With the description of philosophy I have signalled that its end is the flourishing of the human race: that is, temporal happiness. Through this description, first, philosophy will again be separated from theology and, second, it will be denied that the final end of theoretical philosophy is aimed at a pure contemplation – because [theoretical philosophy] must also be rendered subordinate to those activities that reach [only] to the flourishing of the human race, which Seneca had already recognised in his time. (EHP, –)

Despite Thomasius’ comment that the princes themselves have decreed the separation of philosophy and theology, this delimitation does not mean that he is proposing the state control of philosophy in the interests of social welfare; for he argues that academic work should be free of political control, to the extent that it does not jeopardise civil peace. In fact, through his history of philosophical sectarianism and his account of the confusion of revealed and natural principles of knowledge in scholasticism, Thomasius was attempting to achieve a desacralisation of philosophy analogous to Pufendorf ’s secularisation of natural law. He uses the end of worldly happiness to exclude contemplation of pure truth from civil philosophy, in the same way that Pufendorf uses worldly security to exclude the theo-rational contemplation of pure justice from civil jurisprudence – although, apparently, with less success. Thomasius’ aim is thus not to teach a true philosophy backed by the state, for that would be more philosophical sectarianism. Rather, it is to transform the manner in which intellectuals would accede to philosophical truth. Thomasius uses his history of philosophical sectarianism to reveal the relation between philosophical doctrine and intellectual deportment. Then he establishes the horizon of civil happiness in order to repudiate those doctrines and deportments which purport to transcend this horizon through access to a pure contemplative truth shared with God. This is the manner in which Thomasius approaches neoscholastic and Cartesian metaphysics in the Hof-Philosophie, discussing their anthropologies, conceptions of truth, and logical doctrines in terms of his history of philosophical sectarianism and his desacralising separation of philosophy from theology. Without attempting to capture the detail of this discussion, we can observe that Thomasius’ overall endeavour is to replace the Platonised Aristotelianism of rationalist metaphysics with a naturalistic anthropology of the passions and an eclectic mix of humanist logic and Stoic epistemology.



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

In the domain of anthropology, for example, he rejects the privileging of the intellect entailed in Platonic and Aristotelian teaching that, as a fragment of the divine intellect, the human soul consists in thought and controls the body through reason (EHP, –). The Christianising of this doctrine by the neoscholastics – who treat the body as that which distinguishes men from intellectual angels – only compounds the original pagan mixing of theology and philosophy, by drawing philosophical conclusions from Scripture. According to Thomasius, Descartes’ conception of the mind as an incorporeal ‘thinking substance’ derives from the same sectarian sources. Moreover, he criticises Descartes’ use of radical doubt as a means of demonstrating this conception, arguing that it is impossible to exclude reference to the body in accounting for thought (EHP, –). In place of this intellectualist anthropology, Thomasius sketches a civil Epicurean one. Here, the soul (Gemüth) is embedded in the body by the sensory pathways that are the cause of thought, and it is tied to society by language, whose propositional schemata organise thought in a form suited to civil communication (EHP, ff ). Logic thus has no relation to ontology and should be treated rather as an instrument for teaching ‘prudence in thought’, by tying rational judgment to the social communication of this judgment (EHP, –). Similarly Thomasius rejects the ‘pagan’ (neo-Platonic) conception of truth as the soul’s participation in divine intellection of the forms, or recovery of the ideas it possessed prior to its descent into the body. In its place he defends a Epicurean-Stoic and Eclectic conception of truth as the correspondence between the soul’s propositional schemata and the empirical states of affairs conveyed through the senses (EHP, –). We can also observe that he rejects Descartes’ attempt to derive the immortality of the soul from the incorporeality of its substance, treating this as a misguided attempt to provide a philosophical proof for a matter of faith (EHP, ). In rejecting the anthropology, logic, and epistemology of both neoscholastic and Cartesian metaphysics, Thomasius was engaged in an undertaking far more consequential than a dispute within academic philosophy. Through his history of philosophical sectarianism and his analysis of the blurring of philosophical and theological modes of knowledge, Thomasius was attempting to reshape academic philosophy as a whole, from the viewpoint of its role in an emergent deconfessionalised state and civil society. His interventions are thus focused not in disputing particular truths, but on transforming the formative disciplines and institutional order within which truths were configured and acceded to.

Detranscendentalising ethics



Thomasius’ Hof-Philosophie is thus intended to forestall the integration of academic disciplines into a metaphysical hierarchy, and to destroy the pedagogy that saw students acceding to their civil sciences and duties through the contemplative ascent of this hierarchy. Only through such a fundamental dismemberment of the neoscholastic curriculum would it be possible to eliminate the metaphysical assimilation of the civil sciences to moral philosophy. This would allow politics and jurisprudence to stand as independent historically based disciplines, and it would reduce philosophy to the status of a preparatory training in the liberal arts. Without this radical detranscendentalising of philosophy, Thomasius argues, the deconfessionalisation of society could not take place. For the state’s future jurists and politicians would be corrupted by a discipline that tempted them to orient their duties and decisions to an horizon that lay beyond civil happiness and, in doing so, denied them the restrained and pragmatic demeanour required by their civil office. If this desacralising of philosophy were to succeed, therefore, the students would have to be provided with an alternative to the intellectualist ethos that sutured them to the neoscholastic curriculum and, through it, to confessional society. Thomasius sought to provide this alternative in the form of a therapeutic for the passions. .           We recall the brash manner in which Thomasius announced his ethical programme at the University of Leipzig in the late s, upbraiding Aristotelian moral philosophy for its failure to make young men virtuous, and promising to remedy this defect via a lecture series based on this premise: ‘That ethics is nothing other than a teaching and instruction in how a man should govern his affects, in order to render them incapable of impelling him to something that would be against the law’ (KTS, ). In the event, Thomasius’ forced departure from the Lutheran University of Leipzig, engineered by his scholastic opponents, meant that this ethics was elaborated at the University of Halle in Mark Brandenburg, whose Calvinist ruling house was more open to non-orthodox ethical and political doctrine. This was the setting in which Thomasius published the Einleitung zu der Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics, ) and Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics, ). Despite their respective titles, the Ausübung represents less the application of the Einleitung’s moral theory than its supersession, on the grounds of its unsuitability for sustaining an ethical practice. Here, therefore, I will be concentrating on the Ausübung,



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

as the ‘mature’ formulation of Thomasius’ Affektenlehre which, as we shall see in the following section, fed directly into his late natural law doctrine. In the running commentary on the Einleitung that accompanies the opening chapters of the Ausübung, Thomasius locates the defects of his earlier work in its account of the relation between reason and the will. When writing the Einleitung, says Thomasius, he had accepted the common doctrine of the moral philosophers: namely, that bad conduct is the product of the reason presenting erroneous ideas of good and evil to the will, which then acts on them. Now, though, he wishes to treat the will as the more powerful of the two capacities of the soul. In possessing its own fundamental predispositions – to prestigious imitation and impulsive action – it is the will that determines the disposition of reason, giving rise to conduct uncontrollable by reason (ASL, –). The reason for this change of view lay in Thomasius’ acceptance of the doctrine that man is a fundamentally passional rather than rational creature, acting not on the basis of ideas of good and evil, but driven by ‘love’, or the desire to obtain future pleasure or avoid threatening pain. If Pufendorf had sought to detranscendentalise ethics through his doctrine of imposed moral offices, then Thomasius would locate man’s incapacity for rational self-governance elsewhere – in the autarchy of the passions. Thomasius thus signalled his departure from all forms of rationalist moral philosophy; that is, all doctrines in which reason governs the will through its discernment of the ideas of good and evil. Committing himself instead to a thoroughgoing ethical voluntarism, he locates the difference between good and evil within the passional configuration of the will itself, in the form of the difference between two kinds of desire, vernünftige and unvernünftige Liebe. These terms are sometimes translated as rational and irrational love, but are perhaps better rendered as reasonable and unreasonable love, in order to capture Thomasius’ basic focus on the difference between tempered and unrestrained desire. From reasonable love flows tranquillity of soul or peace of mind (Gemütsruhe), the end of Thomasius’ ethic and the source of all virtues; from unreasonable love, turbulence of soul, the source of all vices. From now on let us therefore look for the origin of all errors and all misery in the human will, so to speak. We will find it there immediately, in the simplest manner, because all truth is simple. Tranquillity of soul is the greatest happiness and its mother and daughter are reasonable love . . . Why should we hesitate [to say it]? The well-spring of all good is love. The well-spring of all misery is love. Be he composed as he will, a man cannot be without love for a moment, because there is no moment in which a man does not wish for something as good, or desire and wish its continuation.

Detranscendentalising ethics



But these two loves must possess different, in fact contradictory, natures, because they cause such contradictory effects. The well-spring of all good is reasonable love, so the well-spring of all evil must be unreasonable love. And here you have the origin of universal unhappiness, unreasonable love. In fact here you have universal unhappiness itself: namely, disturbance of the soul. (ASL, –)

Despite its affiliation to Stoic ataraxia, Thomasius’ Gemütsruhe is not an a-social condition characterised by indifference to and withdrawal from worldly desires. In fact, the peace of mind achieved through reasonable love holds the key to tranquil relations with others, making it into the repository of the sociable virtues – friendliness, truthfulness, modesty, peaceableness, and patience – to which the individual accedes through restraint, purity, industriousness, and courage (ASL, –). Conversely, the mental agitation arising from the uncontrolled desires of unreasonable love is the mother of all the social vices – ferocity, vengefulness, licence, envy, and malice – making it into the source of social disorder. Arguing that without an account of the affects it is impossible for a teacher to help his students diagnose and restrain their ruling passions, Thomasius comments that this is a neglected and uncertain area, apparently combining medical therapy, moral philosophy, and rhetoric (ASL, –). This situation is not helped by the existence of several doctrines of the passions, all differing over a series of basic questions: what should be included in a typology of the affects; whether the affects are good, evil, or indifferent; whether they can be expunged or merely restrained; whether man shares them with the beasts (ASL, ). Thomasius then proceeds to develop his Affektenlehre via a comprehensive discussion of the main doctrines of the passions – Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, and Cartesian. His prime targets, however, are Descartes’ account of the ‘passions of the soul’ and the Christian–Platonic treatment of the body– soul relation in neoscholastic pneumatology; for these were the central academic sources of the intellectualist moral anthropology that his passional anthropology was dedicated to combating. It is generally agreed, says Thomasius, that affects consist in movements of the soul, be these inclinations (actions) or reactions (passions). Descartes, though, lodges these affects in the understanding rather than the will, which seems paradoxical when one considers such affects as love, fear, and hope. The prime reason for Descartes’ intellectualist treatment of the affects lies in his treatment of wonder as an affect, in fact as the fundamental affect, occurring prior to the distinction between good and evil, and grounding all the other affects in a fundamental feeling of astonishment at things not yet known (ASL, ). This leads Descartes to



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

treat the understanding as the seat of a self-generated affect – wonder – which, as both a cognition and a feeling, is also a disposition of the will, arousing desire and action. In proceeding in this manner, Thomasius argues, Descartes fails to distinguish thinking something from willing it or, more generally, the actions and passions of the understanding which have their seat in the brain, from those of the will, which are seated in the heart: From this consideration though it necessarily follows that the action and passion of the will differs by nature from human thought. Hence when Descartes says Homo dum vult, cogitat – man thinks when he wills something – he is right in so far as thinking and willing are unified in the human soul . . . but not when he joins other philosophers in proposing that willing and thinking are a single thing, or more precisely: that willing consists in thinking. Because thinking belongs only to the understanding. (ASL, –)

Descartes is therefore wrong to make thought into the essential characteristic that distinguishes man from animals: ‘Because the inclination and drive of the will is a much nobler power of the human soul than the thinking of the understanding, in which form however [the will] is generally completely overlooked by the pagan philosophers and their followers in the universities, or else [it is] mixed with the understanding and its thinking’ (ASL, ). Despite his claim to superior scientific knowledge of the brain and heart – seats of the understanding and will – Thomasius’ constant concern throughout his discussion of intellectualist anthropology is not with its truth or falsity as such, but with the intellectual deportment to which it gives shape. He thus argues that while wonder is a demeanour suited to undertaking intellectual inquiry, it should not be treated as the essential human affect, thereby representing man as a being who governs himself and lives his life through reason (ASL, ). Any philosophical anthropology that does this – including that in his own Einleitung zur Vernünft-Lehre – is suited only to the improvement of the understanding, not to the governance of man’s moral conduct (ASL, –). While Thomasius spends a good deal of energy attacking Descartes’ moral psychology in these terms, his prime target remains the neoscholastic – Christian–Platonic and Christian–Stoic – doctrines that locate the affects in the body by opposing them to the mind or spirit. As we have already observed, Thomasius’ opposition to the metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex is also grounded in his analysis of the kind of relation to the self to which it gives rise. By treating them as corporeal drives common to men and beasts, and by opposing them to a capacity for

Detranscendentalising ethics



rational self-control lodged in man’s intellectual or spiritual substance, this intellectualist anthropology characterises the affects as intrinsically evil, marking them out for complete eradication through rational contemplation of the good (ASL, –). Not only is this way of relating to the self vain and fantasmatic, it results in an inappropriate ‘monkish’ civil demeanour. By the same token, Thomasius’ construction of a ‘naturalistic’ anthropology of the passions is also governed by the end of deportment-formation. If Thomasius opposes the neoscholastic view of the affects as the fleshly source of evil, treating them instead as morally indifferent, that is because he is programming a different way of relating to the self, aimed at forming a different kind of intellectual demeanour. This is the appropriate light in which to view Thomasius’ doctrine that such affects as anger, patience, fear, and courage arise in part from the sensory stimulation of the blood and brain fibres, and in part from the ruling passion or temperament of the individual who receives these stimuli. The final shape of the affects is thus determined by whether the person’s temperament is governed by reasonable love or by one of the three unreasonable loves or ruling passions: ambition (Ehrgeiz), concupiscence (Wollust), or avarice (Geldgeiz) (ASL, –). Here, rather than attempting to offer a ‘scientific’ or naturalistic explanation of morality, Thomasius is providing a voluntaristic means of detranscendentalising its culture. If the affects arise in man’s nature as a passional being, they can be neither good nor evil in themselves, acquiring their moral character instead depending on whether they give rise to tranquillity and the sociable virtues or agitation and the unsociable vices: ‘From this it follows, though, that the inclinations of the soul in general are indifferent – that is, neither good nor evil – with regard to their kinds, but are either good in so far as they lead us to tranquillity or evil in so far as they lead us to disturbance’ (ASL, ). By positing the moral indifference of the affects, Thomasius detaches ethics from all concern with the soul’s transcendent goodness or evil, allowing it to be reconfigured as a discipline for managing ‘external’ conduct in civil life. This, as the ‘old theologian’ noted with disgust, gives rise to a less purist and less Christian ethics, for ‘the utterly un-Christian statists and atheists are capable of this [management] in a quite masterly way’ (KTS, ). The immediate objective of Thomasius’ detranscendentalising reconstruction of ethics was to transform the manner in which those undergoing academic moral education would relate to and cultivate their moral selves. Thomasius’ passional anthropology forms the core of a paideia designed to impel students to renounce the ‘rationalist’ sense of



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

themselves as intellectual beings capable of governing themselves through a supranatural thinking of pure ideas. The condition of Thomasius’ students adopting the proper moral relation to themselves is that they begin by recognising themselves as beings whose conduct is irretrievably governed by some combination of ambition, lust, and greed; for only then can they renounce all false intellectual pride and accept the need for constant monitoring and restraint of their desires in accordance with the ends of personal and civil tranquillity. At the same time, this Epicurean anthropology also programmes the spiritual exercises required to form a self capable of governing its conduct in this manner. If conduct is driven by the passional configuration of the will, then it is vain to propose the complete extirpation of the affects through contemplative exercises in intellectual selfpurification aimed at rational autonomy. Rather, the task of ethical discipline must be to dampen and moderate the affects. The violent passions will be restrained not through sudden rational insight into the idea of the good, but through the gradual and constant moderation of the desires for honour, pleasure, and wealth, with a view to arriving at the tranquil, sociable desire of reasonable love: This [disturbed] condition of man is certainly very evil. If he does not wish to ruin his nature though, his return from these agitated and extraordinary movements [of the soul] to calm and orderly ones can only be attained through a series of steps. Someone suffering from gout will only gradually regain the use of his limbs. And someone who has been dazzled will only be the more so by normal light, unless he is exposed to it by degrees. It is therefore necessary that one passes from extraordinary and agitated movements of the soul to peaceful ones via less agitated ones. (ASL, –)

Finally, through this anthropology Thomasius also separates the ethical self-cultivation of reasonable love from the (Christian–Platonic) pursuit of salvation. Here, as Thomas Ahnert shows, Thomasius locked horns with those neoscholastics like Johann Ludwig Prasch, who posited a continuum between reasonable love and the Christian love that lifts man from his corrupt state (Ahnert , –). By accepting their corrupt state and renouncing the self-purifying ascent to the contemplation of pure goodness and justice, Thomasius’ students would be impelled to seek a more modest and useful object for their ethical labour. Through recognition of themselves as creatures whose ambition, lust, and greed are ineradicable – hence in constant need of monitoring and restraint – they would forgo the vain pursuit of rational autonomy and

Detranscendentalising ethics



gear their ethical striving instead to the cultivation of a worldly civility and tolerance. This was the deportment suited to their offices as servants and citizens of a desacralised state. From now on moral philosophy could aspire to be nothing higher than a governance of the passions through the passions, to be achieved through naturalistic recognition of their tranquil and agitated states, thereby setting ethics within the limits of this-worldly civil conduct. Seen in this context, Thomasius’ abrupt turn from the ethics of selfrestraint to the theology of grace in the final chapter of the Ausübung would appear to be anomalous. Historians of moral philosophy have seized on this apparent about-face as indicative of the philosophical inadequacy of Thomasius’ supposed attempt to provide a voluntaristic and naturalistic justification for morality. Mixing their own normative analysis of Thomasius’ philosophical failure with biographical anecdotes of his ‘pietistic crisis’ of the mid-s, these historians treat the fideistic turn of the final chapter as symptomatic of Thomasius’ alleged failure to provide a properly rational foundation for his ethics. In Werner Schneiders’ formulation: ‘Because Thomasius . . . had further developed a voluntarism that proclaimed the priority of the will over the understanding and the dependence of the understanding on the will, he found himself confronted, through disillusioning personal experience, by the aporia that thought ruled by an evil will must be incapable of recognising its own evil and the true good, and, through this knowledge, improving the will’ (Schneiders , n.p.). According to Schneiders, this intellectual and personal crisis was responsible for Thomasius’ turn to the Pietist doctrine of divine grace at the end of the Ausübung, in a desperate effort to compensate for man’s incapacity to improve his own will on the basis of rational insight into the good. Once again, however, approaching early modern civil philosophy from a post-Kantian perspective leads to a serious misunderstanding of the form in which Thomasius detranscendentalises ethics and the historical circumstances in which he did so. At one level, it is evidently not true that Thomasius’ elevation of the will over reason left him incapable of recognising good and evil and, thereby, of improving the will. After all, we have just seen him teaching his students that those affects are evil that lead a person away from inner tranquillity and sociable relations with his fellows, while those are good that lead toward this tranquillity and sociability (ASL, –). Moreover, elsewhere in the Ausübung, Thomasius converts this rule into an elaborate diagnostic grid, laying out the various



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

combinations of the ruling passions and their accompanying vices, in order to equip his students with the means of recognising and moderating their own bad desires (ASL, –). This, of course, is not the level of analysis with which today’s moral philosophers are concerned. For them Thomasius’ failure arises from his alleged inability to offer a formal or theoretical justification for the goals of personal and civil tranquillity that underpin his ethics. This would be the kind of justification that Kant offers, when he insists on the necessity of finding a principle whose goodness resides not in the ends to which it leads – because then we must seek the goodness of these ends ad infinitum – but in merely being beheld. It should already be clear, however, that Thomasius cannot fail to discover this kind of justification because he is actively not seeking such. As is signalled in the Ausübung’s subtitle – ‘On the therapy [Arzenei] for unreasonable love and the selfknowledge required by it’ – Thomasius’ objective is to provide his students with a moral therapy rather than a moral theory. His aim is not to teach them how to provide a speculative justification for the goodness of personal tranquillity and civility. Rather, it is to equip them with an ethical regimen through which they could conduct themselves in a serene and civil manner, thereby transforming the ethics seminar into the locus for a practice of secular spiritual direction or psychotherapy. As Schneiders himself comments: ‘Generally speaking, the goal of the theory of affects was the transformation of man through the regulation or mastery of these affects’ (Schneiders , ). Thomasius’ Affektenlehre is thus not an ethical practice lacking a formal theorisation of the good. Rather, it is an ethical culture that regards such formal theorisation as symptomatic of an alternative and undesirable kind of ethical culture: one that purports to govern the self through contemplative access to the concept of the good, but that gives rise to an uncivil intellectualism. Like Pufendorf ’s description of man’s denuded and vulnerable natural condition, Thomasius’ account of this creature’s volatile affect-driven nature is presented not as an object of theoretical reflection but as an occasion for chastened recognition. In this setting it would be idle to enter into a theoretical dispute over the validity of Thomasius’ presentation of evil in terms of the uncontrolled desires for honour, sensuous pleasure, and wealth. For the function of this presentation is to induct his students into a particular way of relating to and conducting themselves: namely, as beings whose ruling passions require constant monitoring and control in order to attain the inner restraint

Detranscendentalising ethics



required by public civility. Dorothee Kimmich argues that Thomasius’ Epicurean anthropology and cosmology are intended to encourage individuals to turn away from the pursuit of higher knowledge in order to cultivate a self capable of meeting life’s blows and vicissitudes with inner calm and fortitude (Kimmich , –). Thomasius’ development of a voluntarist Affektenlehre is indicative not of his failure to offer a formal theorisation of the good, but of his self-conscious rejection of the intellectualist anthropology and demeanour involved in such theorisation, and of his turn to an ethics of self-care and self-control. The abrupt shift to the fideistic theology of grace and moral rebirth that occurs in the last chapter of the Ausübung is thus not a symptom of a desperate attempt by Thomasius to compensate for his lack of a formal theory of morality. Rather, in its very abruptness, it signifies his way of constructing the relation between the naturalistic ethics that he has elaborated in the body of the Ausübung, and the salvation that he expects his students to pursue in a different place and capacity. Once again Thomasius’ target is the rationalist moral philosophy taught in the universities. For, he argues, despite Luther’s teaching on the enslavement of the will to the affects, and on the need for grace to achieve moral renovation, Protestant theology and philosophy faculties have continued to harbor the ‘papist’ doctrine that man might become regenerate through moral philosophy itself: So I believe that one could clearly show how, in the moral philosophy of both kinds of Protestant university [Lutheran and Calvinist] . . ., students are taught such principles – regarding the sufficiency of the natural capacities for the attainment of a virtuous life – as allow if not a gross then at least a subtle papism to take root in their hearts. After this they use the natural and sharp-tongued pride in their subtlety for nothing other than to gloss over themselves and their doctrines with many quibbling explanations, while damning others whom they accuse of heresy. From this it comes about that one in fact writes and disputes against Spinozism, Stoicism and Pelagianism, throwing around the charge of heresy – in other words making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to others’ opinions but remaining unaware of the beam in one’s own eye. (ASL, –)

Thomasius leaves us in no doubt that in his view this speculative and intolerant blurring of ethics and theology arises from the intellectualist doctrines of Cartesian and Aristotelian moral philosophy taught in Protestant universities. In giving reason command over the will, this philosophy ridiculously overestimates man’s capacity for autonomous



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

action, such that: ‘in the process of human conduct the will sits as if on a throne, and after consigning the sensuous desires to evil, while preserving reason from that fate, always determines itself to good or evil through free choice’ (ASL, ). Thomasius responds to this overestimation of man’s moral autonomy with two counter-pointed observations. On the one hand, he argues: ‘that the natural capacity of a man to restrain his desire is very poor and limited, therefore quite unable to remove man from his disturbed state and bring him to the true happiness of spiritual tranquillity and reasonable love’. On the other hand, however, this does not mean that one should despair of the more modest programme of ethical restraint that he has just outlined: ‘nonetheless, the reasonable propositions regarding the moderation of the affects given in the preceding chapters [of the Ausübung] must not be completely lost sight of ’ (ASL, ). This is the context in which Thomasius introduces his argument regarding the incapacity of the affect-driven will to know and govern its own evil, formulating it in a manner virtually identical to Schneiders’ later criticism: ‘We have extensively shown above that with man the will rules the understanding, not the understanding the will. And because that which rules in his will is evil, and yet the understanding takes it for good, how can the understanding obtain the powers to stigmatise its ruling nature and hold it for bad? From where will it derive the attention to notice this?’ (ASL, ). The purpose of this argument, though, is not to destroy the anthropological basis of his Affektenlehre, which Thomasius continues to regard as appropriate for natural or philosophical ethics. Instead, it is to show the inadequacy of philosophical knowledge as such for the process of moral regeneration or the attainment of salvation; for these lie beyond man’s natural reason and will in the domain of revelation, faith, and grace. Rather than reflecting a personal epistemological crisis precipitated by his passional voluntarism, Thomasius’ use of the doctrine of man’s moral and intellectual incapacity thus represents a self-conscious intellectual strategy. Its purpose is to effect the radical separation of philosophical ethics and moral theology, in fact creating a gulf between ethical self-cultivation and the pursuit of holiness that would defy all attempts to bridge it via intellectualist metaphysics. In short, at the conclusion of the Ausübung, Thomasius uses the incapacity doctrine to preclude philosophical or natural theological pursuit of salvation, thereby establishing the border between his student’s civil and religious deportments:

Detranscendentalising ethics



Now when the man who is stuck in his misery, and recognises that he is incapable of practising the means [of ethical restraint] given in the preceding chapters . . . becomes ever more really convinced of his misery and incapacity, then one might easily think that he would find little pleasure in that but must necessarily become downcast, and that philosophy or moral philosophy could not comfort him. But this shows all the better that one must not hold the propositions of the preceding chapters in contempt. Because they show us how the human affects should be restrained, even if at the same time leading us to see that this could not occur through our natural capacity, but that we must wait for this capacity and for the consolation of our sadness from a higher and holier science . . . Where, then, moral philosophy runs out, there divine wisdom supplies its lacks and defects. Moral philosophy goes no further than to allow man to recognise his bestial condition, and to lead him from there to the condition of humanity. How, though, he should be led from humanity and mere reason to true Christianity, that is shown by the Holy Scriptures with the help of divine grace. (ASL, –)

Thomasius’ Affektenlehre may thus be regarded as a paideia designed to forestall the pursuit of salvation through metaphysical moral philosophy, replacing this with a therapeutics of passional restraint oriented to personal tranquillity and civil peace. In keeping with his role as a pedagogue and his campaign to overturn the scholastic curriculum, Thomasius developed his Affektenlehre in order to augment Pufendorf ’s magisterial destruction of Christian moral personalism. He sought a paideia that might combat the enculturating power of Protestant scholasticism, while yet delivering the pluralisation of offices required by Pufendorf ’s deconfessionalising programme. In the Ausübung this is achieved by the civil voluntarism of the ethical therapeutic – which required Thomasius’ students to engage in a discipline of self-restraint reaching no higher than inner calm and outer decorum – supplemented by the fideist voluntarism of the final chapter. Between them, the two voluntarisms shatter the metaphysical continuum between civil ethics and religious morality, by treating civility and salvation as the ends of two distinct personae – the man and the Christian. In dissolving the intellectualist moral philosophy responsible for unifying the theological and civil sciences, Thomasius’ Affektenlehre explodes the unified treatment of religion, ethics and political jurisprudence that characterised the metaphysics and pedagogy of Protestant scholasticism. The discipline through which Thomasius sought to reconfigure the relations between these domains, in a manner suited to a deconfessionalised civil society, was natural law. In the elaboration of his natural law,



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

however, Thomasius’ Affektenlehre would turn out to be a mixed blessing. For, while it offered law students access to a restrained civil persona suited to their calling, it also threatened to interpose a new moral foundation for civil governance, thereby muddying Pufendorf ’s elegant uncoupling of political jurisprudence from moral philosophy, the exercise of civil from moral authority.  .        Although moral voluntarism plays a key role in the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae of , it was not until he came to write the Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium of  that Thomasius made his Affektenlehre central to his construction of natural law. Rather than being a fully independent work, however, the Fundamenta is a rectification and reworking of the Institutiones. It consists of a new framework for natural law – provided by the Affektenlehre – followed by a series of chapters, crossreferenced to their counterparts in the Institutiones, and containing detailed instructions to students for the emendation of the earlier doctrines. If we are to discuss the role of Thomasius’ anthropology of the passions in the Fundamenta, then we must first give an account of the Institutiones, so that we can grasp Thomasius’ view of the problems the Affektenlehre was intended to solve. .. Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae While no less inimical to metaphysical rationalism, Thomasius’ early natural law work remains closer to the theological roots of voluntarism than Pufendorf ’s. As a result, in comparison with Pufendorf ’s fundamental and magisterial reconstruction of natural law, Thomasius’ uncoupling of theology, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence takes a different and more circuitous route. The marks of this difference are evident in the title of the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae itself. For here Thomasius was signalling his intention to construct a jurisprudence that would encompass not just the laws enacted by men and known by reason, but also the ‘divine positive laws’ or biblical commands willed by God and known by revelation – at least to the degree these commands pertained to man’s temporal happiness. Despite the apparent anomaly, though, the inclusion of certain biblical laws within jurisprudence was in fact true to Thomasius’ deconfessionalising agenda. For his objective was to transfer the authority for

Natural law



interpreting and applying a particular class of biblical laws – those that could be deemed as pertaining to man’s civil welfare – from academic theologians to academic jurists. Perhaps Thomasius saw this as a way of dealing with the fact that even in a deconfessionalised state such as Brandenburg-Prussia biblical law continued to play a role in the regulation of civil life at the end of the seventeenth century. In any case it is clear that while Thomasius continued to use the same deconfessionalising threshold as Pufendorf – the exclusion of all matters pertaining to salvation from the sphere of civil governance – he could not immediately follow his mentor in superimposing this threshold on the one that divided natural from revealed (biblical) knowledge, thereby making a clean break between a natural jurisprudence and a revealed religion. This residual retention of biblical law in Pufendorf ’s natural law framework is responsible for the ambivalent character of Thomasius’ central formulations in the Institutiones. This ambivalence is visible in Thomasius’ attempt to ground the secularising separation of theology and jurisprudence in a powerful theological doctrine: namely, the doctrine of humanity’s two conditions or Stände – the condition of innocence and undamaged human nature (status integritatis), and the post-lapsarian condition of corrupted capacities (status corruptus). According to Thomasius, natural law and divine revealed law both originate in God’s will, which is the condition of their agreement (IJD, .., ). Further, the two kinds of law have bound man in both his conditions, of innocence and corruption (IJD, ..–, –). In a footnote to this last remark Thomasius acknowledges that in admitting revealed knowledge of man’s incorrupt state to the domain of natural law he is deviating from Pufendorf who, as we recall, excludes the incorrupt condition and its (Christian) laws from the domain of natural law. In retaining the Christian two-state doctrine, Thomasius envisages the Institutiones as prospecting a via media between Pufendorf ’s secular voluntarism and the metaphysical rationalism of Valentin Alberti, their common arch-enemy. Nonetheless, Thomasius’ construction of the status integritatis is one that precludes Alberti’s, Rachel’s, and Leibniz’s treatment of it as a condition to which fallen man might return in search of pure moral norms for the governance of civil life. Thomasius opens the Institutiones by rehearsing the voluntarist doctrine that the divine being consists in pure will issuing laws, rather than in pure thought to which man might accede through contemplation. He supports this with the long footnote summarising his father’s repudiation of the metaphysical conception of God – as divine intellectual being –



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

for tempting man to imagine that he might conform his being to God’s, or become holy, through thought (IJD, ..–, –). Thomasius’ use of the two-states doctrine follows in the same vein. Beginning with the claim that the biblical account of the Fall may be regarded as history – therefore as ‘a common instrument of the four faculties’ – Thomasius proceeds to give a rendition of man’s change of state that would in fact seem to owe more to theology than history (IJD, .., ). From a condition in which his body was flawless and immune to decay, his reason able to penetrate the essences of things, and his will perfectly attuned to God’s, man has passed into one in which his body is disfigured by disease and haunted by death, his mind darkened and forever removed from nature’s hidden essences, and his will so corrupted by affect and desire as to render its natural conformation to God’s impossible (IJD, ..–, –). ‘These changes in man’, Thomasius comments, ‘are so great that we must imagine it absolutely impossible that man could improve such imperfections through natural means in this life’ (IJD, .., ). It is, therefore, vain of Alberti and the other metaphysicians – in fact symptomatic of the corruption of their theology by pagan speculation – to teach that man might know his duties through some sort of recovery of his integral or holy state. As we have seen, according to this doctrine, man may accede to knowledge of that which is good and bad ‘in itself ’, antecedent to God’s will, through rational participation in God’s intelligising of such ‘perfections’ as love and justice. Such a doctrine is impossible, according to Thomasius, because it is God’s willing that creates moral qualities, which are therefore not available to his or anyone else’s reason beforehand. Moreover, it is unacceptable to teach that man might accede to pure ideas of good and evil through conceptualisation because, following the ruin of his faculties, ‘such conceptualising signifies an imperfection’ (IJD, .., ). According to Thomasius, then, man accedes to moral knowledge not through concepts shared with God but via two other paths. Like Pufendorf, he argues that this knowledge can be gained in part through natural knowledge of man’s own fallen nature and of the rules required for its preservation. But, unlike Pufendorf, Thomasius argues that it may also be gained through the positive biblical laws that God has issued to fallen man in partial compensation for the corruption of his knowledge and nature (IJD, .. and fn., –). For this reason, because they purport to ground justice in transcendent or divine concepts of it, metaphysical theologians are unable to determine the role either of natural or of divine positive law in the sphere of civil jurisprudence.

Natural law



On this basis, Thomasius is able to divide up the field of natural law in a manner suited to his deconfessionalising agenda. Theology’s proper concern with man’s eternal felicity means that it can have no place in ‘divine jurisprudence’, whose concern is the divine and human laws enacted to ensure man’s civil happiness, making it the exclusive preserve of the law faculty (IJD, ..–, –). Natural law and divine positive law, while agreeing as co-ordinate expressions of the divine will, differ in their mode of knowing it and in their object. Natural law is known via natural reason – in fact through the deduction of the rules required by civil peace – and applies to conduct whose goodness or badness is determined by its agreement or non-agreement with man’s rational being. Divine positive law, though, is known through its revelation or publication in the Bible and applies to conduct that would be otherwise morally indifferent: These two laws differ in that natural law has to do with conducts which necessarily agree or conflict with common rational human nature. Revealed law, though, [concerns] such conducts as are in the middle, and neither agree nor conflict with this nature. Because the light of nature shows that God has willed that man should be rational and that his conduct should be subordinated to a certain norm, it follows necessarily . . . that God will have commanded such conducts as necessarily promote rational nature and will prohibit those that conflict with it. At the same time, there are many conducts whose performance or neglect does not disturb man’s nature, nor benefit it as such, which means that man cannot know through rational reflection whether they are commanded or prohibited. Hence it was necessary that this law be published. (IJD, ..–, )

With these arguments Thomasius in fact transfers the right to determine which biblical laws will be given civil effect wholly to the estate of political jurists. The jurisconsults will use the criterion of civil welfare to exclude all revealed law concerned with salvation from the jurisprudential field. Next, they will use the threshold of moral indeterminacy to determine when biblical law can supplement natural jurisprudence, while finally claiming the authority to regulate the ceremonial forms of public worship in the name of civil peace. Thomasius leaves us in no doubt as to the political importance of these intellectual distinctions: Moral theology teaches the Ten Commandments – which are binding on all men – without distinguishing between natural and revealed law, and uses the Holy Scriptures to ground both kinds of law. Generally therefore the theologians take the moral law and the natural law to be the same thing. But divine jurisprudence separates natural law from divine revealed law, deriving the former from the rules of sound reason (ex dictamine rectae rationis), in accordance



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

with the teaching of the apostle Paul, but taking the latter purely from divine revelation. This distinction has indescribable benefits for the discussion of the otherwise intractable controversies over the duty of princes with regard to such commands, and whether he has the power to dispense with them or not, over the power and authority to make laws, and so on. (IJD, .., )

Nonetheless, despite delivering the required separation of theology and jurisprudence, the intellectual machinery of the Institutiones remains quite unstable. This is due to the difficulties Thomasius encounters in reconciling the Lutheran voluntarism which he inherited from his father and the far more radical and secularised voluntarism which he had encountered in Pufendorf ’s natural law. The prime locus of this instability lies in the problematic relation between the theological voluntarism of Thomasius’ version of the two-state doctrine and the civil voluntarism underpinning Pufendorf ’s doctrines of status and sovereignty. In fact, despite their shared hostility to orthodox metaphysical natural law, there is a crucial difference between the ways in which Thomasius and Pufendorf construct man’s moral nature as an object of (natural law) knowledge and governance. For Thomasius it is the post-lapsarian corruption of the faculties that removes man from the capacity for rational self-governance advocated by the scholastic moral theologians and philosophers. In using the doctrine of man’s damaged faculties to determine that he be governed by imposed laws rather than self-imposed reasons, Thomasius is, however, retaining the idea of moral self-governance as the criterion for judging man’s moral corruption and as the goal of his moral restitution – even if the latter is impossible ‘through natural means in this life’. This means that Thomasius treats post-lapsarian natural law and its civil applications as a surrogate for the natural law that governed man in his integral condition, compensating for the lost capacity for moral self-governance through a mix of prudential knowledge and civil discipline. Pufendorf, however, despite using the doctrine of human incapacity to attack the metaphysical rationalists, treats man’s moral nature – his weak, fractious, sociable being – not as the ontological remnant of a more perfect kind of moral and rational being, but simply as the ‘observable’ moral existence (natural status) whose natural laws man must deduce. In governing man’s moral nature, Pufendorf ’s natural law is thus not oriented to a lost capacity for moral self-governance, but solely to the end of civil security, which is the condition of preserving man’s fragile sociable existence. For Pufendorf, natural law and its civil cognate compensates not for the higher moral being that man once was and still should be, but for

Natural law



the fractious sociable being that he happens to be as a matter of fact. Pufendorf ’s natural law is oriented not the recovery of the lost status of moral self-governance but to the construction and imposition of a new civil status: governance by a political superior. The Institutiones represents Thomasius’ sustained attempt to integrate Pufendorf ’s secular voluntarist construction of natural law within the framework of Lutheran theological voluntarism. The only intellectual means at Thomasius’ disposal for this task was in fact the ‘dualist’ or ‘analogical’ current of Lutheran metaphysics represented by his father. This, we recall, used the doctrine of man’s two states to separate the theological and civil sciences – teaching that it was impossible for fallen man to accede to revealed truth through natural reason. At the same time, however, it could maintain an attenuated relation between the two domains, by treating naturally known things as analogues of things revealed through faith which yet remained inaccessible to natural reason. Using this complex figure of thought, Thomasius is able to construct his version of natural law around the inaccessibility of divine will to rational insight. For this enables him to treat Pufendorf ’s naturally known natural law as the analogical form of God’s hidden commands, while treating biblical law (divine positive law) as the published or revealed form, each form compensating in its own way for the lost perfect knowledge characteristic of the incorrupt state. Thomasius’ construction of natural law in the Institutiones thus steers an unsteady path between the Aristotelian and Pufendorfian frameworks. But the solution Thomasius arrives at is closer to Grotius’ version of natural law than Pufendorf ’s. Thomasius thus offers a quasiAristotelian derivation of natural law in terms of the laws needed to realise an ontological essence, which makes natural law duties ontologically good. This derivation is marked in such formulations as: ‘The law of nature is a divine law written in the heart of all men and obligating them to do that which agrees with man’s rational nature and refrain from that which is contrary to it’ (IJD, .., ). At the same time, though, Thomasius is aware that this construction is problematic, as it appears to bind God’s will to antecedent concepts of good and evil to which man might accede. He thus attempts to hold the incipient rationalism at bay via a second, more Pufendorfian deduction. According to this, natural laws are simply the rules required to preserve the (sociable) nature willed for man by God, which makes natural laws a function of civil security. In fact the only way that Thomasius can forestall this incipient rationalism in the Institutiones is to treat the rational deduction of natural law



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

as itself symptomatic of the limited or analogical knowledge of God’s will available to man in his fallen condition. He does this by treating the moral indifference of certain actions as a sign of fallen man’s incapacity for natural knowledge of their true moral character, thereby deviating markedly from Pufendorf ’s secular voluntarism. Unlike Pufendorf, who treats all ‘natural’ actions as morally indifferent – as a means of excluding moral theology from the domain of natural law – Thomasius treats the moral indifference of some actions as indicating the need to supplement natural law with revealed commandments. Thomasius thus reinterprets his mentor’s secular delimitation of ethics, treating it as indicative of the inaccessibility – rather than the irrelevance – of the divine mind to natural jurisprudence. In using the imputed deficiency of natural knowledge to include a supplement of biblical law within jurisprudence, Thomasius sacrifices the sharpness of Pufendorf ’s distinction between the secular–political and religious–theological domains. The Institutiones thus contains two distinct ways of desacralising the domain of civil governance. According to the first, while necessary and inevitable, the derivation of civil duties from the end of civil peace is a sign of man’s corruption. According to the second (Pufendorfian) way, the derivation of civil duties from the end of civil peace, far from approximating man’s lost capacity for moral self-governance – inaccessible or not – is in fact the means of relegating this concern in favour of a different derivation of such duties: namely, their imposition by a political superior as a means of governing man’s fractious sociability in accordance with the end of security. The instability arising from these two ways of ‘secularising’ natural law is evident in Thomasius’ treatment of marriage law which, as a nexus for religious and civil governance, was a neuralgic point for the problem of deconfessionalisation in early modern Germany. In the Institutiones, Thomasius offers a quasi-Aristotelian deduction of the natural laws of marriage, but one whose final insufficiency dictates its supplementation by biblical marriage law. As the ends of this society are the begetting of children and the assuaging of lust, and as these ends have been implanted in the marriage partners in the form of an inner desire for marital society, it should be possible to derive the duties of marriage by deducing them from these ends in accordance with the method of natural law (IJD, ..–, ). So powerful is the ‘burning desire’ implanted in man for the realisation of the natural ends of marriage that it completely overwhelms his capacity to judge and conform

Natural law



himself to the duties of marriage (IJD, ..–, –). Consequently, were it not for the relevant biblical injunctions regarding adultery, incest, polygamy, whoring – acceded to by jurists in order to secure man’s civil happiness – marital conduct would remain morally indifferent (IJD, ..ff, ff). Outside of the natural law setting of the Institutiones, however, in a context determined by a concrete religious–political dispute over the regulation of marriage, Thomasius adopts a position much closer to Pufendorf ’s statism. The dispute in question had broken out over the marriage of Maria Amalia, the Calvinist daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm I (III) of Brandenburg, to the Lutheran Duke Moritz Wilhelm of SaxonZeitz, a brother of the Electoral Prince of Saxony, where the marriage was opposed on religious grounds (Lieberwirth , ). In  the Lutheran theologian Philipp Müller – Provost of Magdeburg and professor at the University of Jena – published a pamphlet in which he attacked the marriage, using extensive biblical citation to show the unlawfulness of such inter-faith unions. For our immediate concerns, the most striking characteristic of Thomasius’ polemical response to this pamphlet – given in his Fürstlicher Personen Heirat (The Marriage of Royal Persons, ) – is how little it owes to the ‘divine law’ framework of the Institutiones. Rather than grounding the prince’s marital duties and rights in natural or biblical law, as mediated by his theological or juristic Räte, here Thomasius derives them directly from positive Staatsrecht: In fact, from that which we have . . . advanced from the Osnabruck Peace Treaty [ie., the Treaty of Westphalia], it can be seen following it that the adherents of the Reformed [Calvinist] religion were expressly included [in its provisions]; that they should enjoy all the privileges and rights enjoyed by the adherents of the Augsburg Confession [Lutherans]; and that the freedom of royal persons of both religions to marry each other, arising from divine law, was reinforced rather than limited by that [treaty]. (ADS, , )

In other words, under the pressure of confessional disputation, Thomasius appeals to political law not to mop up the residue of indifferent conduct remaining from the application of natural and biblical law, but as the source of autonomous duty-imposing norms. Here therefore the role of political jurisprudence is not to compensate for a lost capacity for rational insight into true morality. Rather it is to transmit norms arising from a politically imposed pacification of society. These are norms grounded in the political–juridical instrument that banished all concern with true morality from the governance of civil society: the Treaty of Westphalia.



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics .. Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium

Some of these ambivalences and instabilities are resolved in Thomasius’ final formulation of his natural law doctrine, the Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium of  – translated into German as Grundlehren des Natur- and Völker-Rechts in , which is the edition I have used. Looking back at the Institutiones Thomasius explains to his readers that with the concept of divine positive law he had been attempting to find a middle path between the alternatives of natural and Mosaic law and, indeed, between Pufendorf and his scholastic opponents (FJN, Fwd, –). In doing so he had failed to separate fully the principles of natural knowledge and revelation, in part because he had located positive law in the revealed word of God, and in part because he had failed to scrutinise with sufficient care the central thesis of Pufendorf ’s opponents: namely, that principles of natural law ‘must be looked for in their agreement and non-agreement with the condition of innocence’ (FJN, Fwd, ). He soon learned, though, that he would be reviled by the scholastics regardless of whether he attempted to reconcile his conception of natural law with the Bible, hence ‘the [concept of] universal positive law was renounced and finally the hypothesis that the foundation of natural law is to be sought in the state of innocence has henceforth been completely buried and forgotten’. As a result: The constitution of natural law as we are now considering it requires that we disregard the Holy Scriptures and the state of innocence. This is especially so since not only has the state of innocence been utterly lost, it also cannot be regained in this life – not to mention the fact that while the purpose of Holy Scriptures is the blessed life in the next world, moral philosophy and the whole of jurisprudence are aimed solely at true happiness in the present life. (FJN, Fwd, )

In this manner, Thomasius abandoned the residual dualist or analogical metaphysics of the Institutiones. Henceforth natural law was to have no relation to an inaccessible condition of rational self-governance – not even an analogical one – and there would be no biblical supplement for natural law in the domain of civil jurisprudence. Thomasius thus took the deconfessionalising threshold, which partitioned the goal of civil happiness from that of eternal felicity, and superimposed it on the epistemological one that separated the principles of natural jurisprudential knowledge from those of revealed biblical truth. In doing so, he approximated Pufendorf ’s clean break between a biblical moral theology concerned with salvation, and a natural ethics and jurisprudence whose

Natural law



ends reach no higher than civil well-being. With this, Thomasius negotiated his own passage from theological to secular voluntarism, relegating the two-state conception of innocent and fallen man in favour of a conception of man as a being whose single passional nature was the source and object of naturally known ethical and political duties. Nonetheless, despite arriving at an intellectual destination similar to Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius had taken a very different route. If Pufendorf had secularised natural law by decoupling the recognition of civil duties from the cultivation of moral personality – specifically from the Christian–metaphysical contemplative integration of the person – then Thomasius did so by secularising the cultivation of moral personality itself. As we shall now see, this means that Thomasius’ construction of natural law continues to differ in important regards from Pufendorf ’s. For, in contradistinction to Pufendorf ’s conception of the imposed character of civil offices, Thomasius’ foundational appeal to a quasiEpicurean moral anthropology allows civil duties to remain grounded in a practice of moral cultivation, albeit a very different practice to the contemplative exercises of the Christian rationalists. The first three chapters of the Fundamenta – in which Thomasius outlines his image of man as a being whose will is governed by corporeally rooted passions quite outside the reach of intellectual control – are little more than a summary of the Ausübung der Sittenlehre, minus the latter’s ideal of reasonable love and the fideist conclusion. In the Fundamenta Thomasius uses his Affektenlehre to mount a frontal assault on metaphysical moral philosophy and Christian natural law (FJN, ..–, –). If man is governed by his affects, specifically by the three dominant passions of ambition, lust, and greed, this is not because he has fallen from a higher condition of rational self-governance but is simply the result of the kind of natural being that he is. Like all such beings, man is driven by the desire to preserve himself and consequently is attracted to that which sustains his life and well-being and repelled by that which threatens it. These visceral feelings of attraction and repulsion, giving rise to the affects of hope and fear, are the primitive source of moral judgment and natural law. From the perspective of this ethical naturalism, and apparently misunderstanding the full significance of Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed entia moralia, Thomasius declares that the scholastics and Pufendorf share a common error: they make a sharp distinction between man’s moral and physical nature. For the will is both driven by the physiological powers of the passions and yet functions as the source of their moral



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

governance. This means that the will must achieve moral governance in and through these powers: ‘The moral nature of man is thus a concept of the power to will through forces controlled by the will. Because of this the physical nature of man is not rightly opposed to the moral nature of man, nor absolutely and finally to the intellectual [vernünftigen] or rational [verständlichen] nature of man’ (FJN, ..–, ). Yet the will is never rational in the sense of acting on the basis of ideas, for these are the exclusive preserve of the understanding. For its part the understanding is capable of discerning the ‘truly good’ – that is, the conduct that preserves man’s life and happiness – but only on the basis of a prior calming of the passions. This tempering is a work of the will on the will, requiring the arousal of passions – hope and fear – to effect a restraint of the passions (FJN, ..–, –). With his Affektenlehre in place, Thomasius is ready to announce the end of the metaphysical moral philosophy and its replacement by a discipline for governing the passions. Arguing that if the will is governed by the balance of passional powers then it is meaningless to talk of freedom of the will – in the sense of its freedom to choose on the basis of moral ideas – Thomasius declares with an overly optimistic flourish: ‘Now, if the will has no freedom to choose, then undoubtedly the whole of scholastic moral philosophy falls to the ground’ (FJN, .., ). Nonetheless, while not itself free, the will can be restrained. This gives rise to actions that are ‘free-willed’ in the sense of being chosen on the basis of a recognition – itself dependent on the calming of the passions – of the conduct required to give man a long and happy life. This degree of freedom is enough for individuals to be held responsible for their actions (FJN, ..–, –). Moral philosophy of the standard intellectualist kind must therefore be replaced by a ‘moral discipline’ that will provide individuals with the capacity to moderate their passions, thereby allowing their reason to judge the conduct conducive to man’s civil happiness (FJN, .., ). Thomasius thus uses his quasi-Epicurean anthropology in order to expunge the residual theological aspects of his construction of natural law in the Institutiones, and to ground the naturalistic construction of the Fundamenta. At the heart of the Fundamenta lies the conception of man as a being whose civil happiness is dependent on the ethical and juridical restraint of his unruly passional nature. As we have already noted, constituting the moral self as a physiological phenomenon is Thomasius’ way of allowing it to be approached in a detranscendentalised manner, as something open to empirical observation and practical control in accordance with worldly ends: ‘For moral

Natural law



nature also belongs in a certain manner to physics, because it depends upon and is driven by the will, whose treatment belongs to physics [ie., the science of corporeal things]’ (FJN, .., ). Only thus could those who had been exposed to university metaphysics learn to refrain from approaching their moral self in a grandiloquent sacralising manner; as if it were the imago Dei or as the remnant spark of divine reason; as if it were something known only through the purifying contemplation of a priori concepts, and conformed to such exalted ends as purity of will, selfless love, and union with God. Thomasius’ ethical naturalism is thus intended to detach the cultivation of civil duties from the self-exalting pursuit of ends akin to holiness, and to ensure instead that such duties would be acceded to through a practice of passional restraint geared to the ends of personal civility and social peace. Nonetheless, in failing to comprehend and follow Pufendorf ’s far more radical detranscendentalising of ethics – via the doctrine of imposed offices – Thomasius’ natural law remains closer to moral philosophy than his mentor’s. Pufendorf ’s argument is that man’s natural goods only cross the threshold of morality through their conversion into duties through the imposition of offices, without which man is incapable governing his liberty in accordance with natural law. Thomasius’ argument is that inner tranquillity is itself a natural good from which natural law duties may be derived. We cannot agree then with those commentators who see Thomasius’ attempt to provide an ethical basis for political commands as superseding Pufendorf ’s framework (Schneewind , –). In fact Thomasius’ naturalist anthropology of the passions is an attempt to reach the same destination as Pufendorf ’s antinaturalist doctrine of imposed offices: a secular deconfessionalised construction of natural law governed by the end of social peace. More to the point, in rejecting Pufendorf ’s radical divorce of the imposition of civil offices from the cultivation of moral personality, it seems likely that Thomasius makes his path to this end ever more circuitous and protracted. The problems encountered in this regard are focused in two related aspects of the construction of natural law duties in the Fundamenta. First, Thomasius’ passional anthropology leads him to establish a continuum between inner self-restraint and external juridical coercion, as steps on a single hierarchy of governance. In tying duties to man’s passional nature, Thomasius is thus deviating markedly from Pufendorf. For, in regarding civil disturbance as the result of the unrestrained inner passions breaking out into anti-social conduct, Thomasius treats legal



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

coercion as compensating for the failure of moral self-governance. In a reciprocal manner, he simultaneously treats inner self-restraint as a higher form of the civil governance exercised through external coercion. Despite a good deal of commentary to the contrary, then, the predominant construction of natural law in the Fundamenta is characterised not by a sharp break between morality and law but by a series of graduated steps linking moral self-restraint to legal coercion. There are, Thomasius argues (almost certainly against Pufendorf), two forms of obligation. Inner obligation arises from restraint of the passions, gives rise to knowledge of what it is that makes for a long and happy life, and issues in the wise man’s counsel. Outer obligation comes from the administration of fear and hope, compels the ‘fools’ – or those incapable of inner restraint – to keep their conduct within the bounds of civil peace, and is embodied in the ruler’s command backed by sanction (FJN, ..–, –). The two forms of obligation though are both directed to the same end – securing inner and outer peace in accordance with the end of natural law – which means that morality and law are joined on a single hierarchy of governance: Further, given that the fools show through their actions that they lack inner calm and are thus incapable of promoting or preserving outer calm – in fact that they cause the disturbance of outer calm – it follows that the norm of a wise man, whose purpose is to lead the fools from unhappiness to happiness, is oriented to three main points: to the achievement of inner calm, or, the restraint of the foolishness of the three main desires; to the promotion of external calm through peaceable actions; [and] to avoiding the disruption of outer [public] calm by refraining from actions that disturb the peace. (FJN, .., )

To achieve the right distribution of friendly counsel and coercive command across this hierarchy the wise man must have regard to ‘the degrees of foolishness’. The greatest fools, who disrupt outer peace and disturb the freedom of others, require command to the exclusion of counsel. The ‘middling’ fools do not disrupt social peace but neither do they cultivate the good-will and friendship of others. Hence their governance can be largely based on counsel with a view to rectifying this defect, while not excluding command should their lack of winning ways give rise to social disturbance. The least foolish, though, because they neither disturb social peace nor lack the ability to win the good-will of others, require no commands and should be governed solely through counsel aimed at reinforcing their capacity for passional self-restraint (FJN, I..–, –). Actions can thus be divided into good, evil, and ‘middling’ or indifferent – depending on whether they are oriented to

Natural law



the attainment of inner calm, the disruption of external peace, or neither disturb nor promote social peace, but seek it without cultivating inner calm: ‘here you have the sources of the three-fold good of the honourable [ehrlichen], the decent [anständigen] and the just [gerechten]’ (FJN, .., ). The second obstacle to Thomasius’ full ‘political’ desacralisation of natural law comes in the figure of the sage. Clearly, in situating legal coercion as compensating for the failure of moral self-governance, Thomasius establishes a hierarchical continuum between law and morality. The wise man is described as unifying the three kinds of goodness: ‘Nevertheless, this threefold good should not be separated and divided. Because he is not wise who does not live virtuously, decently and justly at the same time’ (FJN, .., ). Thomasius thus exhorts his students to govern themselves by beginning with the least perfect of the three goods, law-abiding conduct, and work their way up through civility to the inner tranquillity arising from self-restraint of the passions (FJN, .., ). Moreover, this way of relating law and morality fails to avoid the political chiliasm that had been characteristic of moral-philosophical accounts of law and that would resurface again in Kant’s account of the law–morality relation. For, if legal coercion is a compensation for the failure of moral self-governance, then it is possible that with the general attainment of the latter there might be no further need for the coercive legal governance of society. Finally, this secularised eschatology haunts Thomasius’ construction of the relation between legal obligation and individual right in the Fundamenta. If the imposition of legal obligation is construed as merely clearing away the obstacles standing in the way of rights arising from the capacity for moral self-governance, then these rights – to a long and happy life – appear as grounded in the individual moral personality. This, of course, is quite unlike Pufendorf ’s view of them as reflexes of the duties imposed by a superior for the governance of man’s permanently dangerous liberty. Thomasius’ view of the state as the natural complement to man’s capacity for moral self-cultivation is, we recall, precisely the teleological account that Pufendorf rejects, commenting that it ‘presupposes a kind of civil state wherein citizens are without any fault and wickedness, when in fact states are a sort of remedy for human imperfection’ (DSH, § , ). Nonetheless, despite the continuum that Thomasius’ moral anthropology introduces to the law–morality relation, his conception of this relation is also informed by a second, more disjunctive treatment of it. This second construction is also focused in the relation between inner



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

and outer obligation, but here Thomasius treats the latter form of obligation – imposed by a superior possessing the means of coercion – as autonomous of inner moral obligation, rather than as conditional on its failure. He thus rejoins Pufendorf in arguing that all right comes from externally imposed obligation, as no-one can obligate themselves or claim a right over themselves, which means that: ‘all right is external not internal’ (FJN, ..–, ). On this construction, rights in the sense of the performance of compellable duties arise wholly from the sphere of justice, now conceived as an autonomous domain of external obligations imposed by a political superior, while decorum and morality do not give rise to rights at all – not even to ‘imperfect’ ones (FJN, ..–, –). At this point then the hierarchical relation between morality and law falls apart, as the different modes in which individuals accede to their obligations no longer form a continuum and arise in fact from autonomous modes of governing human conduct: From this it follows that what a man does from inner obligation, and in accordance with the rules of morality and decorum, is specifically governed by virtue; so that this man should be called virtuous [tugendhaft] rather than law-abiding [gerecht]. But that which a man does in accordance with the rules of justice, or from external obligation, is governed by justice, and on the basis of such actions he would be called law-abiding. (FJN, .., )

According to Thomasius’ second, Pufendorfian, construction of natural law, then, the coercive character of justice or civil law arises not from its role in compensating for the failure of moral self-restraint but from a different source: the fact that these laws serve ends determined by rulers possessing the means of compulsion. Moral counsel and political command thus fall into different domains, as the end of civil peace is construed not as the outer expression of inner moral tranquillity, but as a purely public condition reached through the application of the means of political–juridical coercion to external conduct (FJN, ..–, ). On this construction, law is not a less perfect form of governance than morality and decorum but simply a different one, based in the autonomous end of social pacification. This construction is thus incompatible with the doctrine of a continuum between law and morality, and with the eschatological conception of a society of self-governing individuals possessing individual rights. The manner in which politics and law are admitted to the domain of moral philosophy – that is, the way in which moral philosophy is desacralised – differs significantly between these two constructions. For, according to the first, the coercively imposed rules of outer peace

Natural law



prescribed by political jurisprudence are extensions of the self-imposed rules for the inner restraint of the passions. This means that political command (Herrschaft) and moral counsel (Ratschlag) meet in a single subject. This is the political jurist as Epicurean sage, who is capable of calibrating the ‘degrees of foolishness’ separating morality, decorum, and law, and thereby determining when the state should intervene to reinforce virtue or, conversely, when self-governing virtue makes the state redundant. In construing him as sage, Thomasius thus envisages the political jurist assuming the role once played by theologians in setting the moral parameters of political governance. According to the second construction, however, the compulsory duties prescribed by political jurisprudence arise solely from the state’s interest in social peace, independently of all concerns with inner ethical self-restraint. Here, then, the political jurist is not the integral wise man of moral philosophy but an adviser whose expertise is bound to the exercise of political command, so that the role of political jurisprudence is to set the political parameters of moral culture. We can see the role that he envisaged for the first, ethically based, conception of the morality–law relation in Thomasius’ new treatment of marital duties in the Fundamenta. Here he revises the account of marital duties given in the Institutiones, repudiating his own earlier treatment of lust as symptomatic of fallen man’s complete incapacity to govern himself in accordance with natural law. Lust, Thomasius now argues, is no more powerful than the passions of ambition and greed, and all can be controlled through the rules of morality, decency, and justice (FJN, .., ). There is thus no residue of indifferent conduct awaiting determination by biblical law – a strategy that Thomasius now denounces as ‘papist’. For those duties not determined by the rules of justice in the strict sense – monogamy and permanent cohabitation, for example – can certainly be determined by the rules of morality and decorum, as being necessary for the moderation of desire or the decent rearing of children (FJN, .., –). The problem with this solution, however, is that it assumes the existence of a civil society already in possession of a deconfessionalised capacity for moral self-governance, capable of cultivating its duties – including its marital duties – in a tolerant and civil manner, in accordance with the secular ends of personal and civil tranquillity. We need only recall provost Müller’s attack on inter-faith marriages, however – which he treats as tantamount to profaning the sacrament through union with the infidel – to recognise that the German societies had not yet reached this pacified condition.



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

It should not surprise us, then, that as soon as Thomasius is confronted by morality which is not in the required secularised civil form – that is, as soon as he re-engages with the still-prevalent religious determination of civil duties – the posited continuum between moral counsel and political command, the teacher and the ruler, falls to pieces, and with it Thomasius’ conception of ‘natural law in the broad sense’. This happens most strikingly in the first chapter of Book , ‘On Man’s Duties to God’, where Thomasius is recasting his earlier account of natural law religious duties. For here, despite his wish to construct these duties by applying the rules of morality, decorum, and justice, Thomasius must confront the fact that the moral–theological and political–juridical determinations of religious duties are in conflict, precluding the appeal to a single moral hierarchy of governance, and forcing the wise man to negotiate between conflicting ethical ends: [The wise man] must explain the principles of the whole rights of princes in religious affairs together with the foresight enabling one to prevent a prince being oppressed by teachers or priests. [He must also explain] how one should take the middle path when a prince seeks to alter external religious worship, so that he neither tyrannises over conscience nor allows too much scope to those who under the pretext of their conscience foment disorder in the republic. (FJN, .., )

Rather than reconciling moral counsel and political command, teacher and prince in a unifying natural law hierarchy, the political jurist is now forced to establish a different and less harmonious kind of hierarchy: ‘There must be a thorough demonstration of the agreement and difference between political rule [Herrschaft], religious ministry and teaching, together with their necessary friendship and interconnection, that is nevertheless associated with the necessary dependence of ministry and teaching on political rule’ (FJN, .., ). This fracturing of the law–morality continuum, and the emergent dominance of the political over the clerical and academic estates, arises from the fact that, in religion, the political jurist must deal with a morality that threatens the ultimate end of social peace: One must deal with the injustice of wars against other peoples on the grounds of religion or Reformation . . . The justice and injustice of civil wars caused by religion – both in the case of authorities attempting to impose a new religion and in that of subjects wishing to preserve the old one – must also be dealt with. One must show who may decide such a question, whether it is the religious or the secular scholars, whether theologians or jurists or both are entitled.

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



One must treat of measures in a republic and of complaints [against them] arising from religion, whether and how far such [complaints] should be permitted. (FJN, ..–, –)

Faced with the existence of moral communities conformed to internally homogenous and mutually hostile religious anthropologies, the presuppositions of a general natural law ethics based on a secularised moral anthropology begin to buckle. In such circumstances, rather than providing it with an ethical basis, communal moral self-governance provides political governance with one of its most intractable problems. Under this pressure, the unity of moral counsel and political command symbolised by the academic sage breaks down, and the political jurist begins to assume a different form, as the bearer of a political science formed in and for the state: But not all auditors are suitable for this doctrine. It is in fact a true state secret [Königliches Geheimniß]. Accordingly it is to be presented only to adults who are capable of discretion, who have given clear proof that they have progressed a certain way along the path of wisdom, and who are devoted not to the university but to government. (FJN, .., )

Moreover, Thomasius offers tacit acknowledgement of his own error in presuming that a science dealing with the political regulation of religion could be addressed to a general moral community. In this regard we should accordingly confess our own lack of circumspection, in that we have until now carelessly revealed many truths belonging to this science. For there are numerous examples to hand showing how irrationally they act who present counsel pertaining to religious matters in public writings, even when they are by no means unreasonable in other matters. (FJN, .., )

With this confession, though, we reach the limits of Thomasius’ natural law, whose attachment to a single moral anthropology finally renders it incapable of detaching the political jurist from the moral philosopher.  .                   In the event, Thomasius’ uncoupling of law and politics from theology and moral philosophy – of the exercise of civil power from the pursuit of moral truth – finds its definitive formulation not in his natural law works but in his political jurisprudence, in particular his political jurisprudence of church law (Staatskirchenrecht). Here, in a series of works that are indeed addressed to ‘adults who are capable of discretion . . . and



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

who are devoted not to the university but to government’, he outlines a profound and ambitious dual programme – for the desacralisation of the state, and the spiritualisation of religion. The influence of Pufendorf ’s political and theological writing on Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is clear in its central text, the posthumously published Vollständige Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit oder Gründliche Abhandlung vom Verhältniß der Religion gegen den Staat (Complete Explanation of the Jurisprudence of Church Law or Fundamental Treatise on the Relation of Religion to the State) of . The first volume of the Vollständige Erläuterung consists of a reprint of Pufendorf ’s De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem (On the Nature of Religion in Relation to Civil Society, ), in Latin and German, accompanied by Thomasius’ extensive commentary. The second volume appears to be an edited version of Thomasius’ lectures on Staatskirchenrecht. In addition to this compendium on church law and governance, Thomasius also published an important series of disputations dealing with the state’s rights in religious affairs. We shall be concerned with two of these dissertations in particular: Vom Recht evangelischer Fürsten in Mitteldingen oder Kirchenzeremonien (De Jure Principis circa Adiaphora, Of the Right of Protestant Princes in Middle-Things or Religious Ceremonies, ) and Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (The Right of Protestant Princes in Theological Controversies, ). Of these two dissertations only the latter is cited as co-authored with Thomasius’ student Enno Rudolph Brenneysen, despite the fact that Brenneysen also cowrote the former, albeit under Thomasius’ professorial direction. In these works Thomasius addresses the concrete problem of how to construct a political–judicial programme for detaching the exercise of civil power from the forms of religious authority. Moreover, he did so under circumstances in which most citizens were still learning their civil duties through religious instruction, and in which most theologians and philosophers were still teaching that individuals acceded to their civil duties via their Christian moral personality. If, as we have suggested, its foundation in moral anthropology ultimately rendered Thomasius’ natural law incapable of dealing with these circumstances, this is because it meant that he continued to ground civil power in a particular way of acceding to moral truth. This is the lesson to be learned from the figure of the Epicurean sage in the Fundamenta, who sets the thresholds between morality and law through his own exemplary moral selfgovernance. Under historical circumstances, however, in which the linkage between political rule and communal moral culture continued to threaten social peace with religious civil war, Thomasius’ natural law

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



reached its limits – as indeed did all the other forms of natural law that grounded civil duties in moral anthropology. For, in the sphere of political decision per se, what these circumstances demanded was not a better (deconfessionalised) moral culture for the ruler, but a radical uncoupling of political rule from moral culture, security from sanctity, the prince from the sage. This helps to explain why key Pufendorfian doctrines that play no role in Thomasius’ natural law – the doctrines of imposed offices and ‘absolute’ sovereignty – suddenly become central to Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht. In taking up Pufendorf ’s officio doctrine in this new context, Thomasius uses it consign the pursuit of moral truth and the imposition of civil obligation to two distinct offices – those of the teacher and the prince – thereby suspending all moral–philosophical foundations for civil governance, including his own. He does so in order to construct a political jurisprudence capable of meeting the contingency in which all religious and moral doctrine – true or false – was capable of threatening social peace, and therefore had to be regulated independently of its veracity. We have already observed, however, that Thomasius’ political jurisprudence of church governance is not grounded in an all-embracing rationalist philosophy, designed to extirpate religion or to transform it into an expression of man’s rational autonomy. On the contrary, Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is grounded in two interrelated doctrinal fields – a spiritualist theology and a statist politics – designed to support a dual programme: the spiritualisation of religion and the desacralisation of politics. The result of this dual formulation is a Staatskirchenrecht in which the ‘visible church’ and the clerical estate are to be excluded from all exercise of civil power, but in which the state must exercise its power without concerning itself with the ‘private’ pursuit of transcendent truth and moral regeneration. Given this remarkable outcome, we should discuss its two doctrinal sources in a little more detail. Thomasius’ conception of religion in the Vollständige Erläuterung is dominated by a spiritualistic and inwardist, typically Protestant, understanding of moral renewal and salvation. Drawing in part on Gottfried Arnold’s Unparteiysche Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of Religion and Heresy), Thomasius argues that moral regeneration can only occur when individuals, eschewing all sacerdotal and ceremonial assistance, acknowledge their misery and freely open themselves to the gratuitous grace of a loving but inscrutable God. None of the rites and ceremonies of the visible church, none of the metaphysical doctrines and articles of



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

faith – which have only served to promote religious discord and heresyhunting – can affect an individual’s moral condition, which is determined solely by the inner relation of the will to God. From this arises an ecclesiology grounded in a radical distinction between the visible and invisible church: The only precept that Christ has given us is the precept of love. All the rest is unnecessary and lacks the character of a true church . . . Christ said, though: ‘By love you should know that you are my disciples’; and Peter said: ‘God has chosen some from among all peoples’; because God is always gracious and sees into the heart of man. And so one finds nothing of the visible church in Christ’s teaching, which much more rebukes the Jews for this, that they concern themselves with external ceremonies and holy days . . . Hence the distinction that when someone seeks the true church in external and visible things, they depart from the Scriptures. Because [the true church] is understood as the invisible community, and all predicates [of the church] apply to the invisible church, which is alone holy, and in which Christians are unified in God; and this church is eternally one. (VKR, .., –)

Like Pufendorf, Thomasius regards this spiritualistic form of religion, epitomised in the simple and loving relation between Christ and his disciples, as the original or ‘primitive’ form of Christianity (DHR, §, –; VKR, , –). In making this non-sacramental private faith the key to salvation, both thinkers distinguish it from ‘natural religion’, which is a minimalistic religion taught by the state for civil purposes but having no bearing on salvation. According to Thomasius’ Arnoldian religious history, primitive Christianity was traduced through the historical assimilation of two other traditions. As a result of the adoption of Jewish ceremonial and political law – regarding such matters as baptism and Sabbath observance – Christianity developed into a religion claiming the capacity to save through sacramental rituals and, consequently, the right to a share in the political governance of a Christian state (VKR, , –). Next, through the absorption of Greek philosophy into its theology – specifically the metaphysical doctrine that man is a being who might be regenerated through the purification of his intellect – Christianity gave birth to a speculative religiosity or religiose speculation. This in turn gave rise to the view that individual salvation depends on knowledge of specific intellectual doctrines and articles of faith (VKR, .., ). We have, of course, already encountered this view of Greek philosophy in Thomasius’ Foreword to Grotius, where he treats Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics as the source of a ‘secret theology’, teaching the

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



possibility of moral regeneration through speculation and mystical ascent to the pure intellectual forms (VG, –). Thomasius leaves us in no doubt that Jewish ceremonial law and Greek philosophy are in fact stalking-horses for the ecclesiology and metaphysical theology of Lutheran orthodoxy, whose representatives he calls ‘our papists’. Indeed, the whole point of Thomasius’ Arnoldian ecclesiastical history is to demonstrate the illegitimacy of confessional religion: that is, religion claiming a share in civil authority on the basis of credal doctrines and saving ceremonies. Similarly, the object of Thomasius’ spiritualist theology is to deny that moral renewal is in any way dependent on the sacramental ceremonies of the Lutheran church or the metaphysical doctrines of its theology faculties. Salvation is wholly a matter of the private opening of the spirit to a God who sees into hearts: Whether we consider God or man, we will find nothing from which reason could conclude that God demands such external forms of worship from us. For he has an exact knowledge of the heart and needs no external ceremonies for us to declare our will to him. And as for that which most pleases him in his service, this too is best known by him. From this our reason must conclude that there is nothing in the nature of God that commands us to an external worship of him. (RFM, § , )

The notion of compulsory forms of worship is thus entirely foreign to true religion, which consists in the free dedication of the will to God. Consequently, orthodoxy’s claims to theological truth and sacerdotal mediation must be treated as ‘priestcraft’, as a use of false doctrine to secure the clergy’s civil power. Similarly, in claiming a share in the governance of a Christian state – through its jurisdiction over blasphemy and heresy and its claims to the ‘power of the keys’ (ex-communication) – the church must be seen as betraying its true role in opening souls to God, and as usurping coercive powers properly belonging to the civil sovereign alone (VKR, .., –). In complementing this spiritualist theology with a desacralised conception of politics and the state, Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht draws directly on Pufendorf ’s doctrines of imposed moral offices and absolute sovereignty. No matter how alien it might be to the teachings of modern moral philosophy, Pufendorf ’s conception of sovereignty holds that the state’s rights and powers are not delegated to it on the condition that it realise man’s moral being, but only so that it might preserve security, which is thus the only legitimate end of the state. In his discussion of the prince’s right to dispose over religious adiaphora – all aspects



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

of religion not necessary for salvation – Thomasius follows Pufendorf to the letter: Because they concern the fundamental laws of particular republics, through which the exercise of sovereign territorial government is observed and limited, the rights to which a prince is entitled in religious matters, in accordance with the law of nature and the properties of sovereign government, can best be discussed in relation to the ultimate end of republics and the causes from which they arise. The ultimate end of the republic in this ruined condition is that the subjects need it for protection against the evil and cunning attacks of other people, to which they were prey in the state of nature from their more powerful neighbours. For apart from God there is no more powerful means to curb human evil and to attain security than this wise invention: that many men by means of a pact subordinate their will and their power to the will of another, for the common benefit of the whole community of subjects. Without doubt, then, a prince must be entitled to as much power as is required for attaining the ultimate end of the republic; that is, for [attaining] its internal and external calm and peace. (RFM, § , –)

To the extent that it now finds its end solely in preserving the security of a territorial population, all coercive power – all right to make law and war – belongs to the civil sovereign alone. Moreover, to the extent that it disturbs the republic, the prince is justified in using this power against all kinds of conduct, religious as well as worldly; for, as a recent period of religious civil war has shown, religious conduct can also cause great harm to the commonwealth: Is it not shown in Germany and all the kingdoms of Europe what kind of disaster and injury comes from religious conflict and rebellion? Were the power to suppress such disturbance as arises from religion now to be removed from the prince, so the whole republic would certainly be ruined. Therefore, to my way of thinking, they reason correctly and prudently who say: That in so far as it stands in their free will, all conduct of subjects – both natural and moral – is subject to the power of the prince . . . Because damage to the republic can arise from all such conduct of subjects. (RFM, § , –)

In combining statist sovereignty doctrine and spiritualistic theology, Thomasius’ political jurisprudence of church governance gives rise to a far-reaching programme for deconfessionalising the church and the state. In the first place, by construing all religious ceremonies as ‘middlethings’ or adiaphora – that is, things neither commanded nor forbidden by divine or natural law – he is able to bring the entirety of church law and liturgy within the supervision of the territorial sovereign, giving rise to a conception of church governance known as ‘territorialism’ (Schlaich ). In the lengthy discussion that comprises the seventh

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



chapter of the second volume of the Vollständige Erläuterung, Thomasius applies the category of adiaphora to all the central sacraments of the church. Here he treats baptism, catechisation, the Eucharist, confession, exorcism, marriage, and ordination as ceremonies inessential to inner ‘saving’ religion, hence as open to the sovereign’s supervision, should they give rise to uncivil conduct (VKR, ., –). As for the competing theological doctrines of the three major confessions and the various sects, the prince should endorse none of them; for their intellectual and compulsory nature make them all equally distant from the genuine religion of those who seek salvation in ‘simple active Christianity’. Political prudence dictates, however, that the prince steer his public pronouncements mid-way between the extreme ritualism of the Catholics and orthodox Lutherans, and the equally extreme spiritualism of the Quakers and other illuminati. The only public religion suited to both true piety and the desacralised state is natural religion. This is a religion whose few simple propositions – that there is a God, that Christ teaches us to love God and our neighbour – both agree with true Christianity and are accessible to natural reason, yet do not give rise to any religious–civil rights that might subtract from secular sovereignty. The spiritualisation of religion in Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is thus reciprocally related to his secularisation of the visible church. At the same time, however, the prince may not exercise his supervision of religion on the basis of his own insight into moral truth, or in order to make his subjects holy. Instead, in keeping with the rest of the state’s sovereign powers, the prince’s right over religion must be exercised solely in accordance with the end of civil security, against conduct threatening social peace. On the basis of this construction of the state’s religious neutrality, or indifference to transcendent truth, Thomasius was able to develop one of the most far-reaching of all the early modern doctrines of religious toleration. Using injury to civil peace as his sole criterion for state intervention in religious affairs, he is able to extend the threshold of toleration beyond the Protestant churches to include sects harbouring heterodox conceptions of the Trinity and mediation. Thomasius thus offers the following fundamental criticism of the demand by Leipzig’s leading controversial theologian – J. B. Carpzov – that Socinians and Arians be treated as criminal heretics: Disagreement as such does not disturb the tranquillity of the republic – even though the Socinians say that Christ is not truly God, or the Arians that Christ is not co-eternal with the Father . . . Of course it cannot be denied that here they err gravely, especially because they fail to recognise their own misery. But



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

why should the prince force them into exile? Such people can still also be good and honourable citizens. They give the prince their taxes and obey his commands, make good soldiers, and so on. It is not they who disturb the republic but the intemperate geniuses [i.e., controversial theologians like Carpzov], who moan and complain about each other . . . . (VKR, , p. )

Further, on the same basis, Thomasius was able move beyond both Locke’s refusal to extend toleration to atheists, and Locke’s and Pufendorf ’s unwillingness to offer it to Catholics. Locke had claimed that atheists could not be trusted to honour oaths, and both he and Pufendorf argued that Catholics, in owing allegiance to a foreign monarch, could not be good citizens of the territorial state. Thomasius’ remarkable account of his own change of mind on these questions warrants an extended quotation: Religions as such do not disturb external peace, and where their teachings are so disposed [to tranquillity], then the prince can well tolerate them. For those who deny the Trinity do not immediately disturb the state. Where, though, such people do disturb the state, then the prince’s duty (Officium Principis) demands that he expel them from the republic. In fact, in the past I maintained that nothing could be more injurious to the republic than atheism. Now, though, I recognise this to be false. Who then may not be tolerated in the republic? Our author [Pufendorf] responds: the papists – because they say that a prince belonging to another religion may be killed in good conscience, and that heretics may not defend the faith. These principles are against the law and disturb the republic – as one has seen in France – which means that they should not be tolerated. For my part, I will not here inquire into the facts of the case, which are no doubt deserving of respect. Nonetheless, we must not impute the principles of the Jesuits to everyone. And if a prince were to act on the basis that disturbance could arise from a doctrine as a matter of probable consequence, he would tolerate no religion; for the Lutheran religion can also give occasion to turbulence as a matter of consequence. Those who say that true religion is contrary to state utility delude themselves, and we therefore maintain that noone should be exiled on the grounds of [religious] disagreement. (VKR, , –)

Through this dual strategy – of spiritualising religion by secularising the visible church, and desacralising the state by establishing its religious neutrality – Thomasius establishes a threshold for the state’s intervention in the church which varies with religion’s capacity to damage civil society. This marks an important advance on the threshold used in the De Habitu. Here Pufendorf had attempted to draw a firm line between the internal order of the church which should be left to the clergy (liturgy, sacraments), and the external order open to control by the

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



prince through the Consistory (appointment of priests, funding, and administration of church property) (DHR, –). The problem with this solution, Thomasius argues, is that it leads to irresolvable argument over whether a certain matter should be regarded as internal or external, thereby paralysing the state’s capacity for political action. The two cases that Thomasius uses to exemplify this argument in the Recht in Mitteldingen indicate both the kind of problem his floating threshold was intended to address and its success in doing so. Consider the case, says Thomasius, of a Catholic prince who, after the Treaty of Westphalia, finds himself ruling over a territory inside whose Lutheran churches the congregations are singing hymns extolling the Pope’s murder. The question of whether the prince has the right to suppress this conduct cannot be solved via the distinction between the internal and external governance of the church; for this case can be argued passionately on both sides, depending on how hymn-singing is classified. Using Thomasius’ threshold, however, the prince can readily be assigned this right, regardless of whether hymns are normally seen as belonging to the internal liturgical order of the church; for this is conduct that foments communal hatreds and thereby damages civil peace (RFM, § , –). At the same time, however, the sovereign must not attempt to exercise this right on the basis of his religious persona or in a manner that coerces the conscience of his citizens. This is the point of the second example, which concerns the question – much disputed by the ‘doctors’ – of whether Protestant princes have the right to compel their Jewish subjects to attend Christian worship. Again, this case had proved irresolvable using the internal–external division, due to the lack of agreement over how to classify church services. And again, Thomasius’ floating threshold provides an unambiguous resolution, this time denying the right: The rule we have provided above decides the matter quite clearly. Since to attend the churches and participate in the worship of the Christians appears unjust and aggravating to the Jews, and since it is of no assistance to the peace and calm of the country, so one should not compel their conscience. Though their conscience is erroneous, it will not be helped from error through compulsion, but only if one associates with them in a friendly manner, providing them with a good example so that they might better agree with reason and the teachings of Christ. (RFM, § , –)

In short, given their indifference to salvation, all religious ceremonies are potential objects of political supervision. Yet whether they meet with toleration or suppression must in no way depend upon the state’s religious



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

or moral ideology, being determined instead by the sole criterion of civil disturbance. The mixture of spiritualist theology and statist politics informing Thomasius’ Pufendorfian Staatskirchenrecht presents the post-Kantian history of moral philosophy with insurmountable difficulties. Written from the standpoint of its own (neo-Kantian or neo-Aristotelian) moral anthropology, this historiography continues to derive political rights from a theory of moral personality or moral community, and it imagines that civil society resulted from the extension of reason and democracy. It is thus predisposed to assimilate Pufendorfian Staatskirchenrecht to moral philosophy, either by treating it as the expression of a particular moral anthropology, or by criticising it for its ‘unreconciled’ spiritualist and statist aspects. In her discussion of Pufendorf ’s construction of natural religion and religious toleration, Simone Zurbuchen ignores his doctrine of imposed moral offices, and, drawing on Denzer, interprets Pufendorf as advancing an Aristotelian conception of the state as the ‘natural’ vehicle of man’s moral perfection and moral community (Zurbuchen , ). On this basis, Zurbuchen makes Pufendorf ’s doctrine of natural religion into the foundation of his natural law – instead of the other way around – thereby treating political obligation as an expression of the commands of natural religion. Seen in this light, Pufendorf ’s doctrine of religious toleration appears as the recognition of a subjective right to religious self-realisation, rather than as a means of desacralising the state by eliminating the civil power of the church. Consequently, Zurbuchen treats Pufendorf ’s statist defence of the sovereign’s right to supervise the church as a deviation, induced by reason of state doctrine (Zurbuchen , ). We have already dealt with modern attempts to assimilate Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority to neo-Kantian and neo-Aristotelian moral anthropologies (.). Through his doctrine of imposed offices, Pufendorf was able to detach sovereignty from its moral ties – to self-legislating reason or the self-perfecting community – and ground it instead in sovereign commands issued in accordance with the end of security. Far from representing an anomaly or contradiction in Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ thought, their simultaneous advocacy of religious toleration and the political supervision of religion indicates that these were reciprocating strategies grounded in the end of security and oriented to the desacralisation of politics. In making Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed moral offices central to his Staatskirchenrecht, Thomasius was not attempting to provide any kind of moral philosophical basis for the state’s super-

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



vision of religious authority. Rather, in using it to separate the offices of ruler and subject, teacher and auditor, he was attempting to combat the dominant Lutheran doctrines of church governance, which were designed to maintain the independent civil power of the church. We recall that, in contrast with Pufendorf ’s officio doctrine, the neoscholastic metaphysics of the person unites all offices and duties in a core rational substance or imago Dei, modelled on the unity of Christ’s natures and offices in his personal substance. In this regard at least, by continuing to ground civil power in moral personhood, modern moral philosophy remains affiliated to the metaphysics of the person that Pufendorf and Thomasius set out to destroy. As we have already observed, in both neoscholastic and rationalist natural metaphysics, this Christian metaphysics of the person was used to support the merging of religious and political offices required to maintain clerical power in confessional societies. This provides the setting in which Thomasius did battle with the central doctrines of Lutheran church law. This interdependency of Christian metaphysical personalism and confessional political theology is evident in the central doctrines of Lutheran ecclesiology and church law. Schlaich discusses several such doctrines, three of which are of particular importance for us (Schlaich , –). First, the ‘three-estate doctrine’ (Dreiständlehre) taught that the church consists of three Stände or statuses: the princely, clerical, and popular estates (status politicus, ecclesiasticus und popularis). In thus superimposing the three traditional social estates – the governing, teaching, and popular estates – on the order of the church, it forms a theory of the church that doubles as a theory of politics and society. In fact, in proposing that the three estates are unified in the church as Christ’s mystical body, this doctrine is a means of showing that civil and religious authority are harmonised in a single end – the governance of the moral community – which has to be shared between the prince and the clergy. The Dreiständlehre was closely associated with the second doctrine, which elaborated a sharp distinction between the inner and outer governance of the church. This, as we have already observed, was intended to reserve certain ecclesiastical powers – preaching, administration of sacraments, the ‘power of the keys’ – solely to the clergy, while confining the prince’s role to the external administration and defence of the church. Finally, the ‘two-person doctrine’ (Zwei-Personen-Lehre) taught that just as Christ’s person united his divine and human natures, so too the ruler united two personae, those of bishop and civil sovereign. This allowed legal theologians to argue that the prince receives his rights from two different



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

sources, Imperial canon law and territorial Staatsrecht. The prince’s episcopal rights should therefore limit his exercise of territorial sovereignty, while this exercise should in turn be governed by the purpose of his episcopal office, the defence of the faith. In all three doctrines, by establishing the interdependency of civil and religious offices, the metaphysical conceptions of the integral person and the moral community (church) offered religious intellectuals a weapon to combat the complete absorption of their estate powers into the summum imperium of the sovereign territorial state. In using Pufendorf ’s conception of differentiated moral offices to criticise these doctrines, Thomasius’ Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten shows that civil philosophy’s attack on the Christian metaphysics of the person represents something far more momentous than a conflict between rival moral philosophies. Written in response to Carpzov’s attempt to restrict the state’s capacity to intervene in religious controversies, this disputation again reveals the degree to which the attack on university metaphysics was central not only to the desacralisation of political culture, but also to the political subordination of the clerical estate to the territorial state. In arguing that, as part of the church’s ‘teaching estate’, orthodox theology faculties possess the civil jurisdiction to decide theological controversies – and in further arguing that the prince, by virtue of his joint episcopal and civil personae, has a duty to compel church attendance – Carpzov demonstrates typical orthodox uses of the Dreiständlehre and the two-persons doctrine. Thomasius’ attack on these arguments provides an object lesson in the historical role of Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed moral entities, and his natural law more generally. In the first place, argues Thomasius, Carpzov is wrong to claim that the church consists of the political, clerical, and popular estates; for these statuses pertain to the civil state and not the spiritual community, which consists only of the statuses of teacher and auditor: Here all the other ends pertaining to man cease. Hence just as it would be illogical for me to take the Christian church – which contains nobles and non-nobles in a spiritual community – and wish to divide it into the noble and non-noble, so it is also inept if one says that the Christian church consists of the civil authority, teachers and subjects; because these are moral entities not regarded in the Christian church. And, in this respect and purpose, the first and last of these persons would be relinquished, in that they pertain only to the worldly state, while on the other hand in the church they are considered only as auditors. (RFS, )

From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence



Given that the persons of subject and ruler do not exist in the church – given that here there is no civil authority – Carpzov has no grounds for claiming that theologians possess the civil authority to adjudicate public theological controversies. Next, the fact that the individual who is prince may also be a member of the church, does not mean that he represents his princely persona in the church. Citing Pufendorf as his authority, Thomasius insists that: ‘It is a known fact that an individual may represent several personae in accordance with the different offices he bears’ (RFS, ). The doctrine that the prince unites a religious and a civil persona – bishop and sovereign – within a single capacity is thus based on a confusion. Instead, the prince is the bearer of three statuses, each of which imposes its own duties. As a man, the prince is like all men in being bound by the natural law of sociable love for his fellow man. As a Christian the prince is bound to observe the laws of Christianity and, in recognising the common misery of the human race, to trust in the redeemer and hope to acquire ‘a true living faith’, which consists in the living of a good life. As a prince, however, the prince’s only duty is to maintain the public peace and security of his subjects, using appropriate means of compulsion (RFS, –). This means that the prince’s sovereign right of religious supervision may not be divided or limited, as if his religious persona had some share in it: ‘If one observes that rights in religious matters are just as much a part of sovereign majesty as other regalia [royal rights], flowing from the same source as the others, then one would not come to this twofold consideration of the prince’ (RFS, ). At the same, however – testifying to the ‘liberal’ wing of Thomasius’ desacralising strategy – this division of offices also means that the prince may not seek to fulfil religious duties in his civil person. As subjects of a desacralising state, citizens should not be required to be holy, only lawabiding: ‘From this end [social peace] one learns the duties of the prince quite clearly . . . And given this end it is not necessary that subjects dedicate their whole hearts to the cultivation of virtue . . ., but it is enough for this that they refrain from external vice to the extent that it disturbs the peace’ (RFS, ). Given that the state’s rights and powers reach no further than the preservation of external peace, then the prince must not attempt to rule in such a way as to make his subjects holy: Now it follows . . . that the duty of a prince goes no further than external peace; and if he preserves this among the subjects then he has fulfilled his duty. If therefore he wishes to go further, then he manifests himself in the person of a



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

man or a Christian, in which capacities, though, a prince may use no coercive force, but only the sound reason and Christianity that each man and Christian may use in relation to those he seeks to lead to the right path. (RFS, –)

Hence, while the prince has the right to compel the termination of public theological disputes he may do so only in accordance with his political office – that is, only when they threaten civil order. This means that he must do so in complete disregard of the truth or falsity of the contending doctrines. Otherwise, he must leave his subjects to resolve such matters through their own reason, in their capacities as teachers and auditors; for, just as the laws of grammar lie beyond the prince’s civil authority, so too do religious truths (RFS, –). It should already be clear that the tremors from this reconstruction of the moral and political landscape would shake cultural precincts well beyond those of Lutheran orthodoxy. If transcendent truths play no role in the renovation of man’s will, and if the legitimacy of political rule is dependent on the sovereign eschewing all interest in transcendent truths, then it is not only religious doctrine that must be excluded from the sphere of political authority. So too must metaphysical ethics and, indeed, the domain of academic practical philosophy more generally; for it also teaches that man’s perfection is intellectual and that the end of politics is tied to man’s moral completion. As we have seen, Thomasius was acutely aware that it was not just in moral theology that civil duties were held to be dependent on adherence to true intellectual doctrine and the doctrine of the true intellect. This also occurred in those rationalist philosophical doctrines which taught that man accedes to this civil duties through contemplation of pure concepts of goodness and justice, and that man could come to govern his own conduct through the perfection of his intellect (VKR, , –). For, in teaching that the exercise of civil governance should be grounded in the pursuit of moral perfection, these doctrines continued to reserve a place for the morally perfect in the exercise of civil power. This accounts for the drive to harmonise the figures of the sage and the prince – philosophy and government – in the whole line of metaphysical philosophy that stretches from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond. As the direct inheritor of this lineage, modern (neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian) moral philosophy continues to treat politics as grounded in and limited by the need to realise moral personality. In imagining that political society might one day converge with moral community, moral philosophy maintains the church as a political concept; and in insisting that the moral exercise of civil authority requires the co-operation of

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists



philosophers and statesmen, it harbours the image of the political sage. As a result, while moral philosophy honours one half of Pufendorf ’s formula for civil society – that there is no civil jurisdiction over truth – it represses the other half: that truth should have no civil jurisdiction. This is because it continues to teach that the legitimacy of government depends upon realising the moral personality or moral community, which requires the political actualisation of moral philosophy. It has been argued that this failure to observe the separation of political and moral governance can imbue rationalist philosophy with an intolerant cultural and political demeanour (Koselleck ). As we have noted (..), Leibniz’s attack on Thomasius’ decriminalisation of heresy – in which he insists on error remaining punishable as the condition of building a society based on truth – shows that this problem is more than just a theoretical possibility. If Leibniz continued to regard heresy as a crime that is because, for rationalist metaphysics, civil duties are acceded to through personal insight into moral ideas, and civil governance is conditional on moral self-governance. In thus grounding civil and transcendental–moral duties in a single source – the practice of contemplative self-governance – metaphysical ethics promises to redeem political compulsion through the recovery of its justifying moral principles; yet, in doing so, threatens to make these principles politically compulsory. As we shall now see, it was not Leibniz but Kant who rescued political metaphysics and political eschatology from the onslaught launched by Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ civil philosophy. It was Kant who showed moral philosophers how to re-enter the domain of political governance from which they had been expelled. They would return not as a clerical estate possessing its own share of civil authority, but as a clerisy of academic intellectuals, claiming powers from a source higher than the end of social peace – ‘critical reason’.   :    ,  ,           In  Christian Wolff (–) published his Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Rational Thoughts on God, the World, the Human Soul, and all Things in General), usually referred to as the German Metaphysics. Occurring eight years before Thomasius’ death and four years before Kant’s birth, this publication signalled the return of a full-blooded metaphysical scholasticism to the Protestant university, in fact to the University of Halle where Thomasius remained a leading figure. Despite its occasional appeal to Cartesian



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

method, Wolff’s German Metaphysics represents an elaboration and systematisation of Leibniz’s metaphysics. While paying less attention to Leibniz’s monadology and doctrine of pre-established harmony, Wolff draws directly on his mentor’s principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, treating them as the means by which the philosopher abstracts from empirical appearances and ascends to the pure concepts or divine perfections that contain the possibility of things. The German Metaphysics thus possesses the same theo-rationalist character as Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, with Wolff treating the world as the mirror of the divine perfections and its creatures as reflections of the divine intellect: ‘And after that nothing remains than that the world represents God’s perfections as in a mirror. This is the intention which God can realise through the world, and one is wont to call it the glorification or splendour of God: that one may therefore say, God has made the world for the sake of his glory’ (GM, § , ). Using a Scotist interpretation of the principle of contradiction – as the law through which a divine intellect joins atomic possibilia into the concepts of empirically possible things – Wolff improvised his own version of the traditional scholastic conception of metaphysics, calling it ‘the science of the possible as possible’. For their part, the empirical or ‘historical’ sciences represent a less exalted level of the metaphysical hierarchy. Like Albertus Magnus, Wolff treats these sciences as apprehending the possibilia not as they issue timelessly from the divine intellect, but only in the obscure and fragmentary form in which they are given to the human senses in time. Moreover, by treating God, too, as bound by the laws of intelligible possibility, Wolff could entertain the rationalist conjecture that the laws of the universe would remain whether God existed or not. We need to recall however that, despite the common interpretation of it as symptomatic of the secularisation of metaphysics, this conjecture was in fact a standard anti-voluntarist trope of theo-rational metaphysics (Tierney , –). If Wolff’s German Metaphysics represents the transformation of Leibniz’s metaphysical sketches into a full-blown rationalist scholasticism, then the ethical, theological, and political outworkings of this doctrine are also strikingly similar to those adumbrated by Leibniz. Wolff’s German Ethics – the Vernünftige Gedanken von der menschen Tun und Lassen zu Beförderung ihrer Glückseeligkeit (Rational Thoughts on Human Conduct, for the Promotion of his Happiness) – may be regarded as an elaboration of Leibniz’s metaphysical conception of morality. Like his predecessor, Wolff treats the contemplation of the divine perfections or concepts as

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists



the means by which humans perfect their intellectual natures, thereby aspiring to a condition of rational self-purification in which rational conduct and felicity are one and the same. He leaves us in no doubt as to the theo-rational character of this construction of morality: Because a rational man is a law to himself and apart from natural obligation needs no other, so neither rewards nor punishments motivate him to good actions and to the avoidance of evil ones. And therefore a rational [man] accomplishes the good because it is good, and refrains from the evil because it is evil: in which case he will be similar to God, who has no superior to obligate him to do the good and refrain from the evil, but does the former and refrains from the latter through the perfection of his nature. (GE, §, pp. –)

Even more so than Leibniz, Wolff conceived rationalist metaphysics as an alternative religion. In treating the purifying ascent to the divine perfections not just as the key to natural theology but also as the foundation of a civil religion – one capable of overcoming confessional division and reunifying Christendom – Wolff rendered explicit the quasi-religious character of his mentor’s metaphysics. Finally, in his German Politics – or Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (Rational Thoughts on the Social Life of Man and in particular the Republic, ) – Wolff reveals the consequences of using Leibniz’s metaphysics to interpret the political pact and the formation of the state. As might be expected, he treats the political pact as the contract through which men enter into society on the condition that the state will perfect their intellectual nature (GP, § –, –). Wolff thus ignores Pufendorf ’s focus on the imposition of civil sovereignty as the means of achieving security, endorsing instead the moral–teleological conception of the state mis-ascribed to Pufendorf by his neo-Aristotelian interpreters. In keeping with this conception of the state, Wolff conceives civil authority as unifying the ‘two persons’ of the sage and the prince, as outlined in his essay Von den Regenten, die sich Weltweisheit befleistigen, und von den Weltweisen, die das Regiment führen (On Princes who Cultivate Philosophy, and on Philosophers who Direct Government, ). Here Wolff adduces two main arguments for grounding the exercise of civil sovereignty in philosophical knowledge and its transcendent truth. First, considering that like all empirical phenomena the state is merely the sensory appearance of transcendent concepts, and given that only the metaphysician has full access to these, then only the sage may determine the true end of the state – namely, the perfection of man’s intellectual nature (VRW, –). Second, as the true direction of government requires a ruler who has purified himself of all self-interest



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

and thereby acts on the basis of rational insight alone, only the metaphysical sage is in a position to direct the government (VRW, –). Having established the metaphysical continuum between the pursuit of moral perfection and the exercise of civil power, Wolff is able to justify the use of civil coercion to compel this perfection, demanding not just that Deists and atheists be stripped of their citizenship, but also that books be censored and religious worship be made compulsory (Dreitzel , ). Even more indicative of the neo-confessional character of Wolff’s metaphysical programme is that fact that, in his natural law, he seeks to make natural religion itself politically compulsory (Link , ). Unlike the natural religion developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius, Wolff’s is not a minimalist theology subordinate to the end of social peace. Rather it is a fully fledged civil religion grounded in the truth of Wolff’s natural theology, again fulfilling the tendency towards a compulsory metaphysical religion that we noted in Leibniz. Given the completeness of the opposition between Thomasian civil philosophy and Wolffian metaphysics – beginning with their rival conceptions of philosophy and its relation to theology, reflected in their fundamentally different ethical and natural law doctrines, and issuing finally in radically opposed conceptions of the relation between politics and transcendent morality – we should not be surprised that they came into conflict at Halle. Despite their private animosity, however – Wolff describing Thomasius as a mathematical ‘idiot’ in a letter to Leibniz – this was a war carried out by proxy, through the followers rather than the masters themselves. As Arndt has shown, the conflict between Halle’s Thomasians and Wolffians occurred earlier than and independent of that between Wolff and the Pietists, beginning in , well before Wolff officially launched his metaphysical programme, and triggered by his defence of mathematical method in philosophy (Arndt ). Still, even at this stage, it was the metaphysical grounding and claims of Wolff’s mathematical method – his treatment of it as an ars combinatoria capable of determining the possibilia of the objects of all the sciences – that aroused the opposition of Thomasius’ followers. Yet, for all their interest as pointers to the ongoing struggle between the ‘rival enlightenments’, these skirmishes between the Wolffians and Thomasians were only a curtain-raiser to the major attack on Wolff’s metaphysics – that launched by the Halle Pietists in  (Hinrichs , –). The Pietist campaign was led by Joachim Lange, an able controversialist, and Johann Francis Budde(us), who would become one of

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists



Pietism’s leading theologians and a representative of the ‘theological enlightenment’ (Bianco ; Sparn ). Despite the comprehensive nature of their attack on what they christened the ‘Leibniz–Wolff philosophy’, Lange and Budde singled out two aspects of Wolff’s metaphysics for special attention. First, they targeted the ‘fatalism’ of Wolff’s metaphysical cosmology. According to Budde, in treating divine intellection as the source of the intelligible substances while simultaneously treating God’s will as bound by the logic of choosing the best possible set of relations between these substances – the ‘best possible world’ – Wolff’s metaphysics subordinates the divine will to cosmic necessity. Not only does this appear to make God responsible for the world’s evil, it also deprives human action of the freedom necessary for sin, responsibility, and justification (Budde , –, –, –). Secondly, the Pietists took issue with Wolff’s metaphysical anthropology. Here, Budde argues, in adopting Leibniz’s bifurcated doctrine of the active intellectual soul and the passive senses, together with the associated doctrine of the pre-established harmony of soul and body, Wolff’s anthropology is completely inimical to Christian morality. On the one hand, Wolff’s anthropology continues the fatalism of his cosmology by denying the soul’s capacity to control the body, leading all its actions to be treated as predetermined through their prior harmonisation with those of the body, and depriving man of the free will required for the imputation of sin. On the other hand, by treating the soul or intellect as perfecting itself through self-conformation to the laws of natural perfection, Wolff’s metaphysics excludes divine will and grace from the determination of morality, allowing humans to regenerate themselves through their natural rational capacities (Budde , –, –, –). In short, Lange and Budde were reactivating some of the classic arguments of Lutheran voluntarist theology, hostile to both monistic philosophical conceptions of God’s relation to the world, and to the ‘Pelagian’ doctrine that man might regenerate himself through philosophical selfpurification, without need of the means of grace provided by Christian faith. Moreover, they were directing these arguments against a metaphysical philosophy which, we have argued (.), was itself the product of a Platonistic modification of seventeenth-century Lutheran Schulmetaphysik. In the event, after a protracted intellectual and political battle – involving both sides making representations to the court in Berlin, the appointment of an investigative commission, and the direct



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

participation of the cabinet and Friedrich Wilhelm I – the controversy ended in November , with Wolff’s dismissal from the university and exiling from Brandenburg-Prussia by royal decree (Hinrichs , –). If the conflict between Thomasians and Wolffians offers us a further window onto the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy, then Wolff’s battle with the Pietists is indicative of the longstanding conflict between Lutheranism’s metaphysical and voluntarist wings. The Halle events thus provide us with a snapshot of the German academy’s ‘intellectual civil war’ as this passed into the eighteenth century. With the notable exception of Hinrichs’ valuable study, however, the standard interpretations of these events fail to reveal their historical significance. For a long time Wolff’s exiling was interpreted as a victory of religious obscurantism over philosophical Enlightenment – a victory soon to be reversed, with the great philosopher’s triumphant return to Halle in  at the request of the enlightened Frederick II (Beck , ; Zeller ). The inadequacy of this interpretation should already be clear. In treating Wolffian doctrine as grounded in secular reason as opposed to religious authority, it overlooks the cultural and religious dimension of Wolff’s metaphysics, thereby misunderstanding the character of the Pietist opposition to it. In presenting his metaphysics as an integral anthropology and cosmology, holding the key to both personal regeneration and socio-moral renewal, Wolff was responsible for launching metaphysics as an academic religion. Attuned to the manner in which Leibniz’s metaphysics transferred the formerly esoteric authority of metaphysical holiness to the secular philosopher, Wolff took this adumbration and actualised it at the level of the university curriculum. Far from representing the reaction of religious obscurantism to rationalist enlightenment, then, Lange and Budde were engaging Wolff on a shared ground, countering his intellectualist anthropology and cosmology with their own voluntarist kind. Even though their doctrine was oriented to the inward search for the signs of grace and rebirth, while Wolff’s was intended to induce self-purifying philosophical ascent to contemplation of the intelligibles, both were in fact spiritual disciplines administered to overlapping intellectual elites as exercises in moral regeneration. For this reason, we should also be sceptical of a second longstanding interpretation of the Halle events, which unites Thomasius and the Pietists in a line of ‘Thomasian–Pietist’ philosophy – Rüdiger, Hoffmann, Crusius (Carboncini ; Tonelli ; Tonelli ). There is of course some justification for this linkage, as Thomasian and Pietist

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists



thought overlap through a common ‘spiritualist’ anti-metaphysical theology, and in their shared hostility to metaphysical cosmology and anthropology, with its intellectualist conception of a philosophical path to moral regeneration. Nonetheless, it is misleading to treat this overlap as the source of a Thomasian–Pietist philosophy. As we have seen, Thomasius’ spiritualist theology has a quite different organisation and aim to the Pietist version, being partnered by a statist conception of political governance, and being directed towards the privatisation of faith, rather than the Pietist’s general reformation of society. To see this, we need only take note of the Pietist’s attack on Thomasius’ decorum doctrine; for in separating the cultivation of decorum from the pursuit of moral regeneration – treating the former as suited to a ‘decent public life’ in civil society and the latter as a matter of private faith and grace – Thomasius was rejecting the claims of Pietist fideism to provide a single foundation for civil and religious governance; just as he rejected the analogous claims made by the rationalist metaphysicians (Hinrichs , –). Further, we can observe that, unlike Crusius, Thomasius was not interested in harmonising academic philosophy and voluntarist theology. On the contrary, he explicitly rejected this programme, seeking to reduce theology to the status of an informulable private faith, and to return philosophy to its role as a propaedeutic training in the liberal arts. Thomasius was not a philosopher in this sense, but a political jurist who realised that Protestant scholasticism was wholly unsuited to the ethical and professional preparation of the young jurists and politici of a deconfessionalised state. In this context we should recall our earlier discussion of the limits of post-Kantian dialectical treatments of the conflict between the Thomasians and Wolffians (pp. –). In treating Thomasius and Wolff as representatives of reciprocally deficient philosophical theories – a voluntarism that leads to political utilitarianism and a rationalism lacking all grounding in empirical experience – this approach uproots the rival intellectual cultures from their ascetic and institutional conditions, turning them into mere actors in the theatre of Kantian dialectics (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –; Schmidt-Biggemann ; Schneiders b; Schneiders , –). In fact, this tendency to remove the rival intellectual cultures from their institutional settings and political orientations is common to all three of the above interpretations of the Halle events. In addition to reducing the conflicting institutional cultures to mere ideas, this deracination has the effect of creating homogeneous epochs on the basis of the



Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

rise and fall of theories. As we have already noted, this gives rise to the standard periodisation of early modern German philosophy. According to this periodisation, the philosophical dominance of Thomasian voluntarism characteristic of the first two decades of the century ends with its eclipse by Wolffian rationalism in the s. This is followed by a melding of Thomasian and Wolffian perspectives in mid-century Popularphilosophie; which is in turn superseded by Kant’s definitive transcendence of the key oppositions in the s (Schneiders b). We can conclude our discussion of Thomasius and open the door to our discussion of Kant by indicating the inadequacy of this intellectualist and ‘epochalist’ treatment of the Halle conflicts. First, we recall that Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy did not undergo some kind of universal supersession in the s. In fact it remained powerful in Protestant Germany’s leading law faculties – Halle and Göttingen – well beyond this epochal boundary, due to its role in the academic formation of jurists and political officials (Hammerstein ; Rüping ). In his illuminating account of the teaching of jurisprudence at Königsberg during the first half of the century, Steven Lestition offers important pointers to the reasons for the continuing vitality of Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law. In discussing the place of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Thomasius in the foundation programme of Reinhold Sahme and the Königsberg jurists, Lestition suggests that their role was ‘to encourage students (and political actors and state-officials) to break free of “tutelage” by “scholastic” modes of thinking and above all to grasp the way in which the power of princely, territorial–state institutions would end the heritage of religious strife and sectarianism’. He further comments that this fostered ‘the renewal of juristic modes of thought encouraging self-disciplining and a functional subordination to diverse roles on various levels below the prince’ (Lestition , ). If therefore Protestant Germany’s leading law faculties continued to teach Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy long after its supposed eclipse by Wolffian metaphysics, this is because these rival philosophies interacted not as competing theories – only one of which could be true – but as rival intellectual cultures dedicated to the formation of particular kinds of intellectual comportment. Next, we may observe that if Pietism and Wolffian metaphysics also interacted as rival comportment formations – rather than as opposed theories – then neither was their historical relation characterised by a uniform epochal movement from the false to the true, or from religious obscurantism to secular Enlightenment. This helps to account for the

Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists



otherwise scarcely explicable fact that after the period of initial warfare at Halle in the s, Wolffian metaphysics and Pietist theology underwent a culturally crucial process of convergence and hybridisation. Although we are not in a position to enter into a detailed discussion of this process here, we can shift the burden of proof back onto the standard interpretation. For this argues that through its rationalist reconciliation of theology and philosophy, Wolffian metaphysics opened the door to a form of Lutheran theology – ‘Neology’ – seeking a ‘rational’ or moral reinterpretation of the Christian mysteries (Aner , –; Beck , –). As a consequence of our brief redescription of it, however, we may suggest that it was the cultural and religious character of Wolffian metaphysics – its capacity to function as a spiritual discipline for the pursuit moral regeneration and social reform – that permitted its convergence with Pietism, which, unlike the new civil philosophy, was dedicated to just these ends. This interpretation finds some confirmation in the fact that the Königsberg theologians and philosophers who pioneered the merging of Wolffianism and Pietism – particularly F. A. Schultz and Martin Knutzen – did so by improvising a series of doctrines that minimised the difference between Wolff’s rationalist ascent to the divine intelligibles and the Pietist regimen for spiritual rebirth through the inner pursuit of grace (Erdmann ; Hollmann ; Malter ). In this new cultural space – formed when a metaphysics aspiring to be a religion entered into an alliance with a religion seeking a purely rational moral form – it would become possible to elaborate a metaphysical moral philosophy capable of functioning as ‘pure moral religion’ and, on this basis, to once again propose to rebuild society in the image of the church. The architect of this next renewal of metaphysics was Immanuel Kant – heir to Wolff, protégé of Schultz and Knutzen, and alien to the ‘juristic civic consciousness’ Sahme and his successors were forging in a faculty nearby but intellectually so far away.

   

Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

 .             In this our final chapter we discuss Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy – his metaphysics of morality, law, politics, and religion – in relation to the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy whose history we have been essaying. Kant’s philosophy, we shall argue, represents the decisive step in the modernisation of university metaphysics initiated by Leibniz, whose own embryonic programme had since been developed into a new and all-embracing form of Protestant scholasticism by Christian Wolff. Despite its lack of direct engagement with the writings of Pufendorf and Thomasius, Kant’s philosophy thus remains deeply implicated in the intellectual civil war that continued to rage between university metaphysics and civil philosophy. Kant’s role in this conflict, however, has become very difficult for us to discern, as the modern humanities academy is so saturated by Kantian styles of thought that we have come to treat them as timeless. This dehistoricising of Kant is reflected in the debate over whether he may be regarded as a metaphysician at all, rather than as the philosopher who simply uncovered the subjective conditions of human thought and morality (Gram ). It is also reflected in those histories that see Kant’s philosophy as transcending religious, political, and cultural conflict altogether – as ushering in an epoch of Enlightenment in which all the old divisions would give way to a fully universal and autonomous conception of human reason, characterised by the virtues of Aufklärung, Selbstdenken, Perfektibilität: enlightenment, intellectual autonomy, perfectibility (Beck ; Beck ; Hinske ; Schneiders ). It is not difficult to demonstrate the prima facie implausibility of this kind of interpretation; for Kant’s practical philosophy is shaped at every point by a relentless and occasionally vehement rejection of the central tenets and direction of civil philosophy of the Pufendorfian kind. This 

Introduction



rejection is manifest in Kant’s unstinting repudiation of all conceptions of virtue that treat it as a restraint of conduct in accordance with the ends of personal or civil happiness. The following attack on the conception of virtue as outward conformation to prudential law – taken from his Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone – is typical: Virtue here has the abiding maxim of lawful actions, no matter whence one draws the incentives that the power of choice [Willkür] needs for such actions . . . But not the slightest change of heart is necessary for this; only a change of manners [Sitten]. A man here regards himself as virtuous whenever he feels himself fortified in the maxims of observing his duty, but not by virtue of the supreme ground of all maxims, namely duty itself. The immoderate man thus converts to moderation for the sake of health; the liar to truth for the sake of reputation; the unjust man to civil righteousness for the sake of peace or profit, and so on, all in conformity with the prized principle of happiness. (.; RRT, )

This criticism is, of course, a direct echo of Leibniz’s complaint that Pufendorf ’s ethics confines itself to merely lawful actions and ignores inner motives. It is also strikingly similar to the ‘old theologian’s’ attack on Thomasius’ restriction of morality to management of the passions, in the course of which it is argued that ‘the theory of the virtues (through which true happiness is attained) should also illuminate a man’s immortal soul with the brilliance of the true light of virtue, and implant there these virtues so that the soul may turn to God . . . again ascending to reunite with him, once more able to appear worthy and capable before God’ (KTS, ). Kant’s attack on prudential ethics should thus serve to remind us that it was the civil philosophers who had in fact sought to confine ethics to outwardly lawful actions, rejecting all concern with inner motives. Further, it should lead us to recall that Pufendorf and Thomasius had indeed created an ethics and politics designed to convert the unjust to civil righteousness for the sake of social peace, regardless of purity of heart. After all, we have just listened to Thomasius’ powerful argument against the political metaphysicians that, considering the end of civil rule is social peace, ‘it is not necessary that subjects dedicate their whole hearts to the cultivation of virtue . . . but it is enough for this that they refrain from external vice to the extent that it disturbs the peace’ (RFS, ). Finally and above all, however, Kant’s attack should remind us that in restricting ethics to outward civility regulated in accordance with the end of social peace, the civil philosophers were engaged in a profound struggle to desacralise politics and deconfessionalise society – the struggle to uncouple civil authority from



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

moral truth, the public pursuit of happiness from the private striving for moral regeneration. In short, despite what the modern Kantians say, Kant’s attack on the moral sufficiency of outward lawfulness and prudential ethics allows us to approach him as heir to the main line of German university metaphysics – including its constitutional hostility to civil philosophy – and hence as party to the ongoing attempt to resacralise the domain of civil governance. As in our discussions of Leibniz, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, in order to arrive at an historical understanding of Kant’s philosophy we must return it to the circumstances of cultural, political, and religious conflict in which it was fashioned. Four features of Kant’s historical circumstances lend plausibility to our treatment of him as a university metaphysician who was constitutionally opposed to civil philosophy’s detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics. In the first place, after attending a Pietist preparatory school in Königsberg, Kant was trained by Wolffian philosophers at the university, and then spent his entire adult life in the precincts of the University of Königsberg’s philosophy faculty; first as a student, then as lecturer (–), and finally as professor of logic and metaphysics (–) (Stark ). Unlike Leibniz, Kant did not know the life of the court savant. Unlike Pufendorf ’s, his philosophy was not shaped by the role of political or jurisprudential adviser to government. Further, we have already noted that Königsberg’s philosophy faculty was responsible for elaborating the modus vivendi between Pietist voluntarism and Wolffian rationalism. In seeking to reconcile the cultures of moral rebirth and rationalist selfpurification, Kant’s teachers, F. A. Schultz and Martin Knutzen, provided the form in which he would inherit Schulmetaphysik (Erdmann ; Hollmann ; Malter ). Secondly, if Kant was himself taught by Wolffian metaphysicians, then his own teaching was also heavily indebted to the Leibniz–Wolff inheritance. Kant’s lectures on metaphysics and moral philosophy were based on the same two Wolffian compendia – A. G. Baumgarten’s Metaphysica () and Initia Philosophiae Practicae Primae () – throughout his long career. Kant was, of course, no slavish adherent of Wolffian rationalism. In fact his commentary on Baumgarten’s texts, published in volumes  and  of the Akademie Ausgabe, shows that, while he expounded them for his students, he used their divisions primarily as a platform for his own metaphysical and moral philosophising. This is borne out by the surviving transcripts of Kant’s lectures. In all likelihood produced by professional amanuenses for student use, and now available

Introduction



in English as the Lectures on Metaphysics (LM) and Lectures on Ethics (LE), these transcripts reveal little if any deviation from Kant’s published doctrines. Nonetheless, while criticising Leibnizian and Wolffian metaphysics – for its claims to immediate noumenal intuition and for the perfectionism associated with this knowledge – Kant’s philosophy emerges as an elaboration, criticism, and modification of his metaphysical predecessors’ (Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth ; Schmucker ; Wundt ). We shall return to this point below. Thirdly, we must take due note of the institutional centrality of metaphysics to the Königsberg philosophy and theology faculties. Unlike their contemporaries at Halle, students at Königsberg – expressly the theology students – were required to begin their course of six semesters and three years with a semester of metaphysics, the most famous teacher of which during the latter half of the eighteenth century was Professor Kant. The Methodological Instructions to Students, issued in the summer semester of , left them in little doubt about why: Metaphysics deals with the first concepts and principles of all human knowledge, and without it nothing in any other science can be possibly explained or proven. It therefore facilitates the learning of all the other sciences because, unlike them, it treats of the world, of the nature of the body, of man and all his spiritual powers, and of God; thus it fosters fundamental insight in theology, jurisprudence and medicine. (Stark , )

Eighty years after the fact, then, Thomasius’ proposal to explode the metaphysical unity of the neoscholastic curriculum – to separate philosophy from theology, replacing metaphysics with history, and moral philosophy with his Affektenlehre – would seem to have fallen on deaf ears, at least in a faculty charged with the philosophical preparation of theologians rather than jurists. Kant, who had himself been taught metaphysics by Knutzen, was in his turn required to teach it to the next generation of philosophy and theology students, which he did with great dedication. Finally, to understand the importance of metaphysics at Königsberg, we need to take brief note of the university’s cultural and political setting. As the capital of East Prussia, Königsberg was a frontier post of Lutheran German culture, adjacent to the religiously unreliable Baltic states and multi-religious Poland, and confronted by the vast unknown of Russian orthodoxy. It was in this setting that Königsberg’s law faculty took on the role of forming the ‘juridical civic consciousness’ of a provincial ruling elite, imitating the forms of legal education and legal governance that held sway in the Prussian centre, but adapting these to the culture and circumstances of the Baltic periphery (Lestition ).



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

More importantly for our present concerns, it is also this frontier setting that accounts for the key role played by Königsberg’s philosophy and theology faculties. For it was their joint task to train the Lutheran clergy and schoolmasters of East and West Prussia, thereby functioning as a kind of cultural headquarters for the maintenance of Lutheran religious culture in the Baltic region (Hubatsch ). Salmonowicz thus points to the quasi-colonial character of Königsberg culture when he reminds us that by lecturing in German from a Lutheran perspective, the philosophy and theology faculties were doubly excluding the town’s Polish inhabitants (Salmonowicz ). For, in this way, a foreign language was joined to a foreign religion, forcing these residents to send their young men to Cracow for university education. If the brilliance of the Königsberg Aufklärung thus failed to illuminate all its sons equally, then neither were the teachings of its sage suited to all hearts and minds. Just as he had been taught by Schultz and Knutzen, Kant taught moral philosophy and metaphysics in German to Protestant boys, whose average starting age was sixteen. The majority of these boys came from Prussia, were students of theology, and were destined to become Lutheran pastors, teachers, and academics (Stark , –). This, as we shall see, turns out to be an important pointer to the role of Kant’s metaphysics in the delineation and grooming of a certain kind of cultural deportment. In helping us to grasp the circumstances in which Kant’s attack on civil ethics took place, these four aspects of Kant’s role as a Protestant university metaphysician provide important pointers to the historical meaning and significance of his philosophy. They indicate that the university where Kant received his education, and became a celebrated teacher, was one in which the philosophy and theology faculties fulfilled the same joint function as in other Lutheran confessional universities: namely, the cultural formation of the religious intelligentsia – a role sharpened by Königsberg’s role in maintaining Lutheran religious culture at Prussia’s Baltic frontier. Further, they suggest that Kant’s elaboration of a practical philosophy capable of harmonising rationalist Wolffianism and voluntarist Lutheranism, undertaken within the framework of a curriculum officially regulated by metaphysics, was the latest refurbishment of the discipline whose role had always been to effect the alliance of philosophy and theology: Schulmetaphysik. In short, despite the widespread view of Kant as a non-metaphysical philosopher who transcends the history of religious, political, and cultural conflict, we have prima facie grounds for approaching Kant’s philosophy in a quite

The morals of metaphysics



different manner: namely, from the viewpoint of its emergence in a university dedicated to preserving metaphysics as a comportment-education for religious intellectuals. Still, regardless of their prima facie significance, unless we can show their relation to Kant’s central intellectual conceptions and doctrines, these features of his cultural and academic situation will remain only pointers to the historical significance of his philosophy. To this end, this chapter undertakes a series of tasks. First – having prepared the historical and methodological ground (., .) – we essay an historical reconstruction of Kant’s moral philosophy, focusing on its moral anthropology and attendant ‘spiritual exercises’, and treating these as the key to understanding the manner in which this philosophy was embedded in historical and institutional reality (.). In doing so, we will be performing the same kind of historical reconstruction as already undertaken on Leibniz, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, approaching Kant’s moral anthropology, like theirs, as the programme for a particular way of relating to and shaping the self. We then discuss the formative role of Kant’s metaphysical paideia for his doctrines of law and politics (Rechtslehre and Staatsrechtslehre) (.) and his philosophical theology and ecclesiology (.). Throughout, we shall maintain a running comparison between Kant’s doctrines in these areas and those of Pufendorf and Thomasius. The object of this undertaking is to redescribe Kant’s metaphysical philosophy as a specific historical intellectual culture, neither more nor less true to ‘humanity’ than its civil rival, but, like it, constituting a particular response to the problems of religious and civil governance confronting early modern states. .         The key to the historical significance of Kant’s metaphysics lies in understanding the ‘ascetic’ or self-formative role of his metaphysical anthropology. The central obstacle to this understanding arises from Kantian historiography for itself. By dividing Kant’s philosophy into socalled pre- and post-critical phases – and by setting the threshold for the transition in Kant’s supposed rejection of noumenal intuition and the noumenal subject – this historiography presumes that Kant transcended all merely historical moral anthropologies, thereby achieving a formal or transcendental recovery of the conditions of subjectivity (Beck , –; Schilpp ; Schneewind , –; Wundt , –). This historiography acknowledges that Kant’s pre-critical philosophy



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

remained wedded to the metaphysical cosmology of a spiritual world and the metaphysical anthropology of man the intelligible being. But it repeats Kant’s own metaphors of illumination and rebirth – of the ‘great light’ of  followed by the ‘awakening’ from dogmatic sleep during the s – in order to present Kant’s ‘critical’ philosophy as indicative of a radical break with his metaphysical past. In this way, Kant’s later ‘critical’ use of the metaphysical cosmology and anthropology is treated either as a leap to a post-noumenal philosophy grounded in experience (Beck, Schneewind), or as the restriction of the noumena to the moral domain (Wundt). This historiography thus ignores the remarkable continuity of concepts, themes, and preoccupations joining Kant’s so-called pre- and post-critical phases, a continuity first demonstrated in Joseph Schmucker’s unrefuted textual analysis (Schmucker ). Even more importantly, it misunderstands the ground of this continuity, which lies in Kant’s unwavering life-long cultivation of the discipline of university metaphysics. To grasp the nature of this cultivation we must return to our central characterisation of a metaphysical culture. If Kant’s metaphysical ethics is characterised by a strongly ‘ascetic’ or self-formative character – grounded in the anthropology of man’s dual intelligible–sensible being – this is because, like Leibniz and Wolff, Kant inherited a university metaphysics that made access to its object conditional on the transformation of its subject. This discipline and culture had been formalised in the great medieval scholastic systems, where it was tied to the life-form of a contemplative monasticism. We have already sketched the forms in which it reappeared in Protestant universities at the beginning of the seventeenth century (.); and we have outlined the Platonistic modifications through which Leibniz made possible the broader dissemination of metaphysics achieved by Wolff (.). Moreover, in drawing on Beroald Thomassen’s remarkable study of Albert the Great’s Metaphysics Commentary, we were able to gain an insight into the inner nexus between the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge and the cultivation of a certain kind of subjectivity (.). This linkage, we recall, is focused in the dual characterisation of the divine intellect – simple, immaterial, active, creative, intuitional – and the complex human one, which appears as both intelligible and sensible, active and passive, creative and reproductive, intuitional and discursive. In this anthropological differentiation of ‘rational being’, we have located the self-formative dynamics of the culture of university metaphysics. Kant’s metaphysics is grounded in this same characterisation of the

The morals of metaphysics



divine and human intellects, emblematised in his version of homo duplex as ‘sensitively affected rational being’. This is a pointer to the fact that far more of Kant’s philosophy is prefigured in the history of university metaphysics than is generally understood. This continuity takes place not so much at the level of exact doctrinal formulation – although here too there are striking similarities – but at the level of the intellectual grooming of the being who is to be the bearer of metaphysical knowledge. Given our prior analysis of the self-formative use of the metaphysical anthropology we have good reason for approaching Kant’s metaphysics of morals as a discipline for shaping the moral deportment of the metaphysician. In doing so we shall arrive at a new understanding of the relation between Kant’s pre- and post-critical philosophy, socalled, and thereby at a better understanding of his role as a university metaphysician. We have already noted that Kant’s characterisation of the noumenon–phenomenon relation is prefigured by the longstanding metaphysical construction of the relation between divine and human intellection. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant thus characterises the noumena or pure intelligibles in terms of a simple active intellect that creates the noumena by intelligising them; and he characterises phenomena in terms of the appearance of the intelligibles to rational beings whose passive sensory apparatus cuts them off from divine intellectual intuition (CPR, A–, B–). Those who argue that Kant’s critical philosophy represents a fundamental break with university metaphysics do so by treating the inaccessibility of the noumena as indicative of Kant’s turn to an experience-based philosophy. It should already be clear that this reading of the history is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding. After all, metaphysicians from Albert to Leibniz also declare that the noumena or divinely intelligised substances are not directly accessible to a rational being possessing man’s passive sensory apparatus. The point is that the inaccessibility of the noumena belongs to a particular spiritual paideia. In presenting the pure intellection of the substances as unavailable to a sensible–rational being such as man, this paideia is designed to induce and intensify the longing to behold such substances – a pathos which in turn drives the self-purifying exercises of metaphysics as an intellectual ethos. In Wittgenstein’s succinct formulation, presenting limits to the human understanding ‘satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because in so far as people think they can see the “limits of human understanding”, they believe of course that they can see beyond them’ (Wittgenstein , ). We can therefore shift the burden



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

of proof onto those who presume that in proclaiming the inaccessibility of the noumena to human understanding Kant was effecting a radical break with Schulmetaphysik and its culture. In fact, there is every reason to conclude that this proclamation, like its Albertian prototype, is a means of inducing and intensifying the desire for metaphysical knowledge. Nonetheless, it might be said that Kant’s shifting of the goal of metaphysical knowledge from theoretical objects to moral laws itself marks a fundamental departure from the culture of university metaphysics. Those who take this stance usually treat Kant’s discovery or invention of the categorical imperative as marking such a departure. Their assumption is that, prior to this, university metaphysics had been ‘consequentialist’ or committed to constructing morality in terms of some kind of good end – generally the perfection of rational being – rather than in terms of unconditional commands arising from man’s practical reason or higher self. Not only is this view historically inaccurate, we shall now see that it is formulated in a language that is itself deeply embedded in the culture of university metaphysics; for all anti-consequentialist moral philosophy arises directly from the culture of metaphysical autarky. As the means of cultivating intellectual autonomy – the complete freedom from all dependency on material outcomes that comes from contemplating rational being – metaphysics is constitutionally anti-consequentialist, which makes Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative far less epoch-making than it seems. We can clarify this point, and Kant’s relation to the culture of metaphysics more broadly, by briefly returning to Albert’s metaphysics. According to Thomassen, Albert’s metaphysics is intrinsically ethical because it is the discipline for cultivating the contemplative ethos required for metaphysical knowledge (Thomassen , –). Albert, we recall (.), constructs the contemplative life as the most virtuous via the Aristotelian differentiation between the two ends of human life – contemplative and civil happiness – which is in turn grounded in the distinction between activities whose end lies in themselves and those whose ends lie outside them. Contemplation, or rational being’s action of thinking and realising itself, is the only activity that contains its own end or is ‘good in itself ’; for by being its own end or good it depends on no other goods or ends outside itself, thereby unifying all the goods and becoming autarkic. Civil happiness represents a lower form of life, however; for it arises from the prudential pursuit of extrinsic ends – typically those of commercial and political life – whose morality is uncertain and whose realisation is always threatened by the contingency of

The morals of metaphysics



action in the material world. We have already noted that this subordination of the civil to the intellectual life is grounded and shaped in the metaphysical anthropology. According to this, through speculative thought the ‘active intellect’ enlightens man’s higher rational being, permitting it to rise to the domain of the intelligences or noumena. Prudential virtue and civil activity, however, are viewed as products of the lower or unenlightened part of man’s being, governed by the ends of useful actions in the civil world. If Kant needed no direct knowledge of Pufendorf or Thomasius in order to display contempt for those who cultivate ‘civil righteousness for the sake of peace or profit . . . all in conformity with the prized principle of happiness’, this was because he could fit their kind of civil philosophy into the hierarchy of forms of ethical life to which he had been inured through his own metaphysical enculturation. We glimpse the metaphysical–anthropological basis of Kant’s hostility to prudential ethics in the comments immediately following his display of contempt for those who cultivate civil righteousness in this ‘consequentialist’ manner: But someone who wishes to become not merely a legally but a morally good man (pleasing to God); that is, virtuous in accordance with the intelligible character [of virtue] (virtus Noumenon), and who needs no other incentive to acknowledge something as a duty than the idea [Vorstellung] of duty itself – this, so long as the maxims remain impure, cannot take place through gradual reform, but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition [Gesinnung] of man (a transition to the maxim of holiness of disposition). And so a ‘new man’ can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were through a new creation (John, : ; compare with Genesis, : ) and a change of heart. (.; RRT, pp. –)

This suggests that, rather than representing an innovation symptomatic of a break with intellectualist metaphysics, Kant’s hostility to prudential ethics, and his anti-consequentialism more generally, are in fact improvisations on longstanding doctrines whose role was to elaborate and valorise the contemplative ethos. We gain further confirmation of this conjecture by briefly considering Albert’s treatment of metaphysics as the path to moral autonomy. Albert elaborates moral autarky in his account of the way in which the unmoved ‘first substance’ moves the ‘separated substances’ or intelligences that aspire to unity with it (Thomassen , –). The only way in which this can occur is if the first substance constitutes the good, thereby motivating the intelligent beings through their desire for the



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

good. Albert explicates this by dividing the desirable goods into those that are good in themselves and those only accidentally good. The accidental goods or ends are not chosen for their own sake but – as Albert says in a formulation that will be immediately familiar to readers of Kant – only because they promise to satisfy the utilitarian desires of the sensible world, which means that they are always only means to the satisfaction of other ends, ad infinitum (, fn. ). As the final moving good, the first substance cannot therefore belong to the domain of accidental goods and must rather be the good in itself, just as, in the course of constructing the categorical imperative, Kant characterises rational being as ‘something whose existence has in itself an absolute value . . . which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws’ (.; PP, ). In the same manner, therefore, as theoretical contemplation – that is, due to its freedom from extrinsic ends and purposes – the prime moving good acquires the quality of autarky. Moreover, the moral autarky of Albert’s first substance is an expression of its intellectual nature. For the fact that there are no conflicting ends in the intelligible world (spiritus mundi) means that the intellectual good is self-consistent and completely unified, unlike the accidental goods of the material world, which come into conflict because of the diversity of desires they are meant to satisfy. Finally, the fact that intellectual good is realised immediately in self-contemplation means that, unlike material good, it is independent of all consequences in the temporal and spatial world. Readers of Kant will of course recognise here many of the central themes of Kant’s metaphysics of morals. In particular, we find clear prefigurations of Kant’s contemplative anti-consequentialism; his distinction between categorical and prudential motivation; his associated distinction between the good in itself and the accidentally good; his doctrine that morality consists in the purely formal unity of moral ends rather than the diversity of material goods; the associated theme of a moral world consisting of a unity of intelligences oriented to a single intellectual good, which Kant calls the ‘kingdom of ends’; and, finally, we find a clear prefiguration of Kant’s fundamental doctrine that morality arises from the manner in which a lower sensibly affected intelligence seeks its own purification through contemplation of a higher autarkic intellectual good – the ‘transition to holiness of disposition’. Here though we can see these themes in their true historical light, as the doctrinal scaffolding for a contemplative ethos focused in a special spiritual exercise. If the foundation of metaphysics depends on inducing the desire for metaphysical knowledge through the inculcation of its anthropology,

Kant’s metaphysical ethos



then we must learn to approach German university metaphysics as a particular historical Lebensführung or culture of ethical life. Further, if the metaphysical conception of morality – as the self-transformative apprehension of an intellectual end that is good in itself – is indeed only functional for an ethos of contemplative self-purification, then we shall have to change our view of Kant’s project to provide a foundation for the metaphysics of morals. Rather than seeing the elaboration of foundations as a theoretical prelude to the moral life, we shall see that, for the metaphysical ethos, the pursuit of foundations itself constitutes the highest form of ethical life; for it represents precisely that exercise of speculation through which the human intellect is purified and prepared for contemplative felicity. Metaphysical knowledge of morality, we shall now see, is not a theory of man’s moral worthiness. Rather it is the goal or condition that man strives to become worthy of through theoretical activity, in accordance with a hierarchy of forms of ethical life that is internal to university metaphysics as an institutional ethos. .    ’           It is not difficult to show the centrality of the metaphysical anthropology to Kant’s work, from its earliest to its latest stages of development. Although he did not publish a work wholly dedicated to moral philosophy until the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in , the anthropology of homo duplex is vividly apparent in those parts of his early theoretical philosophy that deal with the moral domain. In the third part of his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (), Kant sketches a theory of morality in the form of a speculative cosmogony – a theory of the moral universe derived from its constitutive substances. There must, says Kant, be rational beings or intelligences on other planets because otherwise these planets ‘would not be of the slightest use to the end of nature, namely the contemplation of rational being’ (.). Turning to our solar system, he then constructs a moral cosmogony in which the capacity for theoretical contemplation varies with the moral physiologies of the different planetary beings, as a factor of their distance from the sun. The inhabitants of planets nearest to the sun have coarse and lethargic psychologies that mire them in their sensuous natures, making them incapable of theoretical understanding and moral self-governance. The beings dwelling on the outer planets though possess refined and active organic natures, perfectly suited to the activity of theoretical contemplation and the end of morality:



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

To what progress in knowledge will the insight of those blessed beings of the highest heavenly spheres not reach! What beautiful consequences will this illumination of insight not have in their moral constitution! If they possess the proper degree of perfection and distinctness, the insights of the understanding have far livelier attractions than the sensuous lures, which they are capable of ruling victoriously, crushing them under foot. (.)

Man, as the resident of a planet mid-way between the inner and outer heavens, is the possessor of a duplex moral psychology. Tied to sensory knowledge and sensuous desire through the coarseness of his corporeal nature, yet capable of theoretical reflection through the fineness of his rational being, he must struggle to purify his ambivalent being in order to render himself capable of participating in moralising theoretical insight (.–). Clearly this speculative moral cosmogony – representing man as the nexus of the spiritual and material orders whose duality he embodies in his own higher and lower nature – shows Kant improvising on the scholastic metaphysical anthropology, attempting to adapt it to the Newtonian universe without compromising its role in programming the contemplative ethos. A decade later we see Kant nearing his goal. Here he develops a cosmological version of the metaphysical anthropology that would remain powerfully present in his mature moral philosophy. Kant published the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics in  in order to criticise Swedenborgian claims to visionary insight into the spirit world. In presuming the possibility of empirical experience of intelligible entities, Kant argues, such claims blur the boundary between man’s sensory understanding and his intellectual reason, whose maintenance is the task of metaphysics (.–; TP, –). Nonetheless, in the course of establishing this boundary, Kant elaborates an account of man as a rational being that remains rooted in the figure of his dual citizenship in two worlds, the intelligible and the material. We may imagine, says Kant, that there is an immaterial world or mundus intelligibilis. Following the standard pneumatology of university metaphysics, he declares that this world consists of ‘all created intelligences, some of them united with matter so as to form a person, others not’ (.; TP, ). Unencumbered by corporeality and passive faculties, the intelligences of this world are in immediate communication with each other, thereby forming a spiritual community unfettered by the media of space and time. Man, though, is also a member of a world of material entities governed by their causal relations in space and time, and, to the degree that his understanding is tied to this mundus sensibilis through his senses,

Kant’s metaphysical ethos



he may have no knowledge of his place in the spiritual community; although this is something of which he may nonetheless be obscurely aware (.–; TP, –). Kant’s reason for insisting on the inaccessibility of spiritual community to man’s empirical understanding is not, however, to foreclose knowledge of it. Rather, it is to shift the locale in which this insight must be struggled for, to the moral domain. The concepts through which Kant effects this shift – those of the good in itself and moral autarky considered as the unification of all ends or goods – would have been immediately familiar to Albert. We are aware of moral impulses lying beyond our own sensible desires, says Kant, through our capacity to sacrifice our self-interested ends to the ends of other wills. Through this capacity we acquire insight into the fact that our higher will forms a unity with all other such wills, the spiritual community thus constituting a single general will whose rule (Regel) gives unity to morality: ‘As a result, we recognise that, in our most secret motives, we are dependent on the rule of the general will. It is this rule which confers upon the world of all thinking beings its moral unity and invests it with a systematic constitution, drawn up in accordance with purely spiritual laws’ (.; TP, ). As in the Albertian version, the unity of the will is tied to its freedom via the figure of contemplative autarky. By engaging in the only activity whose end or good lies within itself – contemplation of the intelligible world – the private will frees itself from all ends whose satisfaction depends on consequences in the world of space and time. It thereby joins a cosmic unity or ‘kingdom’ of ends, the spiritual community or general will. In this manner man apprehends his participation in the intelligible world, where his purified intentions are immediately efficacious throughout the entire community of spirits – merely by being thought – and are themselves reciprocally purified through this moral unity: ‘For since the moral character of the deed concerns the inner state of the spirit, it follows that it can only naturally produce an effect, which is consonant with the whole of morality, in the immediate community of spirits’ (.; TP, ). Heinz Heimsoeth’s comments on Kant’s spiritual anthropology and cosmology – originally made in  – thus remain valid: A pluralistically constructed ‘realm of spiritis’, of immortal individuals (of the kind in Berkeley’s world or in Swedenborg’s), is the tacit background of [Kant’s] rational faith . . . Every interpretation of the categorical imperative (which commands me always to behave in such a way that the maxim of my will could serve as the principle of universal law) in an individualistic sense changes its meaning



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

and essentially misinterprets Kant’s intent. For Kant, too, everything comes down to a community of rational beings, which is made possible by the fact that all of them will essentially the same thing and that in the spiritual-rational core of their being they are totally alike. Only ‘empirical’ self is individual in the sense of something unique; the special character of individuals is merely a fact; it is not itself something of importance and value. (Heimsoeth , –)

The main difference between the Dreams and Kant’s earlier and more Wolffian cosmogony is his insistence that man is aware of his participation in the general will not through a pure theoretical insight, but through an obscure yet immediate ‘moral feeling’. Kant introduces this feeling as the form in which man’s material nature experiences the law of moral gravity acting on his intellectual nature in the spiritual community: ‘If the phenomenon of moral impulses were represented in this way, the moral feeling would be this sensed dependency of the private will on the general will’ (.; TP, ). In fact Kant goes so far as to say that, given the different sources of knowledge of the two worlds – intellectual intuition as opposed to sense-based discursive knowledge – the individual subject of the intelligible and material worlds lacks personal unity: ‘Accordingly, while it is true that there is one single subject which is simultaneously a member of the visible and the invisible world, it is nonetheless not one and the same person, for the representations of the one world are not, on account of their different constitution, the accompanying ideas of the representations belonging to the other world’ (.; TP, ). Kant is thus able to insist on the illegitimacy of the illuminist claims to empirical experience of spirits. Yet he can simultaneously explain why, in his version of the two worlds, he, ‘as a human being’, may be morally affected by his membership of the spiritual community while having no clear recollection of it. But this is simply a pointer to the fact that in the Dreams Kant is putting the anthropology of homo duplex and the ethos of contemplative autarky to two distinct but associated uses. On the one hand, he uses these key elements of the metaphysical culture to defend it against its misuse by popularisers like Swedenborg, who threatened to discredit university metaphysics by turning it into a kind of popular religion. On the other hand, though, he continues to use the pathos of the inaccessibility of the intelligible world for its central self-formative purpose. Once again, its role is to induce and intensify the longing for metaphysical knowledge, here in the form of a moral feeling whose very obscurity incites the desire for insight into the intelligible world that it veils.

Kant’s metaphysical ethos



The Dreams thus provides us with good prima facie evidence that Kant’s moral philosophy emerged as an improvisation within the culture of university metaphysics. Kant, too, ties the founding insight of the metaphysics of morals to an anthropology of the being capable of bearing this insight, and he does so as a means of inducting his students and readers into metaphysics as a contemplative form of life. Why then do we find so little discussion of the crucial role of the metaphysical anthropology in modern accounts of Kant’s moral philosophy? For the most part such accounts either pass over the anthropology in embarrassed silence or, if they do discuss it, treat it as part of Kant’s ‘pre-critical’ metaphysical stage, consigned to the past by his great critical discovery of the subjectivity of reason. This discovery, it is claimed, allowed Kant to found his moral philosophy in a principle open to formal construction or available to ordinary consciousness, thereby rendering the metaphysical anthropology redundant. This was the view taken by such earlier commentators as Wundt and Schilpp (Schilpp ; Wundt ). But it is also the view of those more recent commentators who, like Henry Allison, defend what has been called the ‘two-viewpoints’ interpretation of Kant against the ‘twoworlds’ reading (Allison , ). Here it is argued that as a result of his supposed ‘critical’ rejection of the metaphysical reality of noumenal entities, Kant’s subsequent use of the distinction between the intelligible and sensible worlds was only to provide a single subject (person) with two perspectives on their moral conduct – as intellectually self-generated and as causally determined (Allison , –, –). While coming from a different theoretical quarter, the manner in which Allison transmutes Kant’s metaphysical anthropology into the transcendental conditions of experience has much in common with Henrich’s way of burying the anthropology in an indefeasible phenomenological insight (Henrich , –). Both are in fact attempts to remove Kant’s anthropology of spiritual–rational being from the domain of competing historical moral anthropologies, in effect by appealing to the kind of insight that such a being would have, were the metaphysical anthropology to be true. Finally, this strategy in turn underlies J. B. Schneewind’s treatment, which both acknowledges that Kant possesses an anthropology comparable with its rivals, yet simultaneously identifies Kant’s with something known to everyone as an indefeasible ‘fact of reason’: Kant embeds his conception of autonomy in a metaphysical psychology going beyond anything in Hume or Rousseau. Kantian autonomy presupposes that we are rational agents whose transcendental freedom takes us out of the domain



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

of natural causation. It belongs to every individual, in the state of nature as well as in society. Through it each person has a compass that enables ‘common human reason’ to tell what is consistent with duty and what is inconsistent. Our moral capacities are made known to each of us by the fact of reason, our awareness of a categorical obligation that we can respect against the pull of desire. (Schneewind , )

In treating Kant’s metaphysical anthropology of noumenal man (on the one hand) as a fantasmatic construct and (on the other hand) as the chrysalis from which man’s final recovery of his true rational being would emerge, this commentary misses the register in which Kant’s anthropology operates – that of ethical self-formation. It is true that Kant is himself uncertain regarding the kind of belief he has in the metaphysical anthropology and cosmology employed in the Dreams. This uncertainty does not indicate however that Kant regards the anthropology and cosmology as a ‘joke’ or ‘plausible fantasy’, as Schneewind argues (Schneewind , ). Our analysis suggests that, rather than signifying his incipient relegation of the esoteric anthropology in favour of a common human reason, Kant’s ambivalence is symptomatic of a quite different historical circumstance. If Kant felt called on to defend the metaphysical ethos against its Swedenborgian popularisation into fanatical belief in an ‘empirical’ spiritus mundi, then he was also acutely aware that Newtonian cosmology threatened to rob the spiritual (intelligible) world of all anchorage in the material one (Wundt , –). Far from leading Kant to repudiate belief in the cosmology and anthropology of the intelligible world, however, this set of circumstances resulted in his elaboration of a new way of assenting to this belief. According to his new mode of assent, the intelligible world should be acceded to not as a hypothesis capable of empirical confirmation, but as a doctrine recommended to us by its moral consequences: If one concedes to these thoughts enough plausibility to justify the effort of measuring them against their consequences, one may perhaps find oneself, because of their charm, being imperceptibly prejudiced in their favour. For in this case, the anomalies seem to vanish which are normally so embarrassingly conspicuous in the contradiction between the moral and the physical circumstances of man here on earth. All the morality of actions, while never having its full effect in the corporeal life of man according to the order of nature, may well do so in the spirit-world, according to pneumatic laws. (.–; TP, )

This modification of the mode of acceding to metaphysical belief points towards Kant’s new way of justifying faith in immortality and a divine creator – in terms of a moral ‘need of reason’ rather than as a

Kant’s metaphysical ethos



confirmable truth. Moreover, it shows why the modern debate between the ‘two-worlds’ and ‘two-viewpoints’ interpretations is beside the point. In constructing a moral plausibility for the doctrine of man as the internally divided inhabitant of the intelligible and sensible worlds, Kant was developing neither an objective moral cosmology nor a subjective moral theory. He was in fact improvising a new way for his students and readers to assent to the anthropology through which their desire for metaphysical knowledge would be induced and their practice of metaphysical speculation impelled. Next we may observe that this elaboration of a moral means of assenting to the metaphysical anthropology was both the effect and the instrument of an ongoing renegotiation of the relation between the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of the metaphysical culture. For Albert, while all individuals possess the higher part of the soul open to enlightenment by the ‘active intellect’, only a minority possess the organic constitution that permits this to occur. This, we may suggest, is a doctrine appropriate to historical circumstances in which only a monastic elite will pursue metaphysical self-transformation. In Kant’s Natural History of the Heavens, however, all of the inhabitants of planet earth possess the kind of mixed sensible–intelligible natures that propel them towards the joy of contemplation. This, we may conjecture, is a result of the extraordinary spread of metaphysical Christianity during the period of confessionalisation and early modernity. As a result of this spread, and in order to preserve metaphysical faith against its marginalisation by an antimetaphysical civil philosophy – committed to detranscendentalising philosophy and treating religion as a simple private faith – university metaphysics was driven to attach its esoteric doctrines to more readily accessible ones. Kant’s construction of moral feeling in the Dreams is one such strategy, removing the metaphysical anthropology and cosmology from the pressures of speculative belief by treating them as only accessible via the feeling of right and wrong that we all experience in daily life. We have just seen that Kant’s argument that we should accede to a purely moral belief in these doctrines is a second such strategy, which would flow into his treatment of the belief in God and immortality. For our present concerns, however, the most important of these exoteric representations of the metaphysical anthropology is Kant’s construction of the ‘sense of duty’; for it is this strategy that takes us to the heart of his metaphysics of morality, revealing it in fact to be another version of the morality of metaphysics. Kant’s conception of doing one’s duty for its own sake – regardless of



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

all external rewards or threats, merely out of regard for duty itself – has something in common with the unconditional duty ethics of monastic and military orders. Yet Kant is able to use this conception as a surrogate for the central figure of metaphysical moral autarky, treating action in accordance with duty for its own sake as a worldly correlate for the contemplative self-conformation of rational being. In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason we thus find Kant commenting that in this work he has been able to graft his philosophy onto an available (moral) language and a popular (moral) consciousness, thereby avoiding the charges of unintelligibility levelled at the First Critique: ‘I have no fear, with respect to this treatise, of the reproach that I want to introduce a new language, because here the kind of cognition itself approaches popularity’ (.; PP, ). He explains his procedure in the accompanying footnote, where he comments that in the Critique of Practical Reason he uses the concepts of ‘duty and contrary to duty’ to signify the metaphysical notion of action that agrees or conflicts with ‘a law actually present in reason as such’. Kant further remarks that ‘this distinction in meaning is not altogether foreign even to popular usage, although it is somewhat unusual’ (.; PP, ). Remembering, however, that the law ‘actually present in reason as such’ is in fact the rule of the general will or spiritual community, and considering that Kant is attempting to graft this conception onto the popular ideal of acting in accordance with the duty for its own sake, we have here a striking insight into his programme for providing metaphysics with an exoteric anchorage in an available ethical culture. In fact Kant’s objective is to treat the sense of duty as the obscure feeling of the unconditional laws governing individuals as members of a purely spiritual community, leading them to measure all prospective maxims and duties via philosophical reflection on those that could be willed by a transparent community of intelligences. One can scarcely imagine a conception of duty more opposed to Pufendorf ’s conception of it as the imposition of obligations by the civil authority in the interests of social peace. As the exoteric face of Kant’s metaphysical ethos, his ethics of duty is centrally responsible for carrying the metaphysical anthropology into the modern period. Here, many commentators accept it as a fully rational exposition of the moral law whose force we are all supposed to feel. We have suggested, however, that the indefeasible experience of duty that is supposed to ground Kant’s philosophy as a moral theory is actually produced by the use of this philosophy as a discipline for the spiritual grooming of moral theorists. If this is so then,

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



like its Albertian predecessor, Kantian ethics must be regarded not as an attempt to pursue the metaphysical foundations of human moral life, but as an attempt to inculcate the pursuit of metaphysical foundations as the highest form of moral life. It is now time to confirm this conjecture by considering the manner in which Kant himself grounds his ethics, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. .            p a i d e i a We can begin by observing that the three parts of the Groundwork are organised as an ascending series of steps. This intellectual ladder requires the reader or student to pass ‘from common moral rational knowledge to philosophic’, thence ‘from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals’, leading at last to the ‘final step from the metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical reason’ (.; PP, ). Through these steps Kant wants to show, firstly, that the metaphysical idea of morality is contained in ordinary moral consciousness; next, that clear insight into this principle requires relegating prudential moral philosophy in favour of metaphysical; and, finally, that the need for this principle arises from man’s dualistic nature as an intelligible being bound to the sensible world. Kant regards the three steps as stages in the analytical clarification of the ‘supreme principle’ of morality that is given in ordinary consciousness (.; PP, ). Moreover, despite widespread disagreement over his degree of success, modern Kantians accept this claim. Henrich’s formulation is representative: ‘[The Groundwork] begins from ordinary moral knowledge and at first grounds its argument wholly in evidences [that this consciousness] demonstrates to itself. This is explicable on theoretical grounds; at the time of the Groundwork Kant had already seen, and a little later resolutely emphasised, that all understanding of moral consciousness had to begin from its facticity’ (Henrich , ). We shall show, however, that the three steps in fact form the architecture of an elaborate spiritual exercise, designed to lead the reader through ascending levels of speculative selfquestioning and self-purification. The character of this exercise can be clarified by looking at its crucial opening phase, designed to induct the reader (or Kant’s students) into a sense of the need for a metaphysical ethics. This occurs in the Preface and, significantly, takes place via Kant’s claim to separate the metaphysics of morals from all moral anthropology. Kant’s central contention – that there must be an a priori knowledge of the grounds of morality,



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

independent of all ethics derived from man’s empirical nature and historical circumstances – is usually treated as a purely methodological distinction, between a pure and an applied ethics. What this standard interpretation fails to understand, however, is that, in university metaphysics, theoretical purity is always the instrument of moral purity. Consequently, this interpretation fails to observe that in imposing the ‘methodological’ distinction between the metaphysics and anthropology of morals, Kant is actually introducing his core metaphysical doctrine: namely, that morality is grounded in the autarky of the pure intelligences as a community of rational beings, rather than in man’s lower ‘empirical’ human nature. His central argument – that to capture the unconditional character of moral obligation one must posit metaphysical knowledge of the law of a community of pure intelligences – occurs rapidly and with little supporting argument, in the form of a ‘step’ from popular moral consciousness to its pure philosophy: For that there must be such a philosophy [cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology] is clear of itself from the common idea of duty and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity; that, for example, the command ‘thou shalt not lie’ does not hold only for human beings [Menschen], as if other rational beings [vernünftige Wesen] did not have to heed it, and similarly with all other genuine moral laws; that, therefore, the ground of obligation must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in concepts of pure reason; and that any other precept, which is based in principles of mere experience – even if it is universal in a certain respect – insofar as it rests in the slightest part on empirical grounds, perhaps only in terms of motive, can indeed be called a practical rule but never a moral law. (.; PP, –)

The metaphysics of morals outstrips all moral anthropology because the universe of rational beings, existing outside space and time, outstrips the world of man, which consists only of those rational beings attached to bodies in the spatio-temporal world. Despite Kant’s claim that it is presupposed in the common idea of duty, the notion that moral obligation is absolutely unconditional – in the sense of applying unconditionally to the commercium of pure intelligences in which man participates – is evidently the product of the esoteric metaphysical anthropology. Ludwig Siep is one of the few modern commentators to note the consequence of this notion: namely, that the metaphysical moral law is grounded not in man as such, but in that part of his nature that belongs to the world of the vernünftige Wesen or pure intelligences (Siep , –).

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



But Siep is so disconcerted by this discovery – commenting that Kant’s methodological distinction might conceal the ‘secularisation of a religious morality’ – that he fails to observe that here Kant is drawing on a standard doctrine of early modern university metaphysics. This, we recall, is the doctrine that the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge is not the sensible–empirical human being, but the intellect whose purity and simplicity allow it to participate in the community of non-embodied intelligences or rational beings. In other words, the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge is not man as a rational being but, as Kant has it, ‘rational being in man’. The following remark, from Kant’s reflections on his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, captures his way of formulating the relevant distinction: ‘There is a great difference between being a good man [Mensch] and a good rational being [vernünftiges Wesen]. To be perfect as the latter involves no other limits than finitude, [to be perfect] as the former involves many limitations’ (.). We recall that this doctrine performs the ‘ascetic’ function of inducing the desire for metaphysical knowledge, representing it as the perfection of man’s highest or best part – his rational intellect – and as conditional on the purification of his lower sensible nature through speculation. Only the fact that Kant, too, is using the doctrine in this way – that is, as a means of tying the theoretical purity of metaphysics to the spiritual purity of the metaphysician – can explain the fact that he treats empirical moral anthropology not just as philosophically mistaken but as morally corrupting: A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely in order to investigate, from speculative motives, the source of the practical principles that lie a priori in our reason, but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we lack the guiding thread and highest norm for their correct judgment. For, in the case of what is to be morally good it is not enough that it conform with the moral law but it must also be done for the sake of the law . . . Now the moral law in its purity and genuineness . . . is to be sought nowhere else than in a pure philosophy; hence this (metaphysics) must come first, and without it there can be no moral philosophy at all. That which mixes up these pure principles with empirical ones does not even deserve the name of philosophy . . . much less does it deserve the name of a moral philosophy, since by this very confusion it actually damages the purity of morals themselves and acts against its own end. (.–; PP, –)

Kant’s claim to elevate the metaphysics of morals above all moral anthropology is thus wholly dependent on his own metaphysical anthropology, which he uses to induct his readers into a particular kind of relation to themselves. Through the metaphysical anthropology Kant’s



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

students learn to relate to themselves as beings whose true selves lie in a higher rational being, to which they may accede only through the purifying activity of metaphysics. Moreover, they come to recognise prudentially oriented empirical moral anthropologies – for example, Pufendorf ’s quasi-Stoic political anthropology and Thomasius’ quasiEpicurean Affektenlehre – not just as philosophically erroneous but as morally corrupting, as a threat to their cultivation of a true pure self. If therefore Kant is widely seen as offering an a priori metaphysics of morals rather than a ‘material’ moral anthropology, this is only because of the religious intensity with which the Kantian paideia welds its practitioners to its anthropology, impelling them to identify it as their true self. Intense and exclusivist adherence to ‘pure practical philosophy’ – as opposed to the plurality of moral anthropologies – is thus itself an outcome of the manner in which the Kantian ‘school’ inculcates its particular moral anthropology. By presenting the metaphysical anthropology as the path to a higher moral self, the Groundwork’s Preface envisages readers who will adhere to the philosophical purity of metaphysics as the key to their spiritual purity as metaphysicians. .. Inducing the desire for metaphysics As we have already noted, Kant presents the first transition of the Groundwork – that ‘from common rational moral knowledge to philosophic’, undertaken in Section  – as an analytical recovery of the supreme moral principle from a popular consciousness already dimly aware of it. Given our redescription of the Preface, however, we can expect that this analytical procedure will in fact take place as an initiatory spiritual exercise. This will be an exercise designed to induct readers (or students) into the speculative ethos by presenting it as the key to a pure and purifying principle of morality, present, but only weakly, in their ordinary consciousness. This expectation is not disappointed. Kant purports to show the presence of his metaphysical moral principle in ordinary moral consciousness by leading the reader through four stages of argument. First, he claims that his readers already know that the only unconditionally good thing is a good will (.–; PP, –). The good will is an incomparably higher good than all the ends we associate with happiness – ‘Power, riches, honour, even health’ – and all the virtues to which the ancient philosophers aspired: ‘Moderation in affects and passions, self-control, and tranquil reflection.’ Next, Kant moves to elucidate this still somewhat esoteric concept by showing that it is already contained in the popular idea of doing one’s duty for its own sake

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



(.–; PP, –). Given that the moral worth of an action done from duty arises not from any desired consequences, this worth must depend solely on the purity of the rule (maxim) or principle of its willing. It must depend, that is, on whether the action is willed in a formal or a priori manner, independent of all gratifying consequences – as opposed to being willed in a material or empirical manner, in accordance with some self-interested desire. Thirdly, he argues that his concept of duty must be understood as the determination of the will through the mere idea or thought of duty (.–; PP, –). If the goodness of the will is not determined by the consequences that follow from its rules, then it must be the mere idea or thought (Vorstellung) of the rule itself that determines the will and constitutes its moral goodness. Finally, Kant claims that in constructing this conception of the moral principle he has done nothing more than clarify a principle already present in ordinary moral consciousness (.–; PP, –). Given the simplicity of this principle, which requires no sophisticated calculation of the empirical consequences of actions, it may be used even by the untutored mind, which need only reflect on whether one if its maxims – to lie out of self-interest, for example – could be willed as a universal law for all rational beings. Moreover, Kant already claims to have shown that the principle of enactment of universal law is actually revered by everyone – felt subjectively as respect for the law for its own sake – even if only philosophers have clear insight into its grounds. It should already be clear that there are striking similarities between Kant’s eliciting of the moral law from ordinary consciousness and Albert’s grounding of metaphysics in man’s desire for a knowledge that will perfect his intellectual being. In the first place, Kant’s opening appeal to the reader’s ‘existing’ knowledge that only the good will is unconditionally good, actually takes place in the form of an evocation of the superiority of the contemplative over the active or prudential life. In proclaiming that the ends of happiness and the virtues of self-control are not the highest good, Kant’s justification is not grounded in any argument against the rival doctrines, but in something quite different: an evocation of the figure of contemplative autarky or intellectual autonomy. This, we recall, is the conception of an activity governed by no external end or good, hence containing all goods, and obtaining thereby the status of the good in itself: ‘A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its aptness for attaining some proposed end, but simply through its willing; that is, it is good in itself and, beheld for itself, is of incomparably greater worth than anything it could bring about merely in favour of some inclination or, if you like, the sum



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

of all inclinations’ (.; PP, ). As in the Albertian version, the inferiority of the prudential ethos arises from the fact that it seeks happiness in fallible empirical consequences, to which it is tied by man’s lower sensible nature; while the superiority of the good will is that, ‘beheld for itself ’, it is freed from such consequences, thereby obtaining the autarky that in fact constitutes goodness for the contemplative ethos: ‘Even if . . . this will should wholly lack the power to carry out its intentions . . . if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left . . . then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake, as something containing its entire worth in itself ’ (.; PP, ). Through his depiction of the autarkic will, therefore, Kant is not reminding his readers of what they already know, for otherwise even the civil philosophers would have known it. Rather, he is offering them an image of the being they might become, if only they will turn away from external prudential concerns with ‘power, riches, honour, even health’ – he does not include civil peace on this occasion – and begin the speculative purification of their inner wills. Secondly, we are now in a position to see Kant’s appeal to the idea of duty in its proper historical light. It appears here not as the explication of a difficult concept (the autarkic will) through one available to popular moral consciousness, but in its true pedagogical form. Through this appeal, Kant ties the esoteric culture of contemplative autarky to the exoteric one of duty for its own sake, in order to reshape popular consciousness. Here the crucial thing to attend to is Kant’s initial characterisation of duty: ‘We shall therefore take up the concept of duty, which contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances, which, however, far from concealing it and making it unrecognisable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shine more brightly’ (.; PP, ). Lying behind this soft-focus formulation is of course the entire anthropology of homo duplex, according to which the good will, as determined by pure self-active intellection, is man’s mode of participating in the kingdom of self-governing rational beings, while his lower sensible faculties – the inclinations that attach him to the world of practical ends – constitute the ‘subjective limitations and hindrances’ that give rise to the sense of duty. Like its prototype – the concept of ‘moral feeling’ in the Dreams – the concept of duty as ‘respect for the law’ in the Groundwork is constructed in terms of man’s ‘sensed dependency’ as a material being on the self-rule of the community of intelligences in which he participates through his rational being. Kant’s formulation of the unconditional or categorical character of moral obligation – ‘so [setting aside inclinations] there is nothing left to determine the will

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law’ (.; PP, –) – thus cannot be understood as the mere clarification of a mode of moral subjection that man is already (universally) under. Rather, drawing on the full weight of the metaphysical anthropology, it is a means of putting individuals under the mode of subjection peculiar to metaphysics as a particular moral culture. It is the means by which Kant compels his readers and students to relate to their moral strivings not as impulses that might be satisfied through the attainment of worldly ends, but as the obscurely immediate commands of a higher intelligence within them. In short, Kant’s explication of the autarkic will through the concept of duty – as the feeling of respect for the law – is a means of enforcing a relation to the self suited to the practice of speculative self-purification. Third, in this light, one of the most obscure parts of Kant’s moral philosophy – the conception of the moral law as one the mere idea of which determines the will, independently of all incentives – becomes a good deal clearer. The idea or thought (Vorstellung) of the moral law cannot be understood on the model of concepts in the empirical or mathematical sciences. For, like the thought of the non-embodied substances in university metaphysics from Albert to Leibniz, this idea is of a pure intellectual order the thinking of which requires the purification of the being who thinks it. It is Kant’s distinction between the formal and material principles of the will – the former determining the will through its mere idea, the latter through external empirical ends – that holds the key to the interdependency of theoretical and moral purity in his ethics. For to have insight into the mere idea or form of the moral law, independently of all the material ends it might have, means to have abstracted from the sensible ends that tie the will to the empirical world, thereby realising the higher active intellect whose thinking of the moral law is simultaneously self-knowledge and self-completion. As we shall see in more detail below, Kant’s initial formulation of the moral principle – ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (.; PP, ) – is thus the exoteric instrument for a practice of speculative self-purification. For the conversion of (material) maxims to (formal) universal laws requires the conversion of the sensuous (sinnliches) subject of the maxims into the intelligible (holy) subject of the law governing a world of intelligences. Finally, we are now in a position to reinterpret Kant’s triumphant conclusion to the first stage of the Groundwork: ‘Thus, through the moral knowledge of common human reason, we have arrived at its principle which, admittedly, it does not thus think abstractly in a universal form,



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

but which it does have always before its eyes and uses as a norm of judgment’ (.; PP, ). In fact the true state of affairs is that through the manner in which he interpellates them as subjects of common moral knowledge – that is, positions them as bearers of the obscure sensible insight into their rational willing as intelligible beings – Kant impels his readers to pursue an abstract universal principle of morality. For this is the means by which they will purify their insight and come to full participation in the community of rational beings; or, more concretely, acquire the intellectual–social prestige attaching to those initiated into this purificatory rite. It is not surprising therefore that the metaphysical anthropology should make its first explicit appearance here in the conclusion to Part I, after its important work of induction has been done: The human being feels in himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty presented to him by reason as so worthy of esteem – the counterweight of his needs and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name of happiness . . . [And] from this arises a natural dialectic, that is, a propensity to rationalise against those strict laws of duty and to cast doubt on their validity, or at least upon their purity and strictness, and, where possible, to make them better suited to our wishes and inclinations, that is, to corrupt them at their basis and to destroy all their dignity . . . In this way the common human reason is impelled, not by some need of speculation (which never touches it so long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical grounds themselves, to leave its own sphere and take a step into the field of practical philosophy. (.; PP, –)

It should now be clear that any impulse that readers might feel to undertake Kant’s practical philosophy comes not from any natural dialectic in the human being. Instead, it arises from the manner in which Section  of the Groundwork has taught them to relate to themselves as beings whose true or higher intellectual selves are in constant danger of corruption by their lower sensible inclinations, thereby inducing the desire for ‘pure practical philosophy’ as the key to their self-purification and selfcompletion. In short, like both Albert and Leibniz, Kant founds the metaphysics of morals as theory in a desire for ‘pure’ knowledge that has been induced by the metaphysics of morals as paideia. .. Formal insight and spiritual purity In ascending from ‘popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals’, Part  of the Groundwork begins by returning to the theme of the corrupting effect of bad philosophy (.–; PP, –). It is not the shortcomings of ordinary moral consciousness as such that necessitate the step into metaphysics, Kant argues, but the manner in which this

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



consciousness is perverted by a popular moral philosophy whose corrupting effect springs from its empirical character. We are back on the terrain of competing paideia. According to Kant, in teaching the people through empirical moral examples, and in deriving moral rules from the ends of empirical happiness – ‘Power, wealth, honour, even health’ – popular moral philosophy ruins the capacity for a priori insight into the idea of the moral law. We learned in Part I that this capacity is not only the foundation of a true moral theory, but is also the means of attaining the only unconditionally good thing, a pure will. In limiting itself to moral rules suited to empirical human beings – which, we recall, was the limit that Pufendorf and Thomasius imposed on their ethics – popular moral philosophy fails to see that the moral law is universal and a priori. In fact it fails to understand that this law rules a community of rational beings existing outside space and time, while being felt as an imperative by human beings in the empirical world. In order to combat the corrupting effects of empirical moral philosophy, then, it is necessary to pass from anthropology to metaphysics. Knowledge of the moral law must therefore be derived from an a priori idea which, because it is to apply to rational beings in general, must not be an idea limited to human understanding: All moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason . . . they cannot be abstracted from any empirical, and therefore merely contingent, knowledge. In this purity of their origin is to be found their very worthiness to serve as supreme practical principles . . . We ought never, as is permitted and even occasionally necessary in speculative philosophy, to make the principles depend upon the particular nature of human reason. Since moral laws should hold for all rational beings [vernünftige Wesen] as such we should instead derive them from the general concept of a rational being as such. In this way, we should first completely expound morality as pure philosophy, that is, as metaphysics, independent of the anthropology required for its application to man – as can be readily done in this wholly abstract [abgesonderter] type of knowledge.

We have already shown that this proclamation of an anthropology-free metaphysics is wholly dependent on the metaphysical anthropology – here, closer to an angelology. In keeping with this anthropology, Kant treats metaphysics as the conduit through which the pure will of intelligible beings flows into the impure nature of human beings, which ties pure moral knowledge to a pure moral being that must descend into human being: We know well that without possessing such a metaphysics it is vain – I will not say to arrive at a speculative judgment of the moral element of duty in everything dutiful – but that it is impossible, even in ordinary and practical usage,



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

particularly that of moral instruction, to ground morals on their genuine principles and thereby to create pure moral dispositions [Gesinnungen], grafting them onto human souls [Gemüthern] for the highest good of the world. (.–; PP, –)

Kant then proceeds to demonstrate the necessity of metaphysics. Metaphysics, he argues, is the only means by which humans can think the notion of a moral law that necessitates the will unconditionally, merely by the idea of it. (.–; PP, –). He stipulates that: ‘The idea [Vorstellung] of an objective principle so far as it is necessitating for a will, is called a command (of reason), and the formula of this command is called an imperative’ (.; PP, ). The moral law is thus an unconditional or categorical imperative, and the need for metaphysics is tied to its capacity to show how a categorical imperative is possible. We can show the possibility of technical imperatives – the rules of geometry, for example – by showing their analytic necessity for achieving a particular technical end, such as the construction of a mathematical figure. Further, we can show the possibility of prudential imperatives – as empirically necessary for certain kinds of happiness – although these imperatives, being only the (hypothetical) means to realise empirical ends, lack the unity and unconditionality of moral laws. How then, asks Kant, can we show the possibility of the categorical imperative, given that it may not be derived from, or made conditional on, any empirical end or experienced good? Only metaphysics provides the requisite ‘entirely a priori’ means of investigating this possibility. Further, it takes the crucial first step in this direction by asking whether the mere thought or concept of the categorical imperative might not itself show, if not the imperative’s complete possibility, then at least its propositional content: ‘In this task we want first to inquire whether the mere concept of a categorical imperative may not also provide its formula, containing the only proposition that can be a categorical imperative’ (.; PP, –). Like the pure concepts that Albert and Leibniz behold directly emanating from the divine mind, the idea of the categorical imperative is envisaged as self-interpreting – as revealing its rational content to a creature whose own higher rational being permits it to participate in immediate intellectual intuition. The idea of the categorical imperative is thus one that has already been thought prior to its appearance in the human understanding, where it appears in the form of a self-revealing idea: When I think of a hypothetical imperative in general I do not know in advance what it will contain, until I am given its condition. But when I think of a categorical imperative I immediately know what it contains. For, since the imperative

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



contains, beyond the law, only the necessity that a maxim conform to the law, while the law contains no condition to limit it, there is nothing remaining to which the maxim should conform except the universality of a law as such; and it is this conformity alone that the imperative properly asserts to be necessary. There is therefore only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (.–; PP, )

In other words, Kant takes the crucial step towards showing the possibility of the categorical imperative and, with it, the necessity for metaphysics, by demonstrating that through a mere a priori thinking of its idea, independent of all empirical ends and experiences, he has immediate insight into its content. This content is in fact the necessity that all subjective ends or wills be conformed to a universal law or general will. The first thing to observe regarding Kant’s step into metaphysics in Part  is that it formalises a transition that has already taken place. The idea of rational being as the ground of an autarkic will has been outlined in the Preface. Moreover, this idea governs Kant’s extraction of his moral principle from ordinary moral consciousness in Part , which, we have argued, should be seen as a programme for inducing the desire for metaphysical knowledge in the reader. Part  thus presumes a reader who has already identified his true self with a hidden capacity for selfdetermination through the mere thought of the moral law. Further, this is a reader who regards all attempts to derive maxims for the will from external empirical ends – such as civil peace and prosperity – not merely as philosophically erroneous but as morally corrupting. It is not so surprising, then, that Kant’s hierarchical division of the moral world into just two orders – the prudential–empirical and the categorical–a priori – should be supported by no significant argumentation. Kant, though, does offer two arguments for the inadequacy of prudential ethics: namely, that disagreement over the nature of happiness arising from man’s empirical desires robs this ethics of unity; and that the fallibilities of worldly realisation rob it of certainty (.–; PP, –). But these standard topoi presume the superiority of metaphysics as an ethos – presume, that is, autarkic contemplation as the highest form of life. In fact their role is only to intensify the desire for participation in that ethos, as we have already observed with regard to Albert’s use of the same arguments. From this position, had Kant actually encountered Pufendorf ’s solutions to these problems, then, we may conjecture, he would have found them morally unintelligible. For Pufendorf, we recall (.), rejects the whole idea of a contemplatively unified moral personality, replacing it with his doctrine of a plurality of functionally



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

differentiated offices and personae. Moreover, he secures agreement over the nature of happiness in the one area where this mattered – the civil happiness of social peace – by delegating its determination to the political sovereign, who could enforce it if needs be. Finally, Pufendorf was of course fully aware of the fallibility besetting the worldly realisation of social peace. He proposes to deal with this, however, not by withdrawing into a self-actualising contemplative felicity, but by equipping the ruler with irresistible powers of political decision and action. For his part, were Pufendorf to have encountered Kant’s arguments for the insufficiency of prudential ethics and the necessity of a priori insight into a universal moral principle – and it is likely that he would have been familiar with earlier versions of these – he would have immediately recognised them as intellectual instruments internal to the metaphysical ethos. If Kant’s treatment of prudential–empirical ethics thus reveals no significant intellectual engagement with its most powerful civil-philosophical instances, this is not because he had transcended all merely anthropological forms of ethics by recovering the pure form in which rational being reveals its will to man. Rather it is because his own metaphysical anthropology – one might say his own metaphysical enculturation at Königsberg – pre-commits him to repudiate prudential– empirical ethics as a corrupting reinforcement of man’s lower sensible nature. The prudential–empirical ethics discussed in Part  of the Groundwork is actually internal to Kant’s metaphysics, and to his metaphysical anthropology in particular. The central role of Kant’s presentation of this ethics is thus actually exhortatory and pedagogical. It is designed to turn his readers away from this cultural rival sight-unseen, as a corrupting threat to the a priori grounding of morality, on which the completion of their true intellectual selves depends: Against this laxity or even ignoble cast of mind, which seeks its principle among empirical motives and laws, we cannot give too many or too frequent warnings; for human reason in its weariness gladly rests on this pillow and in a dream of sweet illusions . . . it substitutes for morality some misbegotten mongrel patched up from limbs of very diverse ancestry and looking like anything you please, only not like virtue, to him who has once beheld her in her true shape. (.; PP, )

In fact, this misbegotten mongrel ethics was, we recall, being taught just around the corner from the lecture hall in which Kant denounced it, in Königsberg’s law faculty. Here Sahme and his successors used Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law ethics – governed by the merely

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



empirical happiness of social peace – ‘to grasp the way in which the power of princely, territorial-state institutions would end the heritage of religious strife and sectarianism’, and to renew ‘juristic modes of thought encouraging self-disciplining and a functional subordination to diverse roles on various levels below the prince’ (Lestition , ). In short, the persistence of detranscendentalised civil ethics in the face of Kant’s reinvention of metaphysical ethics is symptomatic of the fact that they represent autonomous moral cultures, grounded in divergent arational life-orders. The manner in which Kant presents prudential–empirical ethics, however, does play an integral role in his ‘formal’ demonstration of the possibility of the categorical imperative and hence of the necessity for metaphysics. In fact Kant motivates assent to his apodeictic demonstration of the categorical imperative by presenting the rival prudential–empirical derivation of moral rules as both philosophically and morally impure – by presenting it, that is, both as a theoretical obstacle to pure (formal) insight into the categorical imperative, and as a moral hindrance to the speculative purification of the rational being who is to bear this insight. This presentation allows Kant’s ‘discovery’ of the categorical formula to assume a powerful self-validating rhetorical form: namely, the form of a sudden illuminating breakthrough to a higher order of pure intellection – an apodeictic insight into a self-interpreting concept – which could of course only be achieved by a purified rational being: ‘When I think of a hypothetical imperative in general I do not know in advance what it will contain, until I am given its condition. But when I think of a categorical imperative I immediately know what it contains’ (.; PP, ). In this way, the validity of Kant’s demonstration of an imperative whose meaning and necessity lies in the mere thinking of its idea, comes from his own exemplary performantial thinking of this idea. Through this intellectual performance he presents himself to his readers and students as a being possessing the moral and theoretical purity required to be the bearer of such an insight. This provides the appropriate light in which to view Kant’s otherwise enigmatic statement: that ‘perhaps the mere concept of a categorical imperative may . . . also provide us with the formula containing the only proposition that can be a categorical imperative’ (.; PP, –). If this is so, then the acceptability of the categorical imperative is internal to the paideia of university metaphysics. In addition to providing an appropriate historical interpretation of Kant’s construction of the categorical imperative, our account also



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

provides a clear explanation for the double – formal and ascetic – character of the formula itself, which has been a longstanding topos of Kant commentary (Paton ; Williams ). For, on the one hand, Kant presents the categorical imperative – ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ – as a formal test of morality. As such, the formula is open to all subjects, who may determine the morality of their actions merely by reflecting on whether their maxims could be willed as universal law, without the need of any erudite analysis of possible consequences (.–; PP, –). On the other hand, it must be observed that Kant construes ‘maxim’ as the determination of a will distracted by the subject’s empirical nature, ‘often his ignorance or again his inclinations’, while ‘law’ signifies ‘an objective principle valid for every rational being’ (.; PP, , fn.). In other words, it becomes clear that to will a maxim as a universal law means to purify the intellect of its sensuous limitations so that it can will in accordance with the mere idea of the law, which means that the categorical imperative is also a formula for the spiritual grooming of the particular being who is to be its subject. In short, only someone who has undergone the ascetic transformation prescribed by the imperative as metaphysical paideia – that is, someone who is presumed to have purged their empirical inclinations and prudential ends, and can contemplate the law as the rule of a universe of rational beings – will judge in the manner prescribed by the imperative as formal test. This analysis of the categorical imperative is confirmed by, and in turn elucidates, the manner in which Kant exemplifies its use as a test, the most well-known of the examples being those of lying and falsepromising. Kant repeatedly uses these examples in his ethics lectures, where he tells his students that while it may be possible to will ourselves to lie out of self-interest, it is incoherent and self-defeating to will that everyone should lie, by making lying into a universal law (.–; LE, –). As Kant says, such examples are not intended as empirical justifications for the categorical imperative, whose grounding must never come from experience, but as external indications of the fact that all men do have the imperative in their reason. This, remarkably, is how modern Kantian academics continue to present the examples to undergraduates today. This way of presenting the examples, however, presumes a student or reader already disposed to see himself as a member of a community of intelligences in transparent communication with each other. This

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



concrete way of relating to the self both drives the test of universalisation (because intellectual beings will identically) and ensures that lying must fail it (because it is contradictory for a being whose nature is predisposed to spiritual communio to dissemble). For an ethics grounded in a different anthropology and cosmology, therefore, the test of universalisation need make no sense, and lying can have a quite different moral significance. In Thomasius’ detranscendentalised ethics – grounded not in the Platonic anthropology of rational beings in transparent communio, but in the Epicurean one of passional beings in civil conflict – there is no imperative to test the morality of lying by universalising it. Thomasius can thus offer a limited prudential justification of dissembling, to the extent that this is necessary for personal safety or the security of the state (KPK, .–, –). In other words, the categorical imperative is not something contained a priori in everyone’s reason, but something installed in the reason of certain individuals, as part of their initiation into the moral culture of metaphysics. Perhaps this is enough to show that Kant’s construction of the moral law in Part  of the Groundwork cannot be understood as the metaphysical recovery of the principle of pure morality contained in all rational beings. This construction is properly understood as a use of metaphysics as a particular kind of spiritual grooming, one whose role is to form subjects who will accede to moral principles as if they were commands of a higher rational being within them. Kant treats the other three principles discussed in Part  – the principles of humanity (rational being as an end in itself), autonomy, and the kingdom of ends – as ways of bringing the asbstract moral law ‘closer to intuition’ without recourse to anthropology. Given, however, our argument that the formulation of the moral law is itself wholly dependent on the metaphysical anthropology and paideia, then we should expect the same of these three further principles. A few remarks on each of them will be enough to suggest that this is indeed the case. Kant’s formula for humanity or rational being as an end in itself – ‘something whose existence has in itself an absolute value, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws’ – is, of course, one we have already seen prefigured in Albert’s metaphysics, as the formula for the autarky of the divine being. This figure of an intellectual being containing its end in itself – therefore intelligising and willing solely to realise itself, governed by no external goods and therefore the subject of all good, existing as pure self-contemplation or pure



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

self-willing – is absolutely fundamental to the metaphysical anthropology. Its role is to model the life of self-contemplative intellectual being as the highest possible form of life. Kant and his modern followers make much of the fact that for him it is man rather than God who bears this rational being. Kant marks this change by calling this being ‘humanity’, declaring that it is the humanity in us that is good in itself and that, as an end in itself, may never be used as a means to any extrinsic end (.; PP, ). As we have seen, however, it is not the ontological location of rational being that is relevant to its function in the metaphysical paideia – Albert was indifferent as to whether this being was thought of as outside or inside man – but its use as a model for the contemplative deportment. In this regard the important point is that Kant loads ‘humanity’ with all the attributes of the metaphysical God, specifically those of self-contemplating and selfwilling intellectual being. He thereby establishes a difference between ‘humanity’ and ‘human beings’ similar to that between divine and human being in traditional university metaphysics. As a result of this metaphysical distinction, the Kantian sacralising of pure humanity in oneself and others can be associated with a quite callous attitude to empirical human beings. In declaring suicide to be absolutely and unconditionally immoral, for example, Kant treats it as the violation of humanity as a holy being by the lower order of empirical human beings, intent merely on relieving their own suffering: ‘But suicide is contrary to the concept of humanity in my own person; and humanity is in itself an inviolable holiness, wherein my personhood, or the right of humanity in my person, is no less inviolably contained.’ In fact the sacredness of Kantian humanity is the mark of its difference from man, providing us with a new and faintly chilling insight into Kant’s subordination of happiness to morality: ‘It [humanity] demands the duty of morality, and it is only man who demands happiness, which must be unconditionally subordinated to morality.’ The metaphysical–anthropological basis for the differentiation then follows: Personhood, or humanity in my person, is conceived as an intelligible substance, the seat of all concepts, that which distinguishes man in his freedom from all objects under whose jurisdiction he stands in his visible nature. It is thought of, therefore, as a subject that is destined to give moral laws to man, and to determine him: as occupant of the body, to whose jurisdiction the control of all man’s powers is subordinated. (.; LE, )

By locating morality in the rational being who is in man – in order to defeat all attempts to ground it in worldly happiness – Kant’s principle

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



of humanity as an end in itself thus gives rise to a purism capable of inflicting real suffering and indignity on empirical human beings. Kant’s principle of autonomy bears similar relations, of filiation and modification, to the great figure of contemplative autarky. His prime construal of autonomy reads like a paraphrase of Albert’s construction of the autarky of the divine intellect. As an end in itself, rational being renounces all interest or ends outside itself and thereby becomes the universal ‘subject of all ends’ which, in turn, qualifies it to prescribe law for all beings, universally: ‘From this there now follows our third practical principle of the will, as supreme condition of the will’s conformity with universal practical reason, the idea of every rational being as a will giving universal law’ (.; PP, ). At the same time, Kant again appears to humanise this formerly divine capacity of intellectual being, ascribing it to man, who thereby becomes the author of the law to which he himself is unconditionally subject. In fact, with this emendation, Kant claims to have solved the problem that had defeated all previous moral philosophies. This is the problem of how to obligate subjects to the moral law, other than by determining their wills through incentives and threats which, on his view, rob ethics of the universality and unconditionality proper to rational being: For if one thought of man merely as subject to a law . . . the law had to carry with it some interest by way of incentive or constraint, because it did not spring as a law from his own will . . . This meant that all the labour spent in trying to find a supreme principle of duty was irretrievably lost. For, one never discovered duty, only the necessity of acting from a certain interest. This interest might be one’s own or another’s; but on such a view the imperative was bound to be a conditioned one and could not possibly serve as a moral law. I will therefore call this fundament the principle of the autonomy of the will in contrast with all others, which I consequently class under heteronomy. (.–; PP, –)

Despite all talk of autonomy being Kant’s way of ‘honouring man’, however, this construction is not intended to cancel the ontological gap between empirical man and the pure rational being whose self-willing makes it into the universal subject of all ends. For it is only ‘Personhood, or humanity in my person . . . conceived as an intelligible substance’ that is in fact capable of governing itself through self-imposed universal law. Sensible man, however, driven by transgressive inclinations, must remain subject to incentives and sanctions capable of regulating his desires and preparing him for the rule of his rational self. The principle of autonomy – the idea of man as a creature whose intellectual nature



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

prescribes universal law to his sensible self – is thus not an idea that simply occurs to anyone. Rather, it is an idea which those undergoing the metaphysical paideia are induced to think; for this is how they learn to renounce their attachment to ‘external’ ends and interests, thereby constituting the autarkic intellect to which they aspire as the legislative source and ‘supreme principle’ of all duties. Seen in this light, the claim that civil philosophers like Pufendorf and Thomasius did not solve the metaphysical problem – the problem of how to make the moral law obligatory without recourse to incentives and sanctions – appears in its true form: as a symptom of the chasm separating radically different ethical cultures. It is not just that Pufendorf and Thomasius were uninterested in this problem. In fact, as we have seen (., .), they actually attempted to obliterate the metaphysical culture in which it plays a self-formative role. This was why the civil philosophers repudiated the metaphysical figure of God as a self-contemplating selfwilling intelligence, and attacked the idea that human beings could be the source of their own duties by sharing in divine intellection. It is also the reason they proposed instead their own anthropology and ethical culture, based on the figure of man as a fractious empirical being whose need for civil peace could only be satisfied through duties imposed on him by a sovereign will possessing supreme political powers. Far from failing to solve the problem of moral autonomy, Pufendorf and Thomasius expounded an ethical culture that was explicitly and actively inimical to this metaphysical ideal, treating it as symptomatic of the desire of a spiritual elite to place itself above civil governance. Similar remarks apply to Kant’s final principle, that of the ‘kingdom of ends’. Once again, Kant presents this concept of a pure moral community as one that all rational beings will arrive at a priori, merely by reflecting on the idea of the moral law. If each rational being is the selflegislating source of a universal law, then all rational beings, regarding each other as ends in themselves, must form a totality of rational wills. For each is the source of the law to which it is subject through the reciprocal willing of the others, thereby forming a single general will (.; PP, ). Yet this idea that lies at the heart of Kant’s notion of the kingdom of ends – the idea of a totality of intelligences organically united through reciprocal intellection – is clearly a version of the metaphysical notion of the community of ‘separated intelligences’ already seen in the Dreams: ‘For Kant’, we recall Heimsoeth saying, ‘everything comes down to a community of rational beings, which is made possible by the fact that all of them will essentially the same thing and that in the

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



spiritual–rational core of their being they are totally alike’ (Heimsoeth , ). Man’s full ‘democratic’ participation in this community in no way lessens the self-transformative gap between his intelligible and sensible natures. For participation in the self-governing community of intelligences is actually conditional on the speculative purification of man’s sensible nature. This, as we shall soon see, has striking consequences for Kant’s theories of law and politics. For these theories are in fact grounded in this figure of a community of reciprocally determining intelligences forming a single general will. Yet they maintain a utopian and potentially dangerous distinction between the ideal intelligible and the actual historical community. For the moment we can again observe that considering themselves as reciprocally determining members of a community of intelligences or general will is not something that all men harbour in their reason. Rather, it is the figure of thought through which metaphysicians imagine their participation in the spiritual community. Kant’s notion of equal participation in the kingdom of ends – the idea of each rational being issuing the laws to which all are subject – is thus not a prefiguration of political democracy, but a thought-figure used in the grooming of a spiritual elite. .. Belief in metaphysics Kant takes the third and final step of the Groundwork – ‘from a metaphysic of morals to a critique of pure practical reason’ – and, with it, the final step in his demonstration of the possibility of the categorical imperative, by formulating and resolving a problem arising from the prior two steps. Reflecting back on his discourse, Kant observes that he has provided a grounding for the moral law by invoking the idea of freedom as rational autonomy; that is, the idea of a rational being’s capacity to determine its will purely on the basis of self-generated laws. But, while this grounding has permitted him to show the internal relation between freedom and the moral law – for the categorical imperative is the only one that expresses the self-legislative spontaneity of the rational will – it does not, he says, appear to show why anyone should take an interest in the moral law or subject themselves to it (.–; PP, –). According to Kant, this problem arises from the apparent circularity of the relation between the idea of freedom and that of the moral law: ‘We take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends; and we afterwards think



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves freedom of the will’ (.; PP, ). As a result: If someone asked us why the universal validity of our maxim as a law must be the limiting condition of our actions, and on what we base the worth we assign to this way of acting – a worth so great that there can be no higher interest anywhere – and asked us how it happens that a human being believes that only through this does he feel his personal worth, in comparison with which that of an agreeable or disagreeable condition is to be held as nothing, we could give him no answer. (.–; PP, )

There is a way out of this problem, however, and it lies nowhere else than in the metaphysical anthropology, which Kant is now prepared to call on explicitly. Man, says Kant, belongs to the sensible world, to which he is attached by his passive sensibility, and in which he knows himself and his actions only as phenomenal appearances given to the understanding. At the same time, though, he also belongs to the intelligible world, in which he participates through the spontaneous activity of his reason, which he must suppose is the transcendental ego underlying his empirical subjectivity. It is through this image of homo duplex as the nexus of the intelligible and sensible worlds, microcosmically reflected in the relation between the individual’s higher and lower intellectual natures, that Kant claims to solve the apparent circularity between the concepts of freedom and the moral law: ‘For we now see that when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world [Verstandeswelt] as members of it and recognise the autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality; whereas when we think of ourselves as under obligation, we regard ourselves as belonging to the sensible world and yet to the intelligible world at the same time’ (.; PP, ). According to Kant, then, the circle between intelligible freedom and the moral law – which threatens to make it impossible to explain why anyone would take an interest in the law or submit to its commands – is broken by the gap between man’s intelligible and sensible natures. For this gap is the source of the dynamic tension that leads man to take an interest in the pure moral law and, in fact, to regard himself as bound by it: Hence, in spite of regarding myself from one point of view as a being that belongs to the sensible world, I shall recognise that, as intelligence, I am subject to the law of the intelligible world – that is, to the reason that contains this law itself in the idea of freedom, and so to the autonomy of the will; consequently I must look on the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me, and on the actions conforming to this principle as duties. (.–; PP, )

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



The key to the possibility of the categorical imperative, therefore, lies in the idea of a world of intelligences and our higher selves as members of it. For, in the difference between this viewpoint and his knowledge of himself as the passive member of the sensible world, man experiences his ‘sensed dependency’ on the intelligible world, thereby taking an interest in it, feeling himself bound by its laws. This explanation, though, says Kant, marks the outermost limit of philosophical reflection on the possibility of the moral law. For, while it may be thus shown that we take an interest in the moral law through the idea of the intelligible world, we are unable to know how we come to take this interest or just what the reality of the intelligible world and its freedom might be. On the one hand, Kant claims that the idea of his membership in the intelligible world is just one that naturally occurs to man: ‘This kind of conclusion must be drawn by a thinking man from all the things that are presented to him’ (.–; PP, ). This means that the difference between his intelligible and sensible natures – the difference that impels him to take an interest in the moral law and to feel his subjection to it – simply occurs to the thinking man as the result of spontaneous self-reflection. On the other hand, through this same spontaneous insight, the thinking man becomes aware that he may have no direct knowledge of the intelligible world, owing to the passive character of sensibility, which confines human understanding to the domain of empirical appearances. We cannot agree therefore with those modern commentators who treat the practical (as opposed to the theoretical) interest in the intelligible world as arising from the epistemological critique of this world’s metaphysical reality in the Critique of Pure Reason (O’Neill, , ). On the contrary, it seems clear that Kant constructs the practical interest by requiring belief in the metaphysical reality of the intelligible world, but as something inaccessible to man’s empirical understanding, and therefore as something that induces and orients his desire for speculative selfpurification. For this strategy – which is already present in the Dreams – is the basis of Kant’s argument that while it is possible to think such noumenal ideas as that of the intelligible world, these must never be treated as objects of theoretical knowledge, being acceded to instead only for the moral transformation that they work in us: In any case, the idea of a pure intelligible world, as a totality of intelligences to which we ourselves belong as rational beings (although on the other side we are also members of the sensible world), always remains a useful and permitted idea for the purposes of a rational faith [vernünftigen Glaubens], even if all knowledge



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

stops at its boundary – useful and permitted for producing in us a lively interest in the moral law by means of the noble ideal of a universal kingdom of ends in themselves (rational beings), to which we can belong as members only when we carefully conduct ourselves in accordance with the maxims of freedom as if they were laws of nature. (.–; PP, )

Like the university metaphysicians who preceded him, Kant thus uses the metaphysical anthropology to induce belief in the world of rational beings and its laws. He does so by treating the gap between man’s higher rational and lower sensible nature as the source of his interest in a pure and purifying metaphysical knowledge of morality, which can only be satisfied through a priori knowledge of the categorical imperative. In treating the motivating idea of membership in the intelligible world as one that just occurs to the ordinary intelligence – and in simultaneously blocking further inquiry into this idea by treating it as beyond the reach of theoretical inquiry, thereby converting it into an object of moral faith – Kant thus folds his account of the foundations of the metaphysics of morals in on itself. He treats the idea that induces the interest in metaphysics as one in which human beings are already interested, transmitted to them via moral feeling from a world lying outside knowledge – but therefore beyond doubt – hence the object of a philosophical faith admitting of no further explanation or inquiry. We, however, have offered further explanation and inquiry. In discussing Part I of the Groundwork we discovered that, far from just occurring to the ordinary intelligence, the idea of man’s dual intelligible and sensible nature is one that Kant’s philosophy is designed to inculcate in its students. It does so by grafting this idea onto their existing moral culture through the intermediate (exoteric) idea of ‘respecting the law for its own sake’, and then using it to intensify the desire for the contemplative intellectual self-transformation that constitutes metaphysics as an ethos. Further, in our discussion of Part  we showed that the categorical imperative is not a formal test of morality, immanent in a universal subject by virtue of the transcendent nature of moral reason. We discovered instead that it is the formula for a practice of speculative selftransformation, through which the members of a contemplative estate subject themselves and others to the imperative as a distinctive moral viewpoint, renouncing worldly prudential ethics as morally corrupting, and constituting themselves as the ‘subject of all ends’. In short we have shown that the idea of man’s membership in the community of intelligences arises not from his natural desire for metaphysical moral purity, but from the metaphysical paideia that uses this idea in order to induce such a desire.

Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’



As the central instrument of this paideia, Kant’s metaphysical anthropology shares the same mode of historical existence as those other anthropologies that we have investigated: Pufendorf ’s doctrine of man as a being whose fractious yet weak nature drives him to sociability; and Thomasius’ anthropology of passional man, who must practice selfrestraint in order to achieve tranquillity. From a suitably indifferent scholarly standpoint, neither the metaphysical nor the civil anthropology can be regarded as representing a true human nature or experience. Each is a means of shaping a particular comportment of the person in accordance with the objectives of a specific ethical culture. Historical scholarship must therefore give up the idea that Kantian ethics is, as metaphysics, superior to these rival ‘empirical’ anthropologies, by virtue of its grounding in a priori insight into the moral law. This idea, through which modern scholarship remains tied to Christian transcendentalism, is, as we have seen, itself a product of Kant’s metaphysical anthropology. It results from the representation of the moral law as the rule of a world of autarkic rational beings, and from the use of this representation to induce an intense desire to repudiate all prudential ethics in order to attain the telos of speculative self-transformation. The idea of the intrinsic theoretical superiority of moral metaphysics over moral anthropology may thus be regarded as symptomatic of the religious intensity with which Kantian initiates adhere to their particular anthropology, holding to it as the key to their personal moral purity and insight. We have thus achieved the first of our objectives, the reconstruction of Kant’s metaphysics of morals as one of the historically available of ethical cultures. In the process we have shed some light on what it was about this culture that suited it to the teaching of metaphysics in a university like the one at Königsberg. In transposing the old metaphysical figure of man’s participation in the intelligible world into a new moral register – where it could be acceded to for its transformative effect rather than its theoretical objectivity – Kant had effected a major adaptation of metaphysical culture to its new, post-Newtonian and postWestphalian, circumstances. On the one hand, through this new moral grounding, he completed the ‘secularisation’ of metaphysics begun by Leibniz and advanced by Wolff. In making the idea of the spiritual community into an object of ‘moral faith’ or ‘felt need’ alone, Kant loosened the ties of university metaphysics to its theological partner – which continued to require literal belief in the spiritual community – thereby allowing a wider circle of intellectuals to cultivate metaphysical wisdom and authority. On the other hand, he simultaneously preserved Schulmetaphysik as a culture of self-sanctification used in the formation of



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

a religious intelligentsia; that is, a group of intellectuals whose wisdom and authority is grounded in the (moral and theoretical) purity of their intellectual ethos. In doing so he maintained the hostility of the metaphysical ethos to its civil alternative. In presenting the latter’s lack of theoretical formality not just as philosophically erroneous but as morally corrupting, Kant heightened the intensity with which his students would renounce prudential–civil ethics – that ‘misbegotten mongrel patched up from limbs of very diverse ancestry and looking like anything you please, only not like virtue’ – and turn inwards towards the speculative purification of the will. Through his moral philosophy Kant thus pursued the reciprocal goals of secularising metaphysics and spiritualising civil knowledge. We are now in a position to investigate the effects of this programme in two further areas of Kant’s practical philosophy: his metaphysics of law, and his metaphysics of religion and politics. .          Kant’s Rechtslehre – variously translated as ‘theory of justice’ or ‘doctrine of right’ – is a direct extension of his metaphysics of morals. It uses the figure of man as a physically embodied intelligence in order to construct an account of the rights and obligations of such intelligences as they interact through the possession of material things. In this regard, Kant’s Rechtslehre represents a continuation of Protestant scholasticism which, we recall from our discussion of Leibniz and the Lutheran legal metaphysicians (..), sought to maintain natural law and politics as branches of moral philosophy, hoping thereby to forestall the autonomy of law and politics as scientia civilis of the security state. Like Leibniz’s, Kant’s metaphysics of law is closed and inimical to all the civil sciences that Pufendorf and Thomasius had sought to admit to the ethical domain through their reconstruction of natural law. Apart from occasional expressions of disapproval, Kant’s Rechtslehre thus allows no room for ‘reason of state’ doctrine, Bodinian sovereignty theory, Helmstedtian political science or, indeed, the whole tradition of positive political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht) that had emerged as a means of secularising the governance of confessionally divided communities. Indeed, in purporting to subsume positive Staatsrecht within a philosophical reflection on its ‘formal’ conditions of possibility – conditions ultimately grounded in the figure of the community of rational beings – Kant’s metaphysics of law may be regarded as a direct attack on the desacralisation of politics that had been achieved by German political jurisprudence

The metaphysics of law



and formalised in Pufendorfian natural law. For, as we have seen, a central condition of this desacralisation is that law be regarded as coming from a source no higher than the positive commands of the civil sovereign, issued solely for the purposes of maintaining social peace. This is not to suggest, however, that Kant’s legal philosophy is backward looking in any absolute sense. On the contrary, considering its long future, Kant’s treatment of law and politics has just as much right to be considered ‘progressive’ as Pufendorf ’s, even though they were headed in opposite directions. Indeed, Kant’s grounding of law and politics in inalienable natural rights clearly strikes many modern intellectuals as far more progressive and enlightened than its civil–philosophical alternative. For Pufendorf and Thomasius, it will be recalled, focus on political obligations and treat rights as creations of positive law, instituted for the purposes of civil governance. The modern viewpoint may, however, be indicative of a ‘moral forgetting’ of the work of the state in pacifying fratricidal religious and ethnic communities. Here, perhaps we should again recall Pufendorf ’s remark regarding states, that ‘their force is not realised by children or the unlearned, or their advantages by those who have never experienced the losses consequent upon their non-existence’, leading the latter to ‘live in [the state] in such a way as not to value its excellence’ (DJN, .., ). In any case, Kant’s unapologetic treatment of justice or right (Recht) as a branch of metaphysical ethics shows that the civil–philosophical treatment of jurisprudence – as an autonomous discipline grounded in the positive legislation of the territorial state – remained locked in intellectual combat with its metaphysical rival. If Kant’s Rechtslehre did indeed look back to a curriculum in which law and politics had been integral parts of a metaphysically unified practical philosophy, then it simultaneously found a new and durable means of anchoring the legal and political in the moral: namely, the language of inalienable subjective rights. .. Morality and law At first appearing separately from the Tugendlehre (Doctrine of Virtue), to which it would later be added to form the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre (Metaphysical Principles of the Theory of Justice) was published in , hence late in his career; although Schmucker and Ritter have argued that its central figures of thought can be found in Kant’s writings and Reflexionen from the mid s (Ritter ; Schmucker ). Kant opens the Rechtslehre with his



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

version of the relation between law and ethics, elaborated through the extension and subdivision of the central concepts of his moral philosophy: law, duty, obligation, and freedom. Law and ethics, Kant argues, are both ultimately grounded in the rational will (Wille) of the intelligible being. The medium in which they interact, however, and are related and differentiated, is not the rational will as such, but a specific use of it: namely, the free ‘power of choice’ (Willkür): The faculty of desiring in accordance with concepts, insofar as the ground determining it to action lies within itself and not in its object, is called a faculty to do or refrain from doing as one pleases. Insofar as it is joined with one’s consciousness of the capacity to bring about its object by one’s action it is called choice [Willkür]; if it is not joined with this consciousness its act is called a wish. The faculty of desire whose inner determining ground, hence even what pleases it, lies in the subject’s reason is called will [Wille]. The will is therefore the faculty of desire considered not so much in relation to action (as choice is) but rather in the ground determining choice to action. The will has no determining ground as such but, in determining choice, is practical reason itself. (.; PP, pp. –)

Through the faculty of choice, therefore, the will of rational beings (beings whose substance is reason) is connected to objects external to their pure autotelic willing for the sake of willing. As the ‘external use of freedom’, choice is the gateway through which an otherwise selfenclosed and self-willing community of intelligences comes to desire external objects or material goods, thereby giving force to the inclinations that affect them as sensibly embodied rational beings. The metaphysical character of Kant’s treatment of the relation between law and morality thus starts to emerge. Unlike Pufendorf, Kant does not construct this relation in terms of the need to uncouple civil authority from inner purity, the pursuit of security from the pursuit of moral regeneration. Rather, he constructs it as a particular metaphysical problem grounded in the anthropology of homo duplex: namely, how to relate the governance of man’s external (material) choices to his internal (intelligible) ones. Kant’s exposition of the difference and relation between law and ethics in the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals is not immediately perspicuous, although this may in part be due to the possible corruption of this part of the text (Ludwig , –). Nonetheless, the central point is clear enough. Unlike Pufendorf and Thomasius, Kant does not treat law and ethics as independent spheres of duties – one grounded in

The metaphysics of law



the state’s maintenance of security, the other in the private pursuit of moral regeneration. Instead, he treats them as different uses of a single subjective faculty, the power of free choice (Willkür). Jurisprudence thus concerns a use of freedom that is ‘external’, both in the sense of being oriented to outer ‘public’ actions rather than to the inner condition of the will, and in the sense of being governed by ‘external lawgiving’; that is, by lawgiving designed coercively or ‘pathologically’ to determine the will to a certain action, through rewards and punishments. Ethics, however, even if it may involve external actions, concerns the ‘internal’ use of free choice – that is, its orientation to the purity of willing as such, rather than to the outcome of actions. For ethics is governed by lawgiving that is internal in the sense of arising from the mere thinking of the law, or rational being’s capacity to govern its will through the mere idea of duty: All lawgiving can therefore be distinguished with respect to the incentive (even if it agrees with another kind with respect to the action that it makes a duty, e.g., these actions might in all cases be external). That lawgiving which makes an action a duty and also makes this duty the incentive is ethical. But that lawgiving which does not include the incentive of duty in the law and so admits an incentive other than the idea of duty itself is juridical. (.–; PP, )

Juridical laws thus pay no heed to the inner condition of the will, and ethical duties may not be subject to coercive juridical lawgiving. Nonetheless, as different dispositions of the single capacity for free choice, juridical and ethical laws share a common ultimate ground in the moral law, responsible for the pure rational determination of the will: ‘So whether one considers freedom in the external or internal use of choice [Willkür], its laws, as pure practical laws of reason for free choice in general, must at the same time be the inner determining grounds of this choice; although they may not always be considered in this regard’ (.; PP, ). It is necessary to clarify why Kant argues that the laws of pure practical reason underlie even the external use of freedom – constituting its ‘inner determining grounds’ – but that they may not always be regarded as doing so. In his discussion of this problem, Wolfgang Kersting argues that Kant’s juridical and moral laws share a common grounding, as both are instances of the Vernünftgesetz or rational law governing man’s ‘transcendental freedom’ (Kersting , –). For Kersting, as a result of the formal–rational unity of the subject of (moral) action, juridical law is simply the means of enforcing the moral law, under circumstances where external hindrances to it require their coercive removal.



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

Consequently, it is only because of these circumstances that the moral law may not always be considered ‘the inner determining ground’ of external choice. There are several reasons for rejecting Kersting’s formal–rational interpretation of Kant’s construction of the law–morality relation. First, it is unacceptable to construe juridical law as arising to redress the external obstruction of moral action; for, given that the morality of an action consists in the mode in which it is willed rather than its successful execution then, as Kant insists in the Groundwork, it is impossible to obstruct morality from the outside: ‘Even if . . . this will should wholly lack the power to carry out its intentions . . . if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left . . . then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake, as something containing its entire worth in itself ’ (.; PP, ). Next, and conversely, actions give rise to wrongs redressable by juridical law only in so far as they are ‘facts’ or ‘deeds’, signifying, as Kant puts it in the Rechtslehre, the capacity of persons to impinge externally on each other: ‘The concept of right [justice], insofar as it is related to a corresponding obligation (i.e., the moral concept of right), concerns . . . only the external and indeed practical relation of one person to another, insofar as their actions, as facts, can have (direct or indirect) influence on each other’ (.; PP, ). In other words, if morality is incapable of external obstruction because it is independent of external deeds, and if only external deeds ‘as facts’ are capable of giving rise to wrongs redressable by juridical law and right, then we cannot accept Kersting’s argument that the wrongness of legally sanctionable actions arises from their obstruction of inner morality. These problems are pointers to a more fundamental flaw in the kind of interpretation of the law–morality relation offered by Kersting. In attempting to construct a non-anthropological account of the relation between law and morality – grounded in a formal–rational ‘law of transcendental freedom’ – such interpretations fail to grasp the degree to which Kant’s construction of this relation is embedded in the metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex. For Kant, if man is subject to two kinds of law, moral and juridical, that is because he harbours a dual moral nature, which means that his exercise of choice (Willkür) assumes two different forms: That choice which can be determined by pure reason is called free choice. That which can be determined only by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus) would be animal choice (arbitrium brutum). Human choice, however, is a choice that can indeed by affected but not determined by impulses, and is therefore of itself

The metaphysics of law



(apart from an acquired proficiency of reason) not pure, but can still be determined to actions by pure will. Freedom of choice is this independence from being determined by sensible impulses; this is the negative concept of freedom. The positive concept of freedom is that of the capacity of pure reason to be of itself practical. (.–; PP, )

There may indeed be only a single subject of choice, but the fact that this subject possesses dual moral natures means that it must be governed by two kinds of law. With regard to man’s rational or intelligible being, choice may be governed by the moral law; for rational being governs the exercise of its will by merely thinking the law. As a sensibly affected rational being, however, whose choice is subject to the force of the inclinations, man must be subject to juridical laws designed to overmatch these inclinations with a countervailing pathological force. In Kant, therefore, juridical law is related to moral law not as the specialised coercive form of a single ‘law of transcendental freedom’, but by virtue of the fact that it governs the lower sensible level of man’s dual metaphysical nature. Far from treating juridical law as arising from exercises of choice that transgress morality, Kant argues that, regarded as a noumenal or intelligible being, man is incapable of transgressing morality by choosing in opposition to the law. The capacity to deviate from the moral law thus arises from man as a sensible or phenomenal being, whose sensible desires for external goods permit him to deviate from the autotelic willing of that which is good in itself – the rational being ‘in’ him. At the same time, however, drawing on the standard Christian– metaphysical treatment of evil as ‘privative’ – that is, in terms of failure of good being to realise itself, as opposed to the positive existence of evil – Kant insists that bad choices reflect only sensible man’s incapacity. Despite appearances, man cannot freely choose against the moral law, as freedom arises only from man’s inexplicable self-activity as an immaterial intellectual being, and the moral law is just the law of this activity (.–; PP, –). In other words, the reason juridical law may not be understood in terms of the coercion required to redress breaches of the rational moral law is that the rational being who is the subject of this law is incapable of breaking it. Conversely, human beings may appear to act against this law in the phenomenal world, but in reality this transgression represents only an incapacity for intelligible action arising from man’s lower sensible self. Here, we need only recall what it is that gives rise to juridical wrongs – that is, man’s external choices ‘as facts’ through which persons infringe each others rights – in order to obtain a clearer picture of Kant’s



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

construction of the relation between law and morality. Now we can see that Kant regards juridical law as necessary to regulate the relations into which human beings enter when, governed by their sensible inclinations, they choose external objects. For in this way they enter the material world of scarcity and conflict over goods, displaying their incapacity for rational moral self-governance, and requiring juridical coercion in order to compensate for this. In other words, we may propose that Kant regards juridical law not as a direct compensation for a rational agent’s failure to obey the moral law – that is, not as a specialised coercive form of the ‘law of transcendental freedom’ – but as a distinct kind of legislation, suited to rational beings whose sensible nature condemns them to interact through possession of material goods. Kant’s treatment of the juridical law as an ‘indirect’ form of the moral law is thus not grounded in the posit of a common underlying formal law of reason. Rather it arises from the fact that he regards the juridical as a degenerated legislative domain, formed in order to regulate the conflicts arising from man’s (inescapable) choice to interact through material goods, rather than through the transparent commercium of the community of intelligences. If, therefore, the gap between morality and law arises from the difference between man’s two natures, then their relation cannot be understood by treating the law as a direct compensation for moral failure. In fact, Kant presents a quite different view of the relation between law and morality: namely, that organised by the figure of a metaphysical ascent from man’s lower to his higher nature. Taking place when man becomes capable of making the mere idea of (external) laws into the only incentive for obeying them – that is, when man rises from his sensible to his intelligible nature – Kant envisages a process in which juridical laws are elevated and absorbed (aufnehmen) into ethical duties: ‘But just because ethical lawgiving includes within its law the internal incentive to action (the idea of duty), and this determination must not flow into external lawgiving, ethical lawgiving cannot be external . . .; although it does elevate [absorb] duties resting on external lawmaking into the incentives of its own [internal] lawgiving’ (.; PP, ). In short, for Kant the relation between morality and law is not governed by the continuum of a formal–rational ‘law of transcendental freedom’, but by the gap between the intelligible and sensible natures of the metaphysical homo duplex. This gap is not to be closed through the philosophical grounding of law in morality, but only through the metaphysical transformation of man’s sensible nature, which would make

The metaphysics of law



juridical law redundant, as in Leibniz’s treatment of the same theme. Of course, the fact that Kant envisages a closure of any kind entirely separates his conception of law from Pufendorf ’s. .. The principle of right and noumenal possession In keeping with this metaphysical construction of it, Kant treats justice as arising from a principle, rather than from existing legal systems or from the positive legislation of actual governments. He thus proceeds to construct the Princip des Rechts – the principle of right or justice – as the second great principle governing human conduct, alongside the categorical imperative. Anglophone readers need to keep in mind that the German Recht does not distinguish between right as a legitimate claim to exercise a personal capacity and justice as an impersonal body of laws governing action – especially in Kant’s hands. Invoking the standard metaphysical hierarchy of the sciences, Kant argues that the principle of justice may not be discovered by professional jurists generalising from existing laws. Like Leibniz, he insists that this principle is not to be found in empirical statutes, whose justness it must in fact determine: [The jurist] can indeed state what is legal [Rechtens]; that is, what the laws in a certain place and in a certain time say or have said. But whether what these laws prescribed is also just [recht], and what the universal criterion is by which one could recognise the just as well as the unjust (iustum et iniustum), this would remain hidden from him unless he leaves those empirical principles behind for a while and seeks the sources for such judgments in reason alone, so as to establish the basis for any possible giving of positive laws (although positive laws can serve as excellent guides to this). (.–; PP, –)

Like neoscholastic and Leibnizian natural law – and in radical opposition to Pufendorf ’s – Kant’s principle of right is thus intended as a higher rational principle of judgment to which the state’s positive laws must be subordinated. To leave his empirical principles behind, the jurist must turn away from his concern with the ‘material’ ends governing man’s choice of things. Kant thus grounds his principle of justice in a purely ‘formal’ consideration of the totality of reciprocal choices: ‘in this reciprocal relation of choice no account at all is taken of the matter of choice, that is, of the end each has in mind with the object he wants’ (.; PP, ). Arrived at in this way, Kant’s formula for the principle of justice is: ‘Any



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

action is just [recht] if, through it or its maxim, the freedom of choice of each can coexist with the freedom of all, in accordance with a universal law’ (.; PP, ). Kant unfolds this principle in four stages. First, and fundamentally, he treats the principle of right as grounded in the specific metaphysical anthropology of man as a sensibly embodied pure intelligence. Like the moral principle, the legal one is grounded in the metaphysical figure of the reciprocal determination and unification of a community of rational wills. In the legal domain, however, the reciprocal acts of will are not mediated through the instantaneous transparency of intelligible substances in intellectual community. Instead, here the exercise of will is oriented to and mediated by the choice of material things, whose opacity and finitude means that the choosing intelligences may infringe on each other’s choices, thereby giving rise to wrongs. This is because, to the extent that rational beings will in accordance with the moral law, they are incapable of conflicting with each other, constituting in effect a single spiritual community (kingdom of ends), devoid of all the conflicting personal ends arising from sensuous inclinations. To the extent, however, that they choose material things, in accordance with their sensuous inclinations, human beings are differentiated and governed by material ends that can conflict with each other. Second, given that someone who hinders another’s external choice coerces them, and that it is right to resist this through a counter-coercion, then the reciprocal coexistence of choices that constitutes the principle of justice is actually a universal reciprocal coercion: ‘Strict justice [Recht] can also be represented as the possibility of a fully reciprocal use of coercion that is consistent with everyone’s freedom in accordance with universal laws’ (.; PP, ). The externality that differentiates justice from ethics thus arises from the human choice of material things – that is, the desires of ‘sensibly affected rational beings’ for things lying outside their own rational willing. This in turn necessitates that such choices be unified through external juridical coercion: Even as justice [Recht] in general has as its object only what is external in actions, so strict justice, namely that which has nothing ethical mixed with it, requires only purely external determinations for the power of choice [Willkür]; for only then is it pure and not mixed with any prescriptions of virtue. Only a completely external justice can thus be called strict (narrow). This is indeed based on everyone’s consciousness of obligation in accordance with a law; but if it is to remain pure, this consciousness may not and cannot be appealed to as an incentive to determine his choice in accordance with this law. Strict right rests instead on

The metaphysics of law



the principle of its being possible to use external coercion that can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with universal laws. (.; PP, )

A community of rational beings would have no need of external law and would not be subject to strict justice. Third, Kant’s principle of justice is in its turn grounded in the idea of ‘intelligible possession’ (possessio noumenon), which is the central concept of his legal metaphysics and forms the somewhat idiosyncratic core of his treatment of private law (Privatrecht). In fact, like the concept of ‘duty for its own sake’ in his ethics, the notion of intelligible possession forms the exoteric link that permits Kant to tie the idea of the community of intelligences to an available civil culture – here to the legal culture of private property rights. Kant’s central intellectual strategy in the Rechtslehre is thus to allow the notion of intelligible or non-physical possession to embrace two very different capacities: the capacity of nonphysical (intelligible) beings to possess physical things; and the capacity for juridical ownership of something, as distinct from its mere physical possession. Through this structural ambiguity in the notion of non-physical possession, Kant attempts to solve two problems at the same time. On the one hand, he seeks to provide a metaphysical basis for the principle of justice, in the figure of a community of immaterial intelligences interacting through their possession of material things. On the other hand, he seeks to provide exoteric (juristic) plausibility for the notion of noumenal possession – that is, of beings who exist outside space and time possessing physical things – by anchoring it in the notion of legal ownership: Something external is my property if I would be wronged by being disturbed in my use of it even though I am not in possession of it (not holding the object). – I must be in some sort of possession of an external object if it is to be called mine, for otherwise someone who affected this against my will would not also affect me and so would not wrong me. So . . . intelligible possession (possessio noumenon) must be assumed to be possible if something external is to be mine or yours. Empirical possession (holding) is then only possession in appearance (possessio phenomenon) . . . (.; PP, )

Fourth, given that the idea of intelligible possession by definition lies beyond all empirical experience, it must, like the idea of the community of intelligences itself, be postulated as a ‘need of reason’, again for moral reasons. Kant thus ‘deduces’ this postulate by observing that, were such possession not possible, then the person would not be able to rightfully choose objects. This, however, ‘would annihilate [usable objects] from a



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

moral viewpoint [praktischer Rücksicht] and make them into res nullius [ownerless things]’, which ‘would be a contradiction of outer freedom with itself ’. Further, given that intelligible possession does not require actual physical disposal of the object, then, ‘in order to think of something simply as an object of my choice [Willkür] it is sufficient for me to be conscious of having it within my power’. As a result: ‘It is therefore an a priori presupposition of practical reason to regard and treat any object of my choice as something which could objectively be mine or yours’ (.; PP, –). Kant completes his construction of the principle of justice – simultaneously making the shift from private to public law ( jus publicum, Staatsrecht), or from law to politics – by stipulating that intelligible possession remains merely provisional in the state of nature, requiring the civil state for its actualisation. We will return to this construction of the civil state in the following section. For the moment, we must clarify the historical significance of Kant’s principle of justice, by contrasting the interpretations of some modern Kantian commentators with our own. Despite certain differences of emphasis, Hinske, Kersting, and Gregor argue that Kant provides a formal–philosophical basis for the principle of justice – that is, one transcending all moral anthropologies and political purposes. As a result, he may be regarded as grounding justice in human reason itself, and as showing that only a law grounded in the rational general will is agreeable to humanity (Gregor ; Hinske ; Kersting ). Kersting, for example, argues that Kant’s ‘legal postulate of practical reason’ – ‘It is possible for me to have any external object of my choice as mine’ – is the subject of a purely formal ‘deduction’, analogous to the deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. Without attempting to capture the detail of this argument, it is enough to say that it largely repeats Kant’s own procedure in this regard, which we have already summarised. In short, Kersting rehearses Kant’s arguments that the possession of external objects by intelligible beings must be possible, because without it such objects would be reduced to the moral nullity of being ‘ownerless things’, and because a prohibition on ownership would be ‘a contradiction of freedom with itself ’ (Kersting , –). Kersting acknowledges the indebtedness of this figure of thought to the theological doctrine that God made the world for man’s use, but he fails to link this doctrine to the metaphysics of intelligible possession. Similarly, he also acknowledges the interdependency between Kant’s

The metaphysics of law



notions of law and the spiritual commercium between rational beings, citing Kant’s comment that ‘all legal relation is a purely intelligible relation of rational beings to each other’ (.). Yet Kersting treats this relation between rational beings as expressive of a formal ‘law of transcendental freedom’, insisting that this may be known in a formal ‘anthropology-free’ manner. As a result he ends up treating the relations of universal reciprocal coercion, established between intelligible beings possessing material objects, as something known in a purely a priori manner, independent of all anthropological presuppositions. Finally, with this formal–rational determination of the need for a general will in place, Kersting, like Hinske and Gregor, can proceed to treat Kant’s conception of an anti-statist popular sovereignty as founded in reason itself. We have already observed, however, that Kant’s metaphysical anthropology and cosmology are central to his construction of the principle of justice. They permit him to treat the legal principle as a devolved form of the moral principle, needed to govern sensibly embodied intelligences who interact through their choice of external objects, rather than in the transparent medium of rational willing. In this regard one of the most remarkable and least understood aspects of Kant’s construction of legal possession is that it is configured by the longstanding metaphysical discussion of how a timeless intelligible being can occupy the spatio-temporal world. Deeply embedded in the anthropology of Christ’s one person and two natures, and in the cosmological individuation of intelligible being through its embodiment in material things, Kant’s discussion of intelligible possession is grounded in the figures of incarnation, ensoulment, and the soul’s (non-spatial) habitation of the body. The wrongs informing Kant’s notion of juridical right, the wrongs that juridical law must redress, are thus above all those to which pure intelligences become susceptible through their choice and occupancy of material things. Through this external embodiment, intellectual community loses its spontaneity and transparency; for wills individuated by their choice of material things and goods enter into conflict, subordinating each other, and thereby losing the intelligible freedom responsible for their dignity. Kant’s view of coercion is, thus, that it is an unfortunate consequence of the differentiation of wills attending the sensible inclinations and choices of rational beings. Among the comments that Kant wrote on his own work, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, during –, we find the following:



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

A will that is subject to the will of another is imperfect and contradictory, because man possesses spontaneity. If he is subject to the will of a man (even though he chooses this himself) then he is hateful and contemptible. Only his subjection to God’s will is in accordance with nature. One must not perform actions from obedience to a man that one could perform from inner motivation; and to demand obedience where everything could have been done through inner motivation is to make slaves.

The possibility of subordination and legal coercion arises from the manner in which rational beings claim possession of the material world: The body is mine because it is a part of my self and is moved through my power of choice [Willkür]. The whole animate and inanimate world that lacks the power of choice is mine in so far as I can control it and move it in accordance with my choice. The sun is not mine. Other men are in the same position, which means that no property is a proprietary or exclusive property. In so far though as I want to appropriate something exclusively, at least I will not assume that another’s will opposes mine or that his deed conflicts with mine. I will therefore perform actions that signify my ownership, cut down the tree, make it into something, etc. The other man tells me that this thing is his because, through the actions of his choice, it belongs, as is it were, to his self. The will that is to be good, if it is taken as universal and reciprocal, must not cancel itself for the sake of the other; and the other [person] must not claim as his own that which I have worked, because in this case he would be assuming that his will moved my body. (.–)

Here Kant prefigures the concept of intelligible possession and the principle of right that would be elaborated in the Rechtslehre nearly thirty years later. Yet here their construction is unambiguously metaphysical, carried out in terms of the degeneration of spiritual community attending its necessary material embodiment, and in terms of the partial or analogical restitution of this community through the establishment of ‘universal and reciprocal’ rights of external possession. Moreover, despite all attempts to confine this metaphysical construction to Kant’s ‘pre-critical’ stage, we find the same construction at the heart of the Rechtslehre’s so-called formal treatment of the concept of original possession: In this way, taking possession of a separated piece of land is an act of private choice without being arbitrary. The possessor bases his act on the inborn common possession of the earth’s surface and on the a priori general will corresponding to it, which permits private possession of it (since otherwise unoccupied things would in themselves and in accordance with a law become ownerless things). The possessor thus originally acquires a piece of land through first possession and resists by right (iure) [mit Recht] anyone else who would hinder

The metaphysics of law



him in his private use of it; although in the natural condition he cannot do so by legal proceedings [rechtswegen] (de iure), because there is yet no public law in this condition . . . Merely physical possession of land (holding it) is already a right to a thing, though admittedly not of itself sufficient for regarding it as mine. Relative to others, since (as far as one knows) it is first possession, it is consistent with the law of external freedom and is also involved in original possession in common, which provides a priori the basis on which any private possession is possible. Accordingly, to interfere with the use of a piece of land by the first occupant of it is to wrong him. Taking first possession has therefore a rightful basis [Rechtsgrund] (titulus possessionis), which is original possession in common. (.–; PP, –, fn. s)

Despite various attempts to treat these paragraphs as corrupt, or as a throwback to Kant’s pre-critical thought, this figuration of intelligible being’s occupancy of the material world remains central to Kant’s construction of noumenal possession in the Rechtslehre. In Chapter  of Part  on Privatrecht, we thus find Kant returning to the account of ‘the inborn common possession of the earth’s surface and . . . the a priori general will corresponding to it’, in order to ground his concept of original or first acquisition: All human beings are originally (i.e., prior to any act of choice that establishes a right) in legitimate possession of land, that is, they have a right to be wherever nature or chance (apart from their will) has placed them. This kind of possession (possessio) – which has to be distinguished from residence (sedes), a chosen and therefore an acquired lasting possession – is possession in common, because the spherical surface of the earth unites all the places on its surface; for if its surface were an unbounded plane, people could be so dispersed on it that they would not come into any community with one another, and community would not then be a necessary consequence of their existence [Dasein] on the earth. – The possession by all human beings on the earth which precedes any acts of theirs that would establish rights (as constituted by nature itself) is an original possession in common (communio possessionis originaria), the concept of which is not empirical and dependent on temporal conditions . . . Original possession in common is, rather, a practical rational concept which contains a priori the principle in accordance with which alone people can use a place on the earth in accordance with principles of right. (.; PP, –)

In other words, even in the Rechtslehre, Kant continues to use the figure of the spiritual community’s occupation of the material world in order to construct the notion of legal possession. He does so by treating the spherical nature of the earth as providing the conditions of material contiguity and scarcity through which the spiritual devolves into the legal community; that is, a community characterised by universal



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

reciprocal coercion rather than universal reciprocal intellection. Even if Kant wishes to treat this figure as non-empirical, and as a ‘practical rational concept’ containing the principle of legal possession a priori, we can see that it is not formal in the sense of ‘anthropology free’. On the contrary, returning to his anthropology and cosmology of the spiritual community’s devolution into a worldly community, Kant uses it as the basis of the ‘formal’ construction of his ‘practical rational concept’ of intelligible possession. Indeed, if we return to the two arguments that Kersting identifies as crucial to the ‘formal’ deduction of intelligible possession – namely, that external objects would be morally null without such possession, and that to prohibit it would be a contradiction of freedom with itself – then we can see that these arguments are themselves desiderata of this metaphysical anthropology and cosmology. For it is only in accordance with a moral cosmology of spiritual being’s occupancy of the material world that ownership of things becomes morally redemptive of them. Further, it is only in accordance with the anthropology of intelligibly free rational being that the prohibition on possession is self-contradictory. A pair of Reflexionen from c.  shows us the role of the metaphysical cosmology and anthropology in constructing these supposedly a priori insights: The world is of no value where there are no rational beings [vernünftige Wesen] to make use of it (not merely to contemplate it). The purely willful use of the world arises from the pleasures of life. Therefore, as the only natural end of all rational creatures, this is the only purpose for which the world is good, not merely for consumption, but also for use. The highest condition of this purpose is solely the good use that [rational beings] make of themselves and the things of the world. Everything in nature is good only in so far as it is useful, and everything is nonetheless subordinated to the power of choice. Nature agrees with freedom when the ends of the former are supported by the latter. (.,  and )

The ‘formal–philosophical’ character of Kant’s principle of justice – the notion of things chosen independently of all empirical objects of choice – is thus dependent on the figure of noumenal beings choosing external things in order to rescue them from moral nullity and to give themselves a place in the world. In short, Kant’s formal construction of natural rights through the principle of right – to choose things in a manner compatible with the choice of all others in accordance with a universal law – is actually grounded in the substantive metaphysical doctrine of the moral occupation of the material globe by rational beings seeking worldly communion.

The metaphysics of law



Kant’s argument for the superiority of the metaphysician’s theory of the a priori principle of justice over the jurist’s empirical knowledge of existing laws now appears in its proper historical light. Like the idea of spiritual community in the Groundwork, the principle of a totality of reciprocating free choices in the Rechtslehre may be regarded as a selfformative device impelling intellectuals to repudiate prudential–empirical (juridical) constructions of justice. It does so by presenting laws imposed for the ends of civil welfare and security as radically incompatible with the exercise of free choice by rational beings. We can see this configuration of ideas in the following reflection, written somewhere between  and : It is not benefits that determine the law [Recht], but the wills of each and every individual. Given that, in accordance with the rule of freedom, each must decide what is beneficial on the basis of his own thought, then the authority for judging others applies not to their benefits, only to their wills. The multitude can form a political body through rules of prudence, although this [body] in no way arises from the rules of justice [Rechts]. No-one can cede to another the power to execute his own judgment of rights, unless he reserves the same power to hold the other to their obligation; because that would be to give another the right to do what he wanted (licentiam). If though the other can do nothing unjust [unrecht] through his action, then his actions are based only in his power and not in his right [Recht]. (., )

The prime role of Kant’s formalisation argument is to induce metaphysicians to renounce the civil–prudential rationale for the enactment of laws, providing them instead with an image of themselves as giving laws and possessing rights purely as sensibly embodied intelligences. With Kant’s subordination of the empirical legal order to a theory of its principle, the metaphysical attack on the autonomy of the civil jurisprudence – first encountered in Leibniz’s critique of Pufendorf ’s empirical natural law – appears in its modern form, as anti-positivism. In the light of our discussion of Kant’s differentiation between metaphysical and empirical ethics, however, we may propose that the ultimate source of the anti-positivist principle of justice is not its a priori concept, but the speculative self-purification of the philosopher who is to think it. For this is the way the philosopher demonstrates his moral and theoretical purity in relation to the jurist, whose empirical concepts mortgage his thought to worldly benefits and powers. In short Kant’s anti-positivist critique of ‘empirical’ law is in fact an anti-juridical attack on historical legal cultures and their bearers. Given this, we may suggest that viewing the historical legal order as the expression of natural rights is actually an historical projection of the



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

ethos of philosophical intellectuals. This helps to explain the radical inversion of the history of rights that seems to have taken place in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. It was at this point that popular–philosophical journals began to argue that liberal rights had been extended through the struggle for individual freedom against the encroachments of government. This was an argument supported by a ‘new’ version of natural law – actually a revival of the old Christian legal metaphysics – claiming that men entered political society in order to preserve natural rights, rather than to obtain security (Bödeker ). In fact, as we saw in the case of the rights associated with religious toleration, the creation and extension of rights typically depended on the expansion of the new territorial governments and their legal systems (Schiera ). That is because these rights had been fashioned in the crisis of religious civil war as instruments for the state’s political neutralisation of religion and pacification of society, giving them, as Dreitzel has argued, a degree of independence from their philosophical justifications (Dreitzel a). .. Kant’s political metaphysics The metaphysical figuration of Kant’s Rechtslehre provides the key to understanding his theory of the state, displaying the intellectual–historical basis of its divergence from Pufendorf ’s. Kant necessitates the civil state – conceived as an all-powerful collective will – as the means of realising an original noumenal act of appropriation. Were it not for the relations of universal reciprocal coercion that the civil society establishes between this act and all other such acts, then rightful choice and natural rights would remain in their merely provisional natural condition. Now, with regard to external and therefore contingent possession, a unilateral will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would infringe upon freedom in accordance with universal laws. So it is only a will putting everyone under obligation, hence only a collective general (common) and powerful will, that can provide everyone this assurance. – But the condition of being under a general external (i.e., public) lawgiving accompanied with power is the civil condition. So only in a civil condition can something external be mine or yours. (.; PP, )

Kant thus construes legal–political order – the state’s realisation of the coercive reciprocity of wills – as a lower-level approximation of the transparent intellectual reciprocity of wills in the moral order. For this

The metaphysics of law



reason he rejects the Pufendorfian origination of the state; that is, through the pact in which individuals give up their will to decide matters pertaining to collective security, allowing the formation of a supreme agency of political decision and action. Instead, Kant regards the civil state as arising from a real ideal unification of individual wills into a general will, for the purpose of realising natural right, or, allowing intelligible beings to form a community through the moral use of things: The act by which the people constitutes itself as a state – more precisely, the idea of this act, which is the only means by which the legitimacy of the state can be thought – is the original contract. In accordance with the original contract, everyone (omnes et singuli) within the people gives up his external freedom in order to take it up again immediately as a member of a commonwealth, that is, of the people considered as a state (universi). And one cannot say the human being in a state has sacrificed a part of his inborn outer freedom for the sake of an end, but rather, he has relinquished his wild lawless freedom in order to find his freedom as such undiminished, in a dependence on laws, that is, in a rightful condition, since this dependence arises from his own lawgiving will. (.–; PP, )

If therefore the people is sovereign in the Kantian state, this is because the role of public law (Staatsrecht) is to realise the ‘rightful’ condition – that is, rule of rational beings exercising free choices (natural rights) in the external world – and this is a rule that such beings can only impose on each other. Kant’s ‘democratic’ construction of the people – as refusing all status hierarchies and obeying only those laws they could prescribe for themselves – is thus neither more nor less than a transposition of the metaphysical image of the spiritual community into the political register. Here we reach the point of sharpest contrast between Kant’s conception of the state and Pufendorf ’s; for Pufendorf, we recall (.), rejects all forms of popular sovereignty – indeed all forms of sovereignty arising from moral or transcendental sources independent of the state as a political artifice. Instead, he treats civil sovereignty as the outcome of a pact whose function is not to realise the natural rights of a collective will, but to ‘impose’ the differentiated ‘offices’ – the subject who obeys in exchange for security, and the ruler who protects in exchange for obedience – required to realise a single political end: social peace. We have observed that this differentiation of civil personae holds the key to Pufendorf ’s distinction between sovereignty and form of government. For sovereignty is a ‘moral personality’ that may be occupied by the several forms of government – monarachy, aristocracy, democracy – as



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

long as they fulfil the duties of the office by exercising supreme power in accordance with the end of social peace. This in turn holds the key to the ‘liberal’ differentiation of state and society in Pufendorf, for it is only conduct capable of threatening social peace that is subject to political–legal regulation, even if it is the sovereign’s prerogative alone to determine what is to count as such. Finally, we can recall that Pufendorf elaborated these distinctions in order to shape a political and legal culture suited to the governance of a desacralised state. In fact, he used them to sever the state from all imperatives to represent a prior moral community or will – a view central to the political theology of the confessional state – treating the state rather as a will formed artificially for the sole purpose of security. In unifying ruler and subject in the figure of the all-powerful self-legislating general will, Kant therefore collapses the desacralising distinction between sovereignty and form of government and, finally, the liberal one between state and society. Rather than seeing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy as optionally equivalent forms in which political sovereignty can be exercised, Kant treats them as physical correlates of the spiritual community – ‘the united will of the people’. As such they are required only as long as the actual will of the empirical people falls short of rational self-governance, being destined for subsumption by the only form of government capable of realising this condition, the pure democratic republic: The different forms of states are only the letter (littera) of the original legislation in the civil condition . . . But the spirit of the original contract (anima pacti originarii) involves an obligation on the part of the constituting authority to make the form of government suited to the idea of the original contract. Accordingly, even if this cannot be done all at once, it is under obligation to change the form of government gradually and continually so that it harmonises in its effect with the only legitimate constitution, that of a pure republic. [This must occur] in such a way that the old (empirical) statutory forms, which served merely to bring about the political subjection [Unterthänigkeit] of the people, are dissolved into the original (rational) form. [This is] the only form which makes freedom the principle and indeed the condition for any exercise of coercion, as is required by a rightful constitution of a state in the strict sense of the word, finally leading [the spirit of the constitution?] to become the letter. (. ; PP, )

Under these circumstances, any gap between the ideal collective personality of the people and the actual moral person of the sovereign must be seen as a sign that the people has yet to form the self-governing general will needed to make the ideal but provisional rightful condition actual.

The metaphysics of law



Only the pure republic, therefore, possesses the moral personality capable of representing the people’s will ‘in person’. It thereby closes the gap between the empirical exercise of civil power and the self-governance of a community of rational beings, and, with it, the gap between political representation and its subject: All true republics are and can only be a representative system of the people, in order to protect the people’s rights in its name, through all the citizens united, by means of their delegates (deputies). But as soon as the head of state (whether this be king, nobility, or the whole population, the democratic union) also allows himself to be represented in person, then the united people does not merely represent the sovereign, it is the sovereign itself. For in it (the people) is originally found the supreme authority from which all rights of individuals as mere subjects (and in any case as officials of the state) must be derived. (.; PP, )

Kant’s legitimation of civil sovereignty in terms of the people’s self-governance in the pure republic is, therefore, grounded neither in the formal principle of justice nor in a political philosophy borrowed from Rousseau, but in something he shared with the Genevan philosopher: the Christian–metaphysical conception of the state as the means by which the spiritual community governs its worldly commercium. We first encountered this conception, it will be recalled (.), in Althusius’ notion of sovereignty arising from the ‘universal symbiosis’ responsible for the community’s spiritual and physical perfection. This image of the pure republic, as the means by which the moral community realises its worldly self-governance, is responsible for Kant’s deeply ambivalent attitude to the legitimacy of the state, which has been observed by commentators since the Rechtslehre was first published. On the one hand, to the extent that it is regarded as the pure expression of the general will, then the state is hyper-legitimate. By representing the people ‘in person’, the pure republic collapses the distinction between ruler and subjects, who, because they are only obeying their own will, must obey it unconditionally: ‘For, in order for the people to judge the supreme political authority (summum imperium) with rightful force [rechtskräftig], they must already be viewed as united under a general legislative will; which means that they cannot and may not judge otherwise than the present head of state (summus imperans) wills them to’ (.; PP, –). Here Kant thus joins Pufendorf in denying the right of active political resistance, although on quite different grounds and for quite different ends. For Pufendorf, the sovereign is an artificial construct created by individuals giving up their political wills to another; and this means that while they may privately disagree with the sovereign’s political commands, they may



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

not dissent from them in public, unless they are to dissolve the state altogether. For Kant, though, in the sovereign of the pure republic, the people confront the manifestation of their own lawgiving will. These moral origins give the sovereign’s laws a quasi-holy status and makes even doubting them a crime: ‘A law that is so holy (inviolable) that it is already a crime even to call it in doubt in a practical way, and so to suspend its effect for a moment, is thought as if it must have arisen not from human beings but from some highest, flawless lawgiver; and this is what the saying “All authority is from God” means’ (.; PP, ). Far from representing an aberrant concession to ‘political absolutism’, Kant’s denial of the right of resistance, grounded in a secularised version of divine right, is in fact an integral expression of the political metaphysics that Pufendorf ’s political absolutism was designed to destroy. On the other hand, because he regards the state as coming into existence only to protect the exercise of pre-civil free choices – or ‘natural rights’ as they are more commonly known – Kant’s political–legal order lacks autonomous legitimacy altogether. Kant thus treats positive statutory laws as legitimate only in so far as they do not infringe natural rights (.; PP, ). He insists, as we have just seen, that the only legitimate form of the state is a pure republic conceived of as the transparent expression of rational community (.–; PP, –). This means that the legitimacy of the state resides neither in the welfare of its citizens – ‘for happiness can perhaps come to them more easily . . . in a state of nature . . . or even under a despotic government’ – nor in their security, but only in ‘that condition in which its constitution conforms most fully to principles of justice; that is, the condition that reason through a categorical imperative obligates us to strive after’ (., ; PP, , ). As a result, Kant treats crime as a breach of the moral order – rather than the state’s positive legal order – hence as something that must be punished in an absolute retributive manner, rather than ‘therapeutically’ in accordance with the ends of public safety (.; PP, –). In each of these regards, Kant’s theory of the state represents an anti-political reduction of civil to moral governance. With this observation of his ambivalence over the legitimacy of the state, we reach the limits of Kant’s legal and political thought as expounded in the Rechtslehre. For the doctrine that underpins both the state’s hyper-legitimacy and its chronic illegitimacy – the doctrine that the Rechtsstaat exists only to make it possible for intelligible beings to form a worldly community through reciprocating free choices – reminds us that, after all, Kant’s theory of law and state is a manifestation of his

The pure religion of reason



metaphysical ethics. Kant provides us with a striking formulation of his anti-juridical, anti-political social metaphysics in the following reflection, written between  and : The best condition of man in accordance with the rule of law is the social condition; and the best condition of social man with regard to his security is the irresistible power that compels him to act in accordance with this rule of law. The sciences and arts make him less resistant [to it]. In this way he becomes not better but tamer. One can easily capture him through a small appeal to his pleasures or his honour. He becomes in fact weaker because each such need, even were it to be chosen [willkürlich], is a bond that ties him to the law. (., )

We might say that for Pufendorf and Thomasius the legal and political order’s taming of man – its pacification of the moral conflicts that had torn Germany to pieces during the seventeenth century – signifies not its inferiority to, but its hard-won independence from the moral order. For, when states had joined with their confessional churches in attempting to make man better, they had only intensified the destructive powers of these conflicts. For Kant, however, the key to the separation of the law and morality – the fact that the law controls man’s external conduct without attempting to transform his inner disposition – is finally a sign of the degree to which the legal and political order falls short of the moral one. Hence, while Kant too regards the Rechtsstaat as unsuited to man’s moral regeneration, he, unlike the civil philosophers, does not renounce the project of building a state in which such regeneration will take place. On the contrary, like Leibniz and the Christian natural jurists of the seventeenth century, he continues to pursue this project through a conception of social order older but no less powerful than the idea of the sovereign territorial state: namely, the idea of the church as the model for a general social order in which men can achieve moral regeneration on earth. Surprising, then, as it might at first appear, Kant’s most consequential social and political thought occurs not in his Rechtslehre but in his ‘philosophical theology’, where, like other political metaphysicians, he uses the figure of the church as a blueprint for the moral state. .            Almost all of the modern discussion of Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone is organised around two interdependent contentions. First, it is widely held that the Religion represents the extension of Kant’s ‘autonomous ethics’ into the theological domain. This is taken to



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

signify the emergence of a conception of religion purged of all statutory or credal bases, grounded instead in the ‘rational religious’ postulates required to realise the moral law – the postulates of intelligible freedom, immortality, and God as the creator of the intelligible world (Lötzsch ; Troeltsch ; Wood ). Despite the differences in their approaches, these accounts all claim that in building on his autonomous ethics – that is, on the basis of his purely formal account of the moral law as the rule of man’s rational self-governance – Kant’s Religion is able to propose a moral purification of Christian theology and religion. As a result, religion appears as the external vehicle for the unfolding of the rational moral law in history and society. The second contention informing modern interpretations of the Religion concerns the historical context in which it appeared. If the Religion represents the moral enlightenment of orthodox Christianity then, so this argument goes, its publication in  coincided with a concerted attempt by the Prussian state to stem the tide of the so-called Aufklärung. Relying for the most part on Dilthey’s original reconstruction of the events, most accounts tie the onset of this period of reaction to the ascension of a religiously conservative Frederick William II to the Prussian throne in . In , Frederick’s ‘reactionary’ Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, Johann Christoph Wöllner, issued an edict commanding religious and secular teachers to cease public religious experimentation and to ‘adhere to the creed they are employed to teach’, whichever creed that was (Dilthey ). Kant’s intellectual trajectory intersected with the path of Prussian Religionspolitik when the second of the four essays that would be published as the Religion was rejected by the Berlin Censorship Commission in . After securing the agreement of the Königsberg theology faculty that this was indeed a philosophical rather than theological essay, Kant responded to the state censors by claiming the privilege of academic jurisdiction. At the same time, he sent the manuscript to the philosophy faculty of the non-Prussian University of Jena, whose imprimatur saw the book published the following year. Kant’s evasion of the Prussian censors had its sequel on  October , when he received an official letter, signed by Wöllner on behalf of the king. This charged that he had ‘abused his philosophy for the purpose of distorting and disparaging several principal and fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture and of Christianity’, enjoining him to desist from such conduct (Di Giovanni ). This way of situating Kant’s religious philosophy in its historical circumstances – that is, viewing it as an inherently progressive rational enlightenment of orthodox Christianity, temporarily blocked by the

The pure religion of reason



forces of political and religious reaction – has now become standard in the editorial introductions (Gregor ; Wood ). In the light of our reconstruction of Kant’s metaphysics of morals, however, we have good reason to be sceptical about this whole approach to his philosophy of religion. Firstly, our account shows that Kant’s construction of the principle of moral autonomy cannot be understood as giving rise to an ‘autonomous morality’ – that is, to an ethics whose central principle is independent of revealed religious doctrine, being grounded in free individual reason. Kant provides the following formulation of the theological disclaimer in the Critique of Practical Reason: Nevertheless, the Christian principle of morals itself is not theological (and so heteronomy); it is instead autonomy of pure practical reason itself, since it does not make cognition of God and his will the basis of these laws, but only the attainment of the highest good subject to the condition of observing these laws, and since it places even the proper incentive to observing them not in the results wished for but in the representation of duty alone, faithful observance of which alone constitutes worthiness to acquire the latter. (.; PP, )

While it might serve to separate ‘pure practical reason’ from the revealed theology of the church, this disclaimer cannot separate it from the revealed theology or anthropology of university metaphysics. On the contrary, having observed that Kant’s notion of moral autonomy is actually an improvisation on the figure of contemplative autarky – and having seen, as Kant himself acknowledges throughout his Reflexionen, that this autarky is grounded in the figure of God as pure self-acting intelligence – then we may say that the concept of moral autonomy is itself based in a revealed religious doctrine: namely, the doctrine of God as autarkic intellectual substance as inculcated in Christian university metaphysics. The autonomy of Kantian moral reason is grounded in the revealed autarky of the metaphysical intellect. We have further argued that the ‘formality’ of Kant’s moral principle – the notion that it may be arrived at through a priori reflection on its idea, independent of all ‘material’ anthropology and cosmology – is itself dependent on the metaphysical anthropology of autarkic intelligible being. For we have seen that Kant’s conception of formal moral reason – the notion of an idea capable of determining its own contents, independent of all experience – is actually grounded in the thoughtfigure of an intellectual being whose objects of knowledge are created by pure intellection of them. In other words, far from signifying the emergence of an ethics independent of revealed Christian doctrine, Kant’s conception of the autonomy of moral reason is actually a means



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

of modelling the ethical subject in accordance with the figure of divine intellectual autarky transmitted in Christian metaphysics. We may propose, therefore, that Kant’s reconciliation of reason and religion entailed a sacralisation of reason no less powerful than its rationalisation of religion. This reciprocity is captured in a contemporary text, bearing the apt title of Predigten nach kantischen Grundsätzen (Sermons on Kantian Principles): ‘Religion is innocent [of the charge of superstition] as its precepts are purely moral, and are compatible with human reason because reason itself is holy’ (Anonymous , ). Kant, of course, provides many declarations of the priority of moral philosophy over Christian theology, such as this one from the Groundwork: ‘But where do we get the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the idea of moral perfection that reason frames a priori and conjoins inseparably with the concept of a free will’ (.–; PP, ). But this is not the declaration of the rational independence of morality that it first appears. For, given what it takes to think the a priori idea of the moral law – the need to purify the will of all empirical ends and incentives in order to realise the capacity for pure intellectual self-determination – then human beings have to imitate the concept of God, which remains central to Kant’s moral philosophy. While true enough in its own terms, the claim that Kant generates the practical religious postulates ‘from reason alone’ thus turns out to be quite unrevealing; for the intellectual exercises that count as ‘reason’ in this regard are actually internal to metaphysics as a quasi-religious culture of the self. Kant’s claim that the ‘interest’ in intelligible freedom arises from an idea naturally present in the ordinary consciousness – the idea that man is both a spontaneous intellect in an intelligible world and a passive sensibility in a material one – only makes sense, we discovered, if this idea is seen as the pedagogical means of inducing the interest. Given that they are grounded in the same figure of thought, then we may treat the so-called ‘need of reason’ for the postulates of immortality (required to reconcile intelligible virtue and phenomenal happiness) and God (as creator of the intelligible world in which this reconciliation can take place) as arising in the same way – that is, as a need induced through the inculcation of the metaphysical anthropology. The threshold that Kant establishes to distinguish rational ethics and revealed religion – that the former is grounded in laws internal to human reason while the latter assumes laws originating in a divine being outside human reason – is thus itself an instrument internal to metaphysical

The pure religion of reason



culture. Considering that Kant regards the inner moral law as issuing from a divine autarkic intelligence or ‘holy will’, and given that this idea is one imposed through a metaphysical paideia rather than naturally occurring to the ‘ordinary consciousness’, then the question of whether the law is regarded as internal or external to human reason is not decisive for the distinction between moral philosophy and revealed theology. Kant’s distinction between rational ethics and revealed religion should thus be seen as a purely programmatic means of distinguishing and relating two adjacent moral cultures. We have seen that the culture of university metaphysics requires its initiates to relate to the divine intelligising of the moral law as if it were the command of a higher self to which they might accede through speculative self-sanctification. The religious culture in which this metaphysics was embedded, however, requires its community to relate to the moral law as if it arose from a divine being whose renovating grace might be obtained through various sacramental rites. Intellectual historians must therefore learn to see the Kantian distinction between autonomous morality and heteronomous religion in a new way. For this distinction is in fact a device through which Kantian metaphysics, as the ethos of a speculative elite, maintains its spiritual superiority over the broader culture of sacramental Christianity, while simultaneously anchoring itself within this broader religious culture, as the instrument of its moral enlightenment. From the standpoint of uncommitted intellectual history, therefore, the events surrounding the publication of Kant’s Religion cannot be understood as a clash between a rational philosophy committed to the progressive moral enlightenment of credal Christianity, and an irrational state bent on blocking this enlightenment in order to preserve religious orthodoxy as an instrument of political repression. There are two factors to consider here. On the one hand, the ‘theological enlightenment’, to which the Religion was intended as a contribution, was actually a Protestant theological movement dedicated to reforming or rebuilding the sacramental church on the basis of a ‘pious empirical subjectivity’ (Bohatec ; Sparn ; Sparn ). In publishing the Religion in this context, Kant was thus actually endeavouring to embed his ‘rational theology’ in a powerful institutional religious culture, centred in a network of higher clergy and academic theologians known as the Neologians (Aner ). On the other hand, given that Wöllner’s edict was not in fact an attempt to impose a state-sanctioned religious orthodoxy – demanding rather that priests and teachers expound the



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

doctrines of whatever church employed them and refrain from public religious experimentation – then we may conjecture that it was driven not by religious conservatism as such but by something quite different. In fact the edict would seem to be a typical instrument of the Prussian state’s longstanding policy of supervising the religious peace while remaining neutral between the rival confessions. This was a policy that permitted each confession to proclaim its doctrines, while discouraging proselytising, and insisting that theological speculation capable of disturbing the peace take place in private (Heckel ; Steiger ). The question of the degree to which the Wöllner edict conforms to this policy is of course a matter for historical investigation, but several factors at least give us reason to doubt that this measure was grounded in simple religious conservatism. First, the king’s personal religious beliefs seem to have been radical rather than conservative, being inclined to freemasonry and Rosicrucianism rather than Lutheran orthodoxy (Schultze ). Next, as we have noted, the edict was not directed at mandating a particular confession but at restraining religious enthusiasm by controlling public experimentation and proselytising. The edict repeats the postWestphalian toleration of the three main confessions and in fact extends this to all sects not engaged in public proselytising. Finally, the culturally and politically ambivalent character of the edict is shown by the manner in which it was attacked and defended. As Epstein has shown, its most powerful critic was Lutheranism’s central governing body, the Berlin Superior Consistory, which regarded the measure as state interference in the church. Conversely, among its defenders were many ‘desacralising’ intellectuals who regarded it as a statist measure for the political management of religious enthusiasm (Epstein , –). This at least allows us to offer an alternative historical interpretation of the attempt to censor Kant’s Religion. Rather than representing a reactionary political–religious attempt to repress the so-called Aufklärung, this act can be seen as an instance of the state’s longstanding policy of forestalling public religious controversy and managing religious enthusiasm – here the enthusiasm of rationalist religious intellectuals. In any event we have perhaps said enough to reorient the approach of historical scholarship to Kant’s religious philosophy and to his Religion in particular. This work is not indicative of the manner in which an autonomous moral philosophy sought the rational purification of credal religion, finding the path of historical progress temporarily blocked by a reactionary state. Rather, it signifies the manner in which Kant

The pure religion of reason



attempted to graft his version of the metaphysical paideia onto the ‘rationalist’ wing of Protestant theology (Neology). Through this strategy he sought to reshape theology from within in accordance with his metaphysics, while simultaneously using theology as a social vehicle for his metaphysics. This vehicle would be the figure of the church as a morally perfecting civil society. This is the way, then, in which we shall approach the Religion, treating Parts  and  as elaborating a philosophical theology in the form of the metaphysical ‘purification’ of biblical doctrine (..), and Parts  and  as using this theology to shape a conception of the church as a civil society under metaphysical moral governance (..). .. Metaphysical hermeneutics The doctrine through which Kant effects the transition from moral philosophy to philosophical theology is that of radical evil. This doctrine, whose elaboration forms the centrepiece of Part  of the Religion, plays no role in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality or in the Critique of Practical Reason. It was, however, a standard topic in Kant’s lectures on philosophical theology, and it is not difficult to see how he could use it to give a biblical–Christian inflection to his metaphysics of man’s noumenal and sensible natures. Some modern commentators regard Kant’s discussion of evil as a uniquely profound contribution to intellectual life, in providing a rational account of man’s relation to God (Wood , –). Others approach Kant’s treatment of radical evil as if it were a forensic analysis of the nature of sin and justification, to be judged in accordance with the canons of assertoric argument (Quinn ; Quinn ). It quickly becomes clear, however, that Kant’s discussion of radical evil is neither unique nor rational in any absolute sense. In fact, Kant’s treatment of the doctrine takes the form of the reconciliation of an apparent antinomy or contradiction between two different conceptions of evil, aspects of both appearing necessary to the understanding. Evil for Kant consists in the choice to act on the basis of maxims satisfying the sensible inclinations, rather than the maxim of duty or respect for the moral law. On the one hand, Kant argues, if we are to forestall an infinite regress of such choices we must be able to posit ‘the presence in the subject of a common ground, itself a maxim, of all particular morally evil maxims’; and this subjective ground for the choice of evil maxims can be regarded as natural in the sense of being



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

ultimate and ineradicable (.; RRT, ). On the other hand, though, if man is to be held responsible for his own moral condition, then this subjective ground may not, as the pagans held, be considered as inherent in man’s sensuous nature. It must itself be regarded as an act free choice: ‘Hence the ground of evil cannot lie in any object determining the power of choice through inclination, not in any natural impulses, but only in a rule that the power of choice [Willkür] itself produces for the exercise of its freedom’ (.; RRT, ). In order to stop the regress that would begin were we to ask for the ground of this ultimate choice – of the maxim underlying all other such choices – Kant argues that we must treat it as a priori. It must thus be regarded as timeless and inscrutable to the empirical understanding, which accounts for it being to all appearances innate, while nonetheless remaining intelligibly free and imputable: But since the first ground of the adoption of our maxims, which must itself again lie in the free power of choice, cannot be any fact possibly given in experience, the good or evil in the human being is said to be innate (as the subjective first ground of the adoption of this or that maxim with respect to the moral law) only in the sense that it is posited as the ground antecedent to every use of freedom given in experience (from the earliest youth as far back as birth) and is thus represented as present in the human being at the moment of birth – not that birth itself is its cause. (.; RRT, )

Far from being uniquely Kantian, this resolution of the problem of evil – in which man is regarded as freely choosing the evil nature that corrupts all his choices – was standard in seventeenth-century Lutheran metaphysics, as we learned from Walter Sparn (.). Sparn, we can recall, argues that this figure of thought served a particular end within Christian apologetics: namely, that of subsuming the pagan philosophical conception evil (as arising from man’s sensuous nature) within the Christian theological doctrine of sin (as ur-transgression of divine law). In this way the doctrine permitted the subordination of pagan ethical naturalism to Christian moral transcendentalism, thereby effecting a harmonisation of philosophy and theology typical of Protestant Schulmetaphysik (Sparn , –). From Josef Bohatec’s still-unsurpassed study of Kant’s theological sources we learn that, in late-eighteenth-century Königsberg, it was possible for a Protestant metaphysician to put the same figure of thought to a remarkably similar use. Bohatec argues that Kant uses this figure to reconcile Wolffian moral naturalism – which attributed evil to man’s error-inducing senses – and the Pietist conception of evil as the free

The pure religion of reason



transgression of divine command. Moreover, he shows that, in doing so, Kant’s use of this doctrine of radical evil closely follows that of a number of contemporary Neologians – Heilmann, Schultz, Stapfer, and Baumgarten – whose programme involved just this synthesis of Wolffianism and Pietism into a philosophical religion (Bohatec , –). We have already observed that reconciling the rationalist and Pietist models of spiritual regeneration was a central preoccupation of the Königsberg philosophy and theology faculties during Kant’s formative years. If Kant’s was the latest in a long line of metaphysical arguments designed to reconcile philosophical moral naturalism and Christian moral transcendentalism – ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ – then it is important to observe that, like its predecessors, Kant’s version also has a ‘circular’ character. Here we use this term in an historical and descriptive, rather than a forensic and normative manner; for our aim is to show that the circularity of Kant’s argument regarding radical evil is actually the condition of it fulfilling its role in the metaphysical paideia. Kant expounds his theme of a freely chosen evil nature through a discussion of the propensity to evil, building a good deal of his argument into the definition of propensity (Hang) itself: By propensity (propensio) I understand the subjective ground of the possibility of an inclination (habitual desire, concupiscentia), insofar as this possibility is contingent for humanity in general. It is distinguished from a predisposition [Anlage] in that a propensity can indeed be innate yet may be represented as not being such: it can rather be thought of (if it is good) as acquired, or (if evil) as brought by the human being upon himself. (.–; RRT, –)

It is the propensity to substitute the maxims of the inclinations for the law of duty that explains man’s (empirical) predisposition to evil and that finds expression in the notion of his depraved or corrupt nature: ‘The depravity (vitiositas, pravitas) or, if one prefers, the corruption (corruptio) of the human heart is the propensity of the power of choice [Willkür] to maxims that subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others (not moral ones)’ (.; RRT, ). If, however, it is to remain imputable to us, this propensity must itself be considered as a deed. Kant himself emphasises the apparent contradiction involved in treating propensity – meant to explain our evil acts – as itself an evil act: And yet by the concept of a propensity is understood a subjective determining ground of the power of choice that precedes every deed, and hence is itself not



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

yet a deed. There would then be a contradiction in the concept of a simple propensity to evil, if this expression could not somehow be taken in two different meanings, both nonetheless reconcilable with the concept of freedom. (.; RRT, )

It is at this point that Kant moves to solve the problem, by constructing two different senses for ‘deed’: first, as signifying man’s timeless noumenal choice of the subjective nature that will predispose him to act from the maxims of sensibility; and, second, as signifying the empirical acts performed by this nature in accordance with such maxims: Now the term ‘deed’ [Tat] can in general apply just as well to the use of freedom through which the supreme maxim (either in favour of, or against, the law) is adopted in the power of choice [Willkür], as to the use by which the actions themselves (materially considered, i.e. as regards the objects of the power of choice) are performed in accordance with that maxim. The propensity to evil is a deed in the first sense (peccatum originarium) [original sin], and at the same time the formal ground of every deed contrary to law in the second sense, which materially resists the law and is called vice (peccatum derivatum) [derivative sin]; and the first offence remains even though the second may be repeatedly avoided (because of incentives that are not part of the law). The former is an intelligible deed, cognisable through sheer reason apart from all temporal condition; the latter is sensible, empirical, given in time (factum phenomenon) [phenomenal deed]. (.; RRT, )

Not even a commentator as erudite and sympathetic as Bohatec regards this as solving the problem. If the corruption of the heart is regarded as a propensity in order to explain our tendency to evil acts, and is then regarded as an evil act in order to remain imputable, then this simply sets up a circle between propensity and deed and, consequently, the original corruption of our nature remains unexplained (Bohatec , –). But Bohatec’s careful analysis of this circularity misses the point of Kant’s procedure. For Kant establishes the circle between disposition and deed in order to present the original choice of an evil nature incomprehensible to ‘human reason’ and, in fact, to ground the ultimate or ‘natural’ character of human evil in the very incomprehensibility of this choice: Now the former [intelligible deed] is said to be a bare propensity especially when compared with the second [phenomenal deed], and to be innate, because it cannot be eradicated (since for this to occur the supreme maxim would have to be of the good, whereas in this propensity this maxim has been assumed to be evil). But the chief reason [why the intelligible deed must be regarded as an ineradicable propensity] is that we are just as incapable of assigning a further

The pure religion of reason



cause for why evil has corrupted the very highest maxim in us, though this is our own deed, as we are for any fundamental attribute that belongs to our nature. (.–; RRT, )

Far from indicating a weakness in Kant’s metaphysical theology, this way of grounding the ultimate and ineradicable character of human evil – that is, grounding it in the incomprehensibility of man’s ur-choice of an evil nature – actually holds the key to its considerable power. In the first place, it enables Kant to repudiate all ‘naturalistic’ conceptions of moral character. This applies particularly to the Epicurean anthropologies of the civil philosophers. These, it will be recalled, treat man’s evil disposition as arising from his empirical nature (the passions and affects) or circumstances (bad upbringing, corrupting environment), and construe ethics as a practice of self-restraint designed gradually to improve man’s conduct. Against all such doctrines Kant insists that the corruption of moral character is a complete and instantaneous transformation of man’s moral nature, occurring outside time. This means that there can be no empirical explanation or mitigation of man’s evil actions, each one of which must be regarded as if ‘he had just stepped out of the state of innocence into evil’ (.; RRT, ). In other words, by using the circle between propensity and deed to place evil beyond all empirical explanation – thereby establishing it as a metaphysical mystery – Kant seeks to place man’s moral conduct beyond the reach of all those who treat it as a phenomenon to be managed in accordance with worldly civil imperatives. Had he lived to see it, Thomasius would of course have regarded this as an instance of ‘secret theology’ and ‘philosophical priestcraft’. For Kant is not only breaching the civil philosopher’s injunction on philosophical explications of matters of faith, he is doing so to preserve morality and religion as mysteries, ultimately open only to metaphysicians. Secondly, Kant uses the incomprehensibility figure as the bridgehead for taking his philosophical theology onto the terrain of biblical exegesis. Kant first explicitly introduces the biblical history of the Fall, on whose language he has been implicitly drawing, by appealing to it as far more suited to the transcendent rational origins of evil than any of the naturalistic accounts. For the Christian history treats evil not as a natural endowment but as the corruption of an originally innocent nature through sin, the ur-transgression of the moral law (.–; RRT, –). At the same time, however, by portraying this fall into sin as something that occurs in time – rather than as a timeless event manifesting itself in



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

all temporal actions – the biblical narrative seems to imply that this corruption can be given an empirical explanation, even if it does this only to make allowances for the weakness of human reason: ‘We must not however seek a temporal origin for a moral nature for which we are to be held accountable, even if this is unavoidable when we want to explain the contingent existence of this nature (hence the Scriptures, in accordance with this weakness of ours, have perhaps so pictured its temporal origin)’ (.; RRT, ). Kant thus uses the figure of the incomprehensibility of radical evil as the means of merging his (already tacitly Christian) metaphysical ethics with the central biblical–Christian doctrines of sin, justification, and redemption. He achieves this end by elaborating a structurally ambivalent position for revealed doctrine, treating it as both required to compensate for the limits of human reason, yet sharing in these limits. On the one hand, therefore, the biblical story of the Fall answers to and compensates for the inability of natural philosophical reason to comprehend the original corruption of man’s moral nature: ‘Evil can have originated only from moral evil (not just from the limitations of our nature); yet the original predisposition (which none other than man himself could have corrupted, if this corruption is to be imputed to him) is a predisposition to the good; for us, therefore, there is no conceivable ground from which moral evil could have first come into us’ (.; RRT, ). On the other hand, the fact that the Bible compensates for the limits of temporal human reason via a temporal analogy – the story of the Fall as a singular historical event rather than as an ever-present timeless occurrence – means that it too must be purified, if reason is to overcome its temporal–sensible limits and rise to its highest pure form. The instrument of this purification is a specific metaphysical hermeneutics. Through this hermeneutics Kant treats biblical history as the analogical vehicle of metaphysical truths, thence proceeding to winnow the temporal husks of the history in order to reveal its ‘rational’ kernel, as Kant exemplifies in the following remarkable passage: The Scriptures express this incomprehensibility [of man’s original corruption], together with a more accurate specification of the depravity of our species, in the historical narrative thus: it projects evil into the beginning of the world, not, however, within man, but in a spirit of an originally more sublime destiny. The absolutely first beginning of all evil is thereby represented as incomprehensible to us (for whence the evil in that spirit?); man, however, is represented as having lapsed into it only through temptation, hence not as corrupted fundamentally . . . but, on the contrary, as still capable of improvement, by contrast to a tempting

The pure religion of reason



spirit, i.e. one whom the temptation of the flesh cannot be accounted as a mitigation of guilt. And so for man, who despite a corrupted heart yet always possesses a good will, there still remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed. (.–; RRT, –).

Despite the neglect of it in many modern commentaries, Kant’s philosophical biblical hermeneutics is actually the intellectual method or spiritual exercise through which his rational theology performs the core task of university metaphysics; that is, reconciling moral philosophy and revealed theology within a single discipline in accordance with the apologetic purposes of Christian metaphysics itself. Hence, if Kant places his philosophical interpretation of the Bible outside the bounds of scriptural exegesis, he does so in order to raise it above the latter, treating his metaphysical hermeneutics as the means by which human reason purifies itself of the historical conditioning in which orthodox exegesis remains mired. That this is so is clear from the remarks ‘Concerning the restoration of its power of the original predisposition to the good’, with which Kant concludes Part . For these remarks, organised as a mirror image of the metaphysical analogy of the Fall into moral evil, are intended to show how the doctrine of divine grace may be incorporated in a philosophy of religion that yet remains ‘within the boundaries of reason alone’. Like the original corruption of human nature, the means by which humans can restore their lost good disposition are quite incomprehensible to them: ‘How it is possible that a naturally evil man should make himself into a good man surpasses all our concepts’ (.–; RRT, ). The corruption of our disposition occurs outside time, and this means that none of the improvements that we make to ourselves as temporal beings can restore our good disposition. For this requires a complete and instantaneous ‘revolution’ in our disposition, not the kind of gradual improvement in conduct recommended by the civil philosophers, which occurs in accordance with the ignoble desire for happiness; for example, when ‘an unjust man [converts] to civic righteousness for the sake of peace or profit’ (.; RRT, ). At this point, having demonstrated both the necessity and the incomprehensibility of man’s revolutionary moral renovation, Kant begins to use the biblical language of spiritual rebirth: ‘And so a “new man” can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation (John, :; compare with Genesis, :) and a change of heart’ (.; RRT, ). This provides the avenue through which Kant introduces the



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

doctrine of grace into his ‘pure rational religion’. For, although man is incapable of saving himself as an empirical being – his temporal ethical progress always falling short of a timeless moral disposition – still, ‘if by a single unalterable decision a man reverses the supreme ground of his maxims . . . and thereby puts on a new man’, he may render himself receptive to a renovation of his nature coming from a higher source. This occurs when a noumenal being, possessing the capacity for a-temporal intellectual intuition, intelligises the incomplete unfolding of temporal man’s deeds as an instantaneous unity, thereby completing them and rendering them adequate to the timeless disposition. For him who penetrates to the intelligible ground of the heart (the ground of all maxims of the power of choice), for him to whom this progress is a unity, i.e. for God, this is actually the same as actually being a good man (pleasing to him); and to this extent the change can be considered a revolution. For the judgment of human beings, however, who can assess themselves and the strength of their maxims only by the upper hand they gain over the senses in time, the change is to be regarded only as an ever-continuing striving for the better, hence as a gradual reformation of the propensity to evil, of the perverted cast of mind [Denkungsart]. (.; RRT, )

The full elaboration of this philosophical version of justification and salvation, however, is reserved for Section  of the Religion, where it takes place via the figure of Christ. Here Kant establishes a complex analogical interplay between his own metaphysical anthropology of man’s intelligible and sensible natures, and Christian metaphysics of Christ’s two natures and one person. On the one hand, he argues that the figure of Christ as the incarnation of the divine being in human nature provides an appropriate analogy for the incomprehensible presence of the idea of the pure moral disposition – the archetype of a ‘humanity pleasing to God’ – in sensible man. Kant thus executes a Christological reconfiguration of the central idea of his moral philosophy – the notion of the moral principle as ‘rational being in man’ – which he can do because this ‘humanity’ is already conceived as a quasidivine being resident in the human: In the practical faith in this Son of God (so far as he is represented as having taken up human nature) the human being can thus hope to become pleasing to God (and thereby blessed). In other words, the only human being who is entitled to consider himself as something not unworthy of divine pleasure is the one conscious of such a moral disposition in himself as enables him to believe and self-assuredly trust that, under similar temptations and afflictions (so far as these

The pure religion of reason



are made the touchstone of that idea), he would unswervingly cleave to the archetype [Urbilde] of humanity and, by faithful emulation, remain true to his exemplar. (.; RRT, –)

On the other hand, we must not think of the figure of Christ as literally signifying the embodiment of God in man at some point in time; for this would result in a God–man whose holiness is so far above the human that it could serve no moral purpose for us. We must therefore regard the incarnation as an analogical representation of Christ’s personification of the pure moral disposition ‘through his teachings and actions’, which occurs in us at all times. This practical representation of the moral principle in Christ the human teacher thus makes divine righteousness available for human appropriation, even though this righteousness ‘is not our own’, and ‘rendering this appropriation comprehensible to us is still fraught with great difficulties’ (.; RRT, ). In fact there are three such difficulties (.–; RRT, –). First, how can man become adequate to the personified image of the holy law in him given that ‘the distance between the goodness which we ought to effect in ourselves and the evil from which we start is . . . infinite, and, so far as the deed is concerned . . . is not exhaustible in any time?’ Next, given that we can have no empirical insight into our moral condition and moral fate – such as the images of heaven and hell appear to provide those seeking incentives for their conduct – how can we find the assurance and comfort that heartens us to maintain a good way of life? Finally, given that each man is responsible for fulfilling the commands of duty, yet that man’s corrupt condition means that he must depend on another’s righteousness to render him adequate to the holy law, how can he atone for his own corruption through the goodness of another? In posing and resolving these problems Kant seeks to incorporate the central doctrines of Protestant theology – rebirth, justification through Christ, and vicarious satisfaction – into his hermeneutic metaphysics. Kant has already sketched an answer to the rebirth problem in his metaphysics of grace, given at the end of Part . The only difference between that discussion and this one is that here Kant uses the figure of Christ’s ‘two natures and one person’ in order to show how the grace required for moral rebirth can be both supranatural yet internal to the person. In combining a divine (noumenal) and a human nature, the figure of Christ offers an analogical image of the manner in which ‘pure intellectual intuition’ renders the deed adequate to the disposition within a single person (.–; RRT, –). For its part, the problem of finding



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

comfort in Christ can be solved if we treat the images of heaven and hell not as objective incentives, but as practical analogies for the steadfastness with which we should hold to the moral disposition by living a good life (.–; RRT, –). Finally, Kant makes the most elaborate use of his metaphysical hermeneutics to offer a ‘rational religious’ interpretation of the doctrine of vicarious atonement. This obstacle to the human appropriation of divine goodness can be overcome if we treat Christ’s suffering and atonement as an analogy for the suffering that all men must undergo during the process of moral regeneration. Through this analogy, the relation between man’s noumenal and phenomenal selves is regarded as simulating the relation between Christ and man: The emergence from the corrupted into the good disposition is, in itself (as ‘the death of the old man’, ‘the crucifying of the flesh’), a sacrifice and entrance into a long train of life’s ills. These the new man undertakes in the disposition of the Son of God, that is, simply for the sake of the good, yet they are really due as punishments to someone else, namely the old man (who morally is another being). Although physically (considered in his empirical character as a sensible being) he is still the same human being liable to punishment and must be judged as such by a moral tribunal and hence by himself; yet, in his new disposition (as an intelligible being), in the sight of a divine judge for whom the disposition takes the place of the deed, he is morally another being. And this disposition which he has incorporated in all its purity, like unto the purity of the Son of God – or (if we personify this idea) this very Son of God – bears as vicarious substitute the debt of sin for him, and also for all who believe (practically) in him. (.; RRT, –)

Far from being a rational purification of revealed theology, therefore, Kant’s philosophical theology is the means by which he attaches the elite metaphysical paideia to the broader culture of biblical Christianity. Through his improvisation on the figure of the incomprehensibility of man’s moral corruption and regeneration, Kant effects both a religious reconfiguration of his metaphysical anthropology and a metaphysical reinterpretation of the central Christian doctrines of rebirth and justification. If he thereby achieves a philosophical rationalisation of the revealed doctrines, then he simultaneously makes their sacralising powers of conversion and purification available for his practice of speculative self-transformation. Both dimensions of the change are present in Kant’s insistence that, while the purified doctrines of radical evil, rebirth, and justification do not increase our theoretical understanding, they nonetheless play a crucial role in ‘moral ascetics’ (.–; RRT, ). They do so by destroying confidence in the naturalistic ethics of moral self-restraint. For those

The pure religion of reason



who learn to govern only their external conduct – for example, presumably, the Königsberg law students undergoing a Pufendorfian or Thomasian (quasi-Epicurean) ethical formation – remain evil at heart. In this way Kant’s students, destined to staff the Lutheran churches and schools of East and West Prussia, are compelled to seek moral salvation in a profound and total transformation of the inner self, to be achieved through the self-purifying method of Kant’s own metaphysical hermeneutics (.–; RRT, –). In other words, Kant’s ‘moral religion’ emerges not as a rational purification of revealed Christian doctrine, but as a use of such doctrine to reconfigure the metaphysical paideia in a manner that would better allow it to function as the religion of a specific intellectual elite. Kant and his modern followers regard his rational theological doctrines as ultimately grounded in a fully rational principle – the formal idea of the moral law – hence as supplements to an autonomous ethics. We have shown, however, that his moral principle is itself a Christian metaphysical construct whose ultimate role also lies in the domain of ‘moral ascetics’. Here it forms part of a spiritual exercise designed to turn individuals away from worldly prudential ethics towards an ethos of contemplative self-purification. Kant’s religious reconfiguration of this construct, via the rationalised doctrines of radical evil, rebirth, and justification, is thus designed to allow his metaphysics itself to function as the vehicle of self-sanctification and moral renewal. Seen in this light, Kant’s philosophical theology – like his moral philosophy more broadly – must be regarded as a powerful renewal of metaphysical ethics against the detranscendentalising doctrines of the civil philosophers. Through his philosophical simulacra of the doctrines of sin, justification, and moral regeneration, Kant seeks to destroy all ethics grounded in man’s indifferent or passionate nature – that is, all ethics whose horizon is the management of man’s external conduct in civil life. Further, through this synthesis of philosophy and theology, university metaphysics is able to resume its long campaign to resacralise politics, insisting that the state serve an end far higher than security – in fact the end of man’s moral regeneration. Kant provides his blueprint for the resacralised state in the second half of the Religion. .. Building the moral state The transition from Kant’s metaphysical hermeneutics (rational theology) to his metaphysics of the church (philosophical ecclesiology) occurs



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

in the opening pages of Part  of the Religion. The doctrine through which he effects this transition – the doctrine of the corrupting influence of human society – might be described as Rousseauean, were it not for the likelihood that, in formulating this doctrine, both philosophers were drawing on the same metaphysical conception of an ideal moral community. In Kant’s version, as soon as human beings begin to associate with each other, they are assailed by ‘envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these’; for, given their predisposition to satisfy their sensuous inclinations, human beings simply as human beings ‘will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil’ (.–; RRT, ). Individual moral striving is incapable of combating this social corruption. Bearing in mind the incapacity of the Rechtsstaat to touch the inner disposition, human beings are therefore duty-bound to form a society that is both founded on the laws of virtue and is capable of making men virtuous. The fact that these laws must be publicly proclaimed and adhered to means, however, that this moral union will also be a civil society, consisting in fact of the members of the polity, but organised in accordance with virtue rather than coercion: In accordance with its leitmotif, a union of human beings merely under the laws of virtue can be called an ethical society and, so far as these laws are public, an ethico-civil (in contrast to a juridico-civil) society, or an ethical commonwealth [gemein Wesen]. It can exist in the midst of a political commonwealth and even be made up of all the members of the latter (indeed, without the foundation of a political commonwealth, it could never be brought into existence by human beings). It has however a special unifying principle of its own (virtue) and hence a form and constitution essentially distinct from those of the other. There is nevertheless a certain analogy between the two . . . and with respect to this analogy the ethical commonwealth can also be called an ethical state, i.e. a kingdom of virtue (of the good principle). (.–; RRT, )

In marked deviation from Pufendorf ’s ‘collegial’ and Thomasius’ ‘territorial’ conception of the church, Kant does not regard this ethico-civil society as one of several such associations, existing as private corporations inside the state and under its control. Rather, he treats it as the one true form in which the people may be morally governed, as a hidden moral state co-extensive with the political state, and dedicated to remoulding the latter in its own image. For, from the metaphysical standpoint, human beings in the political state are in an ‘ethical state of nature’, ceaselessly corrupting and preying on each other. This means

The pure religion of reason



that they must leave the political state, submitting their wills to a ruler who governs not just their conduct but their inner dispositions: ‘Hence an ethical commonwealth is conceivable only as a people under divine commands, i.e. as a people of God, and indeed in accordance with the laws of virtue’ (.; RRT, ). Here we see the nucleus of Kant’s programme to resacralise the state, which takes shape as an anti-political ‘enclave politics’, eroding the desacralised state of the civil philosophers from within – in fact from within the state-pacified zone of civil society (Koselleck ). Just as all societies under public laws entail the subordination of their members, so too does the ethical society, whose members constitute a congregation under the direction of teachers and spiritual shepherds. Adapting the Protestant topos of the invisible and visible church to his own metaphysical ends, Kant stipulates that the intelligible ideal of a moral community under divine law constitutes the ‘church invisible’, while the existing ‘church visible’ is to be seen as the empirical approximation of this ideal. Given the need to the close the gap between the empirical and the ideal, then: ‘The true (visible) church is one that displays the (moral) kingdom of God on earth so far as the latter can be realised through human beings’ (.; RRT, ). Accordingly, says Kant – improvising on the standard formula of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ – the true visible church must be universal (subsuming all confessions); pure (grounded in morality alone); free (internally and with regard to the state); and unchanging (grounded in a priori principles which may be publicly proclaimed ‘as it were through a book of laws’) (.–; RRT, ). Kant’s conception of a metaphysical reunification of the faith may thus be regarded as an updating of Leibniz’s reunion project. Kant’s use of the topos of the visible and invisible church differs significantly from that of Pufendorf and Thomasius, this difference pointing to the gulf separating the metaphysical and civil conceptions of the governance of civil society. For Pufendorf and Thomasius, we can recall (., .), the invisible church consists of an unspecifiable community of teachers and auditors, held together by bonds of love and emulation, and by a faith incapable of philosophical formulation or public proclamation. For its part, the visible church consists of the plurality of historical confessions, tolerated by the state as voluntary associations in civil society, but precluded from even the smallest share in civil authority through the state’s constitutional indifference to the truth of their teachings. As far as the civil philosophers are concerned, the notion of a



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

‘true visible church’ or an ‘ethico-civil commonwealth’ – that is, a civil society purporting to make men moral as well as law-abiding – is a dangerous contradiction in terms. Arguing that the political neutralisation of religion and society required the segregation of the ‘kingdom of truth’ and the civil state, Pufendorf and Thomasius reject the figure of the church as a model for civil society, justifying state control of the ‘visible’ churches as secular institutions subordinate to the end of social peace. Kant’s way of separating church and state – ‘But woe to the legislator who would want to bring about through coercion a polity directed to ethical ends!’ (.; RRT, ) – thus points in a different direction to Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’. Like the Lutheran ecclesiastical jurists who preceded him, Kant draws this distinction primarily to protect the ‘true visible church’ from political governance, thereby preserving its role as a (non-coercive) polity directed to ethical ends (Schlaich , –). The civil philosophers, however, draw this distinction in order to defend the state from religious infiltration, and to protect individual Christians from confessional coercion (Heckel , ; Wiebking , –). Kant’s use of the figure of the church to conceive of a morally governed civil society is thus inimical to the central theological, juridical, and political postulates informing the civil philosophers’ strategy for the descralisation of the state. We shall now see that this is because Kant’s moral communitarianism is the direct expression of his rational theology; that is, of his metaphysical hermeneutics as an intellectual discipline designed to reconfigure the culture and role of the university metaphysician. Kant constructs his conception of a faith capable of founding a moral society or ‘universal church’ – the ‘pure religious faith’ or ‘pure rational faith’ – via the distinction between statutory and ‘purely moral’ laws. Unlike Thomasius’ use of this Protestant distinction, however, Kant’s is designed not to divorce private morality from public religious creeds but, in fact, to reconcile the two. This is because Kant’s distinction is governed by his metaphysical anthropology – rather than by a politicaljurisprudential analysis of confessional religion – and is oriented to the harmonisation of moral philosophy and religion. Kant thus treats credal religion – that is, the religion grounded in revealed historical doctrines and oriented to gaining God’s grace and favour through public ritual – as arising from man’s lower sensible nature. The moral laws though are grounded in each individual’s reason, and may be acceded to without any invocation of God – save that of course that which comes through man’s awareness of the holiness of the laws themselves, and from his

The pure religion of reason



need for the Divinity to procure their full realisation in the world (.–; RRT, –). This way of drawing the distinction between revealed statutory and pure moral laws sets the scene for its overcoming through Kant’s central speculative exercise – the posing and reconciling of an antinomy or contradiction. On the one hand, the moral law requires no statutory rites for the worship of God: ‘For in pure religious faith it all comes down to what constitutes the essence [Materie] of God’s veneration, namely the observance of all duties as his commands, which occurs in the moral disposition’. For ‘citizens in a divine state on earth’, though, things are different: ‘A church, on the other hand, which is the union of many human beings with many dispositions in a moral commonwealth, needs a public mode of obligation – a certain kind of experience-based ecclesiastical form, which, being contingent and manifold, cannot be recognised as a duty without divine statutory laws’ (.; RRT, ). Far from leading Kant to follow Thomasius in repudiating the very idea of a public statutory religion of divine dispensation – a move Kant calls ‘arrogant’ – this antinomy points him in a quite different direction. In fact it leads him to seek a credal religion that contains the revealed statutes required for the ‘moulding of men into an ethical commonwealth’, but that also harbours the pure moral religion within it, in a form that allows for its refining over time, as men themselves are refined. He does not have to look far afield. Given that men must be moulded into an ethical commonwealth through ecclesiastical statutes before they can accede to the pure moral meaning contained in these statutes, then, Kant argues, only a scriptural religion could possess the required historical durability and powers of diffusion. Further, among the religions of the book, only (New Testament) Christianity contains the pure moral religion within it. This means that the Christian Scriptures and the church founded on them are providential: How fortunate, when one such book, fallen into human hands, contains complete, besides its statutes as laws of faith, also the purest moral doctrine of religion [reinste moralische Religionslehre] – a doctrine which can be brought into perfect harmony with those statutes (which are the vehicles of its introduction). In this event, both because of the end thereby to be attained, and the difficulty of making intelligible through natural laws the enlightenment of the human race proceeding from it, the book can command the same regard as a revelation. (.; RRT, )

The pure religious faith capable of grounding a universal moral society is thus not biblical Christianity as such. Rather, it consists in the hermeneutic recovery of the pure moral faith from the ‘empirical religion’ in



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

which it was first introduced as a compensation for man’s sensuous understanding: ‘Now to unite the foundation of a moral faith . . . with such an empirical faith which, to all appearances, chance has dealt us, we require an interpretation of the revelation we happen to have, i.e. a thoroughgoing understanding of it in a sense that harmonises with the universal practical rules of a pure religion of reason [reinen Vernunftreligion]’ (.; RRT, ). In this audacious move Kant thus grounds the historical purification of Christian statutes, responsible for creating moral society, in the rational purification of revealed doctrine through his own metaphysical hermeneutics. In doing so he not only precludes the state interpreting the Bible for its ends (contra Hobbes), he also accords priority to the metaphysical hermeneut (the ‘scriptural interpreter’) over the biblical exegete (the ‘scriptural scholar’). For the former opens the door to humanity’s moral future by ‘forcing’ the religion of reason from its historical vehicle, whereas the latter’s task is only to present the historical doctrine that contains man’s moral past: There is, therefore, no norm of ecclesiastical faith except Scripture, and no other expositor of it except pure religion of reason and scriptural scholarship (which deals with the historical side). And of these two, the first alone is authentic and valid for the whole world, whereas the second is merely doctrinal; its aim being the transformation of the ecclesiastical faith for a given people at a given time into a definite and self-maintaining system. (.; RRT, )

Kant regards this programme for the progressive metaphysical purification of biblical Christianity as resolving what he takes to be the central cultural antagonism of his time – roughly that between Protestant religiosity and civil ethics. On the one hand, says Kant, there are those who, conscious that the renovation of man’s corrupt nature requires a transcendent influx of righteousness, maintain faith in the vicarious justification revealed in Bible, but thereby slight the imperative to live a good life. On the other hand, there are those who cultivate a good way of life but, in refusing to accept the need for a vicarious renovation of their moral natures, lack the faith required to realise their moral end: ‘The first principle is accused (often not unjustly) of ritual superstition, which knows how to reconcile a criminal life conduct with religion; the second, of naturalistic unbelief, which combines indifference, or, indeed, even antagonism to all revelation with an otherwise perhaps exemplary conduct of life’ (.–; RRT, ). According to Kant, only his metaphysical hermeneutics shows the way out of this cultural impasse. It does so, as we have already seen, by

The pure religion of reason



insisting (against ‘naturalistic unbelief ’) that faith in the revealed figure of the Saviour is indeed necessary for the renovation of man’s moral disposition. But it simultaneously argues (against ‘ritual superstition’) that Christ is actually an ‘archetype of reason’ in us, which means that we qualify for grace only through living the good life. It is therefore metaphysical hermeneutics itself that controls the passage from credal ecclesiastical religion to pure moral faith, thereby constituting the religion required for the ethical society in which man will reach his highest moral destiny – the perfection of his moral disposition through the kingdom of God on earth: The basis for the transition to the new order of things must lie in the principle of the pure religion of reason, as a revelation (though not an empirical one) permanently taking place within all human beings, and this basis, once grasped after mature reflection, will be carried to effect, inasmuch as it is to be a human work, through gradual reform . . . We have reason to say, however, that ‘the Kingdom of God is come into us’, even if only the principle of the gradual transition from ecclesiastical faith to the universal religion of reason, and so to a (divine) ethical state on earth, has put down roots universally and, somewhere, also in public – though the actual setting up of this state is still infinitely removed from us. (.; RRT, )

It is clear from this passage that Kant regards his hermeneutic metaphysics as differing fundamentally from both orthodox biblical Christianity and naturalistic ethics. He presumes this metaphysics to be dependent neither on inculcated doctrine nor on man’s empirical moral nature, representing instead the self-revelation of divine reason occurring timelessly ‘within all human beings’. In fact Kant constructs an explicit argument to this effect in the fourth and final part of the Religion. He does so through one last antinomy, this time between natural religion and erudite or learned religion. Learned religion is dependent on the transmission, by a clerical elite, of a set of historically revealed doctrines held to be necessary for salvation. It is therefore always the religion of a particular people and lacks the universal communicability necessary to qualify as the universal religion of a world ethical society. Natural religion, however, because it can be arrived at by all individuals reflecting on their own moral natures, is in a different position: Natural religion, as morality (with reference to the freedom of the subject), combined with the concept of that which can actualise its ultimate end (the concept of God as moral originator of the world), and referred to a duration of the human being proportionate to the entirety of this end (immortality), is a



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

pure practical concept of reason which, despite its infinite fruitfulness, yet presupposes only so little a capacity for theoretical reason that, practically, we can sufficiently convince every human being of it and everyone can expect its effect at least, as duty. (.; RRT, –)

In this formulation we can of course recognise an elliptical presentation of core concepts common to Kant’s metaphysics of morals and religion. In comparison with Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ conception of natural religion – which reduces to the bare maxims of loving God and one’s neighbour – Kant’s thus conceals a sophisticated doctrinal specificity, focused in the intellectualist conception of the moral law and the three religious postulates required for its realisation. Moreover, unlike theirs, Kant’s natural religion is not intended to be a non-salvific social pedagogy, radically distinct from ecclesiastical religion, and under state control. On the contrary, it is envisaged as a morally regenerative pure rational faith destined to be reconciled with ecclesiastical faith in a religion that will outstrip all political supervision. For, Kant argues, while erudite religion can indeed degenerate into a sacramental clerical practice lacking all inner moral efficacy, the limits of man’s sensuous understanding mean that he nonetheless requires the inculcation of public doctrines in order to begin the task of moral self-transformation. This need not be a problem, however, if the doctrinal formulas simply introduce an intellectual discipline that men would have eventually imposed on themselves: Accordingly a religion can be natural, yet also revealed, if it is so constituted that human beings could and ought to have arrived at it on their own through the mere use of their reason, even though they would not have come to it as early or as extensively as is required. Hence a revelation of it at a given time and place might be wise and very advantageous to the human race, for then, once the thereby introduced religion is at hand and has been made publicly known, everyone can henceforth convince himself of its truth by himself and his own reason. (.–; RRT, )

Once again Kant both poses and resolves the antinomy through his metaphysical anthropology. For this is what allows him to treat revealed Christian doctrine as the empirical form in which man’s divine intelligible being reveals itself to his material self, still mired in the prudential life of corrupt society. This revelation triggers the process of speculative hermeneutic purification that will eventually, at the end of historical time, make revealed doctrine redundant. Once again, Kant uses this anthropology to induce the desire for a profound reshaping of the self – this time carried out through the hermeneutic exercise itself, and

The pure religion of reason



designed to form a specific inner deportment towards both public sacramental Christianity and personal everyday conduct. Indeed, it is only through the formation of this deportment that the antinomy between revealed credal and natural moral religion is resolved. For this allows those undergoing the metaphysical paideia to participate in such sacraments as baptism, holy communion, and public prayer as morally edifying contemplative occasions, rather than as magically transformative rituals. Yet it also allows them to treat everyday actions as an occasion for religious observance. All such actions, it will be recalled, are to be regarded as repeating the fall from innocence to corruption, and thus as offering the opportunity for the renovation of sensible man’s moral nature through self-transcending participation in his higher intelligible being (.–; RRT, –). This is of course in sharp contrast to Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht which treats the sacraments, one and all, as ‘indifferents’ or adiaphora. According to the civil philosopher, the state may tolerate sacramental religions for the purposes of maintaining religious calm, but it must never grant any of them public recognition, or allow them to dictate the terms of civil ethical governance. We have already seen that, far from being something that ordinary consciousness arrives at of its own accord – independent of doctrinal inculcation, and therefore rationally and universally – awareness of Kant’s inner moral principle is induced through a powerful metaphysical paideia. This is a spiritual pedagogy that requires individuals to relate to their true selves as pure intelligible beings, tied for the moment to their impure sensible natures, but destined for purifying self-recovery through the speculative exercises of metaphysics. In making his moral principle into the core of his conception of natural religion, Kant was not therefore showing how revealed sacramental religion would be purified through progressive recovery of a rational principle already contained ‘within all human beings’. Rather, confronted by a biblical Christianity unleashed from controlling orthodoxy – through the desacralisation of the state and the broader dissemination of religious writings – he was outlining a programme that would allow university metaphysics to defend its claim to provide an account of the meaning of religion which ‘alone is authentic and valid for the whole world’. Under these changed cultural circumstances this would no longer be achieved through the proclamation of definitive and binding doctrinal interpretations. Instead, Kant argues, the unification of the faith will take place by qualifying metaphysicians – now in the guise of the



Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

philosophical–historical hermeneut – to undertake the continuous reinterpretation of doctrine in accordance with their diagnosis of humanity’s current level of spiritual development. The genius of Kant’s hermeneutic metaphysics is that it allows the elite religion of the university (Kant’s own metaphysical paideia) and the broader biblical–religious culture to be continuously adjusted in relation to each other. This adjustment, of course, remains under the control of metaphysical hermeneut himself who, through his own speculative reinterpretation of Scripture, displays the current stage of the ongoing revelation of intelligible being in empirical history. We should be sceptical then of those accounts that treat Kant’s metaphysics as occupying a higher philosophical–historical level than other such late-eighteenth-century religious–intellectual movements as Neology. Stephen Lestition, for example, has argued that Kant’s formal moral philosophy allowed him to grasp the philosophical–historical underpinnings of these rival movements, and that his mastery of antinomy allowed him to understand the historical dialectic governing their future reconciliation (Lestition ). In fact, this kind of interpretation bears an uncanny resemblance to Kant’s own claim to discern the relative historical maturity of human reason. We have shown, to the contrary, that Kant’s formal philosophy may itself be regarded as a spiritual exercise competing with other such (religious) exercises. Further, we have seen that Kant’s antinomies – such as those between external orthodoxy and inner moral faith, and between ecclesiastical and natural religion – far from capturing an intrinsic historical dialectic, in fact seek to impose such a dialectic as a means of absorbing and neutralising the rivals to Kantian metaphysics. In this regard, Kant’s religious philosophy fell quite naturally under the Wöllner edict, concerned as it was to prevent sectarian theologians and intellectuals from public proselytising. In developing his intellectual and cultural strategy, Kant was simultaneously attacking the rival strategy that had been elaborated by Pufendorf and Thomasius. For theirs was premised on partitioning a religion beyond all reach of philosophical formulation and public proclamation, from a politics whose singular end of security dictates its indifference to religious truth and ensures its immunity to moral critique. Kant’s Religion, though, is dedicated to elaborating a metaphysical hermeneutics capable of functioning as the public theology of an ‘ethical commonwealth’, and thereby evading the desacralisation of politics sought by Pufendorf and Thomasius. Kant’s programme thus preserves the longstanding role of university metaphysics as the intellectual archi-

The pure religion of reason



tect of confessional society; that is, society conceived of as a single ‘true visible church’, or, as the morally perfecting ‘kingdom of God on earth’. Given the actual post-confessional religious indifference of the state, though, Kant conceives the ethical state in a new way. He construes it not in terms of the political enforcement of the true religion, but as ‘rational religion’s’ gradual displacement of the state altogether, through the creation of a people no longer in need of political coercion. From here arose the anti-political enclave politics so central to modern dialectical history and ‘critical’ social theory. These disciplines could take over Kant’s philosophical hermeneutics and use it to diagnose the historical signs of progress towards a moral or rational society, typically configured in terms of non-coercive intellectual communication and community, or a ‘rational public sphere’. This is one of the main forms in which university metaphysics has been carried into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, allowing the Christian–metaphysical demand for the resacralisation of politics to be voiced in the registers of dialectical philosophical history and anti-positivist social theory.

Postscript: the kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom

We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German intellectual history as a dialectical progression leading to Kant. We have since discovered that this historiography is anything but a mistake. It is, in fact, a central weapon in the ongoing intellectual civil war between civil and metaphysical philosophy. This historiography first appeared in the dialectics through which Kant represents his own transcendence of the philosophies that preceded his. In using the figure of homo duplex to organise his intellectual antinomies, Kant was able to reduce the colliding cultural worlds seen at Halle to a series of neatly paired intellectual oppositions – between rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism – which could be resolved through the cultivation of a particular intellectual deportment. This method was then used by his early adherents – such as the theologian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin – to write Kant-centred histories of philosophy (Hochstrasser , –). Like Kant, Stäudlin was centrally preoccupied with reconciling moral philosophy and Christian theology; and he was among the first to use the metaphysical hermeneutics of Kant’s Religion to marginalise Pufendorf for ‘failing’ to achieve this goal (Stäudlin ). Never forgiven for its detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics, at the end of the eighteenth century civil philosophy was driven from Protestant arts faculties by Kant’s renewal of Schulmetaphysik, finding itself increasingly restricted to the teaching of law and politics. If, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many historians still treat the civil philosophers as failing to reconcile rationalism and voluntarism in a morally grounded politics, this is surely testimony to the long hegemony of post-Kantian philosophical history, which is perhaps only now beginning to break down. In making its own contribution to this disintegrative process, this book has offered a redescription of Kant’s practical philosophy, including its dialectics. Kant’s philosophy is best understood as a modification of a 

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



longstanding metaphysical paideia, grounded in the pathos of homo duplex, and dedicated to the ethos of intellectual self-purification. By presenting human experience as governed by a realm of pure intelligences, while simultaneously insisting that this realm lies beyond human understanding, Kant’s metaphysical anthropology is the programme for a particular kind of intellectual grooming. This is one that requires its bearers to maintain faith in the metaphysical noumena, but only as regulative ‘ideas of reason’ or as ‘deontological’ moral laws. At the same time, those undergoing this formation must accept the independence of empirical experience, but only as the mode in which the noumena appear to a being with our ‘human’ kind of sensibility. The grooming of this ‘critical’ intellectual deportment – surely a modern form of Hadot’s Platonic exercises in ‘mental concentration and renunciation of the sensible world’ – holds the key to understanding the cultural role and historical significance of Kant’s philosophy. In forming an intellectual estate capable of both entertaining the positive sciences (of law, politics, theology), while simultaneously treating them as manifestations of a recessive power of creative intellection, this philosophy was responsible for a momentous double transformation of intellectual culture: the simultaneous rationalisation of religion and sacralisation of reason. With this transformation, German university metaphysics was able to reassert its claim to moral oversight of civil ethics, law, and politics. These sciences would now all be subject to the imperious gaze of a personage who claimed privileged access to the pure laws from which they devolved on the basis of his own intellectual purity – the ‘critical’ intellectual. It was this reincarnation of the metaphysical personage that recommended Kant’s philosophical theology to modernising theologians like Stäudlin. Not only did the critical deportment permit the reconciliation of moral philosophy and Christian theology – through the subordination of civil conduct to a quasi-divine intellectual self-governance – it also sealed the cultural settlement that Neology sought between metaphysical rationalism and theological voluntarism. It did so via the anthropology of self-legislating rational being; for this assimilated theological voluntarism while simultaneously transposing moral regeneration into the philosophical register, where it could be administered by metaphysicians. In this way, the ‘Kantian settlement’ allowed university metaphysics to re-attach itself to the cultural power of ecclesiastical Protestantism, by providing ‘rational’ explications of biblical doctrines for the religious intelligentsia. At the same time, it allowed Christian



Postscript

metaphysics to penetrate civil ethics, law, and politics. Here metaphysics would appear in the form of the ‘critical’ recovery of the pure moral law, the pure principle of justice, and the ideal general will that would eventually lead to the ‘withering away of the state’. This transformation in our understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy lies at the centre of the essay that we now bring to a close. It was in order to effect this change that we sketched the history of metaphysics as an academic Lebensform (.), tracing its modifications through Leibniz (.) and Wolff to Kant, whose formal–transcendental ethics we described as an elaboration of the metaphysical paideia (., .). At the same time, through a parallel reconstruction – by treating its anthropology as an alternative irrefutable mode of spiritual grooming – we have been able to rescue civil philosophy from its present marginalisation in the history of moral philosophy (., ., .). In stepping outside the engrossing but self-enclosed theatre of dialectical philosophical history, we have been able to encounter the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil and metaphysical philosophy in their true unreconciled forms. Each, we have argued, may be regarded as an attempt to reconfigure the relations between religious and civil governance in the wake of their political–jurisprudential separation, but in divergent forms and in accordance with conflicting interests. Each executed this reconfiguration via a reshaping of the academic disciplines through which religious and civil intellectuals acquired their characteristic ethical deportments and intellectual expertise. Herein lies the significance of their two fundamentally different attitudes to the relation between theology and ‘philosophy’. In continuing to hybridise the two fields – whether via Leibniz’s monadology, Wolff’s rational psychology and theology, or Kant’s metaphysical ethics and philosophical theology – early modern university metaphysics maintained its demand for the resacralisation of politics, in the form of a morally grounded state. It did so by treating the political community as the devolved ‘sensible’ form of the moral or spiritual community. As a result, in rationalist political metaphysics, political and legal rule appear as a debased mode of governance, required only until the moral community regains its capacity for reciprocal collective self-governance, which will appear in the form of the general will of a total or ‘unlimited society’. At this point the need for law and state will wither away, displaced by the moral sovereignty of the community of rational beings, who, in accordance with a revivified political ecclesiology, will form an ‘ethico-civil society’ or ‘kingdom of God on earth’.

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



Conversely, in partitioning theology and ‘philosophy’ – via their ‘spiritualist’ theology and statist natural law – Pufendorf and Thomasius were seeking to separate the pursuit of moral regeneration from the exercise of civil sovereignty. Their object was to reshape the academic intelligibility of civil authority, treating it in terms of the maintenance of social peace by a government exercising supreme power in a religiously or morally indifferent manner. In making this task central to his natural law, Pufendorf was giving philosophical expression to the desacralisation of politics that had been achieved by the political jurists seeking a way out of religious civil war. The civil philosophers were thus not attempting to institute a new integral moral–political governance of a total society – one based on a secular political philosophy – but to separate the maintenance of political order from the pursuit of moral regeneration. From now on these were to belong to different moral personae – the sovereign–subject and the teacher–auditor – inhabiting incommensurate moral worlds: the civil kingdom and the kingdom of truth. The latter would be unconditionally free unless it disturbed social peace; the former would be governed ‘absolutely’, on the condition that the sovereign power remained indifferent to all transcendent truths. Given our fundamental concern to demonstrate the intellectual and institutional autonomy of civil and metaphysical philosophy, we shall not, of course, be closing this book by anticipating their future harmonisation. There is no shortage of such anticipations. Rather we shall conclude by reprising our prime object, to contribute to a chastened historical understanding of these cultures in their unreconciled state. We do so by sketching four themes for further research. Our first theme is that of the statist or authoritarian character of early modern liberalism. We have touched on this theme several times and, of course, the notion of an authoritarian liberalism is familiar to readers of Carl Schmitt (Cristi ). Pierre Manent and Blandine Kriegel have also illuminated our understanding of this issue (Kriegel ; Manent ). Despite this, to the extent that it remains committed to a politics founded in rational moral self-governance, much modern moral and political philosophy remains uncomprehending of the statist character of early modern liberalism. As we have seen, however, Pufendorf and Thomasius did not derive the founding liberal rights – to security of the person and freedom of religion – from the moral capacities of rational individuals or moral communities. Rather they grounded them in the state’s capacity to pacify such communities, by withdrawing civil power from the moral domain and concentrating it solely in the maintenance



Postscript

of external order (., .). Conversely, early modern doctrines of popular sovereignty were typically not liberal, as we saw in the case of Althusius (.). In grounding the exercise of civil sovereignty in a communal moral will – a will that could only be formed through the available religious pedagogies – these theories were incapable of making the separation between moral and political governance on which the first liberal rights depended. Under these circumstances, in which the legitimacy of civil power is held to depend on the general will of a self-perfecting moral community, it is always possible to envisage such power being exercised to ensure the existence of this will. After the Kantian cultural settlement, the statist character of early modern liberalism vanished from sight in post-Kantian arts and theology faculties. At this point, the central reality of historical liberalism – that personal security and religious toleration depended on the pacification of fratricidal moral communities by a desacralised state – passed into the metaphysical looking-glass. On the other side of this inverting mirror – held up to society by the new alliance of rationalist philosophy and enlightened theology – security and toleration appeared as rights against the state, achieved by self-governing moral communities. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the state’s liberal withdrawal from the moral domain would thus be subject to a profound and systematic misunderstanding. It would appear in post-Kantian histories of liberalism not as the means by which the state achieved the religious neutrality required to govern confessionally divided moral communities – not, that is, as the exclusion of the church from the exercise of civil power – but as an expression of the moral community’s transcendent resistance to the state. In considering Jacobi’s wide-eyed claim that it was the ‘ceaseless striving of reason’, not law and state, that put an end to the wars of religion – and in recalling his Kantian relegation of all ‘externally imposed laws’ in favour of those self-imposed by free rational beings – we obtained a snapshot of the self-deluding history that ‘critical’ intellectuals would entertain in the wake of Kant’s inversion of the dependency of freedom on security (Jacobi , –). For it was not philosophical reason that put an end to religious civil war but, in fact, law and politics, and the forms of reason peculiar to them. Specifically, as Heckel has argued, it was positive Staatsrecht that permitted the formation of a ‘non-confessional or supra-confessional order of coexistence between the two great confessional blocks’ (Heckel , ). This was achieved, ironically enough, by treating law as externally imposed for the sake of peace,

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



hence as neutral with regard to inner moral truth. Only inside this politically imposed jurisprudential order of coexistence would the first liberal rights appear. Our second theme – that of the historical independence and persistence of civil philosophy – is one to whose exploration we have contributed in this book. We have done so by arguing that there was no dialectical supersession of metaphysical rationalism and civil voluntarism – Leibniz and Pufendorf, Wolff and Thomasius – except in the minds of Kantian philosophers and historians. They of course undertake the dialectical exercises precisely in order to achieve this supersession ‘in thought’. The fact that Pufendorfian–Thomasian natural law and political jurisprudence survived its recurrent metaphysical critiques – continuing to form jurists and politici for the Brandenburg-Prussian state throughout the eighteenth century – is a longstanding theme of historical research (Rüping ; Rüping ; Wiebking ). We have also taken note of Stephen Lestition’s more recent exploration of a similar theme, in his timely account of the continuing role of civil philosophy in the formation of a ‘juristic civic consciousness’ in the law faculty of Kant’s own university during the mid-eighteenth century (Lestition ). To the extent that we have contributed to this theme, it is by clarifying the radical autonomy of civil philosophy – as an instituted intellectual paideia – from all projects for its philosophical (metaphysical) ‘critique’. Grounded in its own ‘Epicurean’ anthropology, and self-consciously opposed to the ‘Platonic’ recovery of transcendental grounds for knowledge and morality – a recovery which it regarded as the dangerous illusion of a rival intellectualist anthropology – Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy was immune to all attempts to reveal its transcendental grounds. To the extent, then, that statist natural law and positive political jurisprudence did undergo philosophical critique and transformation, this was not the outcome of any weakness in its intellectual foundations. Rather, it resulted from the erosion of the institutional boundary between political jurisprudence and ‘critical’ philosophy, brought about by the spread of Kantianism as an academic enclave-culture. This is the lesson to be learned from accounts of the manner in which a group of Kantian legal philosophers – Hufeland, Feuerbach, Thibaut – dominated the Jena law faculty during the s (Lingelbach ). For in their core doctrines – their insistence on the centrality of the moral law to jurisprudence, their refusal to derive justice from existing law, their insistence on the sanctity of the person as an end in itself, their relegation of



Postscript

political–legal utility in favour of Kantian moral autonomy – we identify not the philosophical critique of positive jurisprudence, but something quite different: the institutional subordination of jurisprudence to the prestigious culture of Kantian philosophical critique. This subordination, we recall, is precisely what Kant’s Rechtslehre is designed to inflict, reserving insight into the pure ‘principle of justice’ for intellectuals prepared to purify themselves of all positive jurisprudence. The Kantian critique of positive jurisprudence thus represents the anti-juridical revenge of a metaphysics dedicated to reversing the law’s desacralisation of civil governance. Moreover this is how several anti-Kantian ‘popular philosophers’ saw the matter, as is clear in Friedrich Nicolai’s attack on the Rechtslehre for substituting moral philosophy for jurisprudence (Nicolai ). The continuing importance of Pufendorfian natural law and positive Staatsrecht in other environs – ‘devoted not to the university but to government’ – indicates their grounding in an autonomous institutional–intellectual culture. In the early s, at the very moment when the Jena Kantians were insisting that the state conform itself to the inner moral autonomy of its citizens – and when Kant himself was publishing his account of a future ethical state bearing the form of the ‘true visible church’ – the privy councillor Carl Gottlieb Svarez was instructing the Prussian crown princes in a very different conception of the state’s relation to the religious and moral cultures of its citizens: ‘Insofar as we regard the Regent simply as the head [Oberhaupt] of civil society, all his rights over religious associations flow solely from the rights of general supervision, through which he must ensure that no associations are tolerated in the state that are contrary to the ends of the state and endanger public peace and security.’ On this basis, Svarez builds the state’s rights of religious supervision: the right of the state to examine religious systems with a view to determining their impact on public tranquillity and security; to ensure that religious teachers are also well disposed to the state; to ensure that religious associations attempt to exercise no corporate rights apart from those enunciated by state law; and to prevent the controversies of opposed religious parties from breaking out into disturbances of civil order. If Svarez’s construction of the state’s supervisory right is thus immediately reminiscent of Thomasius’ defence of the religious rights of Protestant princes, then so too is the manner in which the statesman limits this right: ‘The state can never and under no circumstances be justified in prescribing what a religious association should teach or how it should order its form of worship.’ Further, ‘The

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



state can never prohibit the practice of a religion merely on the grounds of its dogmatic principles . . . Purely dogmatic concepts and opinions of God and divine things, of the relation of man to the Godhead, of his condition after death, no matter how false and incorrect, can never have a harmful influence on civil life and the duties that a man owes to his neighbour or the state’ (Svarez , –). In other words, a century after Pufendorf ’s death, and regardless of its metaphysical critique, civil philosophy continued its task of forming the deportment of those charged with governing the desacralised state. The third theme we have identified as worthy of further exploration is that of the quasi-religious character of enlightenment rationalism. We have seen that German civil and metaphysical philosophy were both deeply rooted in Protestant religious culture, which each nonetheless sought to reconfigure for its own ends. In referring to the quasi-religious character of early modern rationalism, we are thus indicating the reconfiguration characteristic of rationalist metaphysics. This reconfiguration imbues ‘rational’ metaphysics with a religious function by treating reason as that part of human being linking it to its divine intellectual archetype; for, in doing so, it deploys philosophy as an exercise in self-purifying, self-transcending moral regeneration. At the heart of the religious function of metaphysical rationalism lies the metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex – the figuration of man as a pure intelligence temporarily embodied in a sensible being. This anthropology is responsible for the inward intellectualist character of the whole line of metaphysical philosophies, from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond. In requiring its initiates to view themselves as ‘sensibly affected rational beings’, the anthropology induces the pathos of metaphysical longing, driving them to renounce their civil surroundings and begin the endless task of intellectual self-purification. Yet this quasireligious function of metaphysics is simultaneously the source of its rational ‘scientific’ claims; for it is through self-purifying abstraction that certain individuals gain access to the pure a priori concepts of which empirical things are the supposed manifestation. Both functions of metaphysical rationalism – the religious and the scientific – are captured in Leibniz’s conception of transcendent concepts as ‘perfections’ whose knowledge perfects the beholder. This is a knowledge promising access to the divine intellection of the pure concepts – of things, of morality, of justice, of regeneration – prior to their impure embodiment in the empirical prudential world (PW, ; Gr, , –). This privileged participation in a quasi-divine pure thinking holds the key to the moral and



Postscript

epistemological authority of the metaphysician, which is in turn the source of this personage’s claims to exert influence in a variety of intellectual and social domains, including those of law, politics, and religion. Modern Kantians generally argue that Kant achieved the rational emancipation of philosophy by effecting the final transition from a quasi-religious metaphysics to a fully formal transcendental philosophy. In the case of Kant’s moral philosophy, this transition is supposed to entail the relegation of all substantive metaphysical anthropology and cosmology in favour of a formal concept of morality derivable from ordinary consciousness. Nonetheless, in our reconstruction of Kant’s Groundwork (.), we have shown that the process of deriving the formal concept from ‘ordinary consciousness’ is itself a spiritual exercise, one deeply informed by the self-formative use of the anthropology of ‘sensibly affected rational being’ and the cosmology of the spiritual community. Even at its most formal – indeed, especially here – Kant’s practical philosophy retains its metaphysical anthropology and quasi-religious ethos. For it is through their self-formative use of this anthropology – through their renunciation of prudential ethics and purgation of all sensible inclinations and ends – that Kantian philosophers presume to accede to a universally binding (‘holy’) rational moral law; presume, that is, self-transcending access to a universe of rational beings whose communio is the moral law. Moreover, through this turning inwards – away from externally imposed civil duties and towards an absolute inner ‘humanity’ bearing all the features of the metaphysical God – Kantian ethical rationalism inherits the religious purism of its neoscholastic and Leibnizian predecessors. The faint chill of zealotry thus surrounds Kant’s treatment of suicide as sensible man’s sacrilegious assault on his own ‘humanity’, which ‘is conceived as an intelligible substance . . . as a subject that is destined to give moral laws to man, and to determine him: as occupant of the body, to whose jurisdiction the control of all man’s powers is subordinated’ (.; LE, ). Rather than accepting the modern account of Kant’s supposed formalisation of a quasi-religious metaphysics, we should in fact begin to look for the quasi-religious aspects of modern Kantian formalism. Were we to consider John Rawls’s theory of justice in this light, for example, then we might well adopt a different view of the supposedly formal character of his central methodological strategies – in particular the ‘veil of ignorance’ required to enter the so-called ‘original position’ needed for the choice of principles of justice (Rawls , –). In requiring the philosopher to abstract from all forms of knowledge relevant to extant

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



civil ends and personally interested desires – in stipulating the philosopher’s ignorance of his or her social position, natural abilities, moral beliefs, historical and cultural location – might not the veil of ignorance simulate Kant’s spiritual exercise in self-purification and ascent to the spiritual community? After all, what is a community of mutually disinterested beings – beings whose rational calculations of interest come to form a reciprocating totality through abstraction from their personal and social ‘embodiment’ – if not a simulacrum of Kant’s community of intellectual beings? In other words, to the degree that knowledge of Rawls’s pure principles of justice requires the intellectual purification of those charged with knowing them, we have prima facie reasons for investigating whether modern Kantian formalism might not conceal the same quasi-religious metaphysics as its prototype. Further, might not the intellectual and moral prestige of the modern formal philosopher owe something to the religious deportment of the metaphysical personage? For how else does this philosopher accede to formal principles of justice except via the cultivation of a self-purifying transcendence of all instrumental social ends and positive laws? These at least are questions for further research. Finally, our last theme draws attention to what might be called the neo-confessional character of rationalist political metaphysics. By ‘neoconfessional’ we mean the preparedness to declare metaphysical philosophy necessary for living a good life and, sometimes, the willingness to make assent to this philosophy compulsory, as the condition of forming a good society. The neo-confessional character of early modern political metaphysics is grounded in its intellectualist ethics. In modelling ethical conduct in terms of the self-legislating self-governance of an intellectual being – rather than, for example, in terms of the capacity to restrain external behaviour in accordance with public decorum or positive law – there is a tendency to treat the doctrine held to be responsible for intellectual self-governance as necessary for the good life. For as long as the metaphysics of morals is understood as a formal theorisation of a moral law in principle available to the ‘ordinary consciousness’, then the problem of a metaphysical confessionalism remains invisible. As soon, however, as we uncover the self-formative role of the metaphysical paideia – the moment we see that metaphysics programmes the exercises in abstraction and self-purification required to deport oneself as a selfgoverning intelligence – then its neo-confessional character becomes starkly apparent. For, if it is only intellectually self-governed conduct that is going to count as moral – and if metaphysics contains the doctrine and



Postscript

discipline required to become a self-governing intellectual being – then metaphysics itself must be necessary for living a good life. It is only a short step from here to making metaphysical ethics compulsory and to declaring other forms of ethics not just erroneous but morally corrupting, hence deserving of prohibition or even of punishment. We first encountered this chain of consequences in Leibniz’s remarks on the issue of whether heresy is a crime (..), written, it will be recalled, as a criticism of Thomasius’ negative answer to this question. The twin grounds of Thomasius’ answer – his voluntarist denial that ideas can affect the will, and his statist insistence that only external civil actions be punishable – encapsulate the religious and political disposition of civil philosophy. Conversely, it is Leibniz’s rationalist insistence that the goodness of the will is determined by the purity of the mind’s ideas – his fundamental teaching that humans are perfected through contemplation of the intellectual perfections – that leads him to regard heresy as culpable and punishable. For, in establishing a continuity between intellectual purity and civil conduct – without which, says Leibniz, we would be forced to the absurd Pufendorfian conclusion that good acts may come from bad dispositions – the way is open to exercise civil force to achieve the required intellectual purity. In Wolff’s discussion of the relation between the sage and the prince, we encountered an even more pronounced tendency to give civil force to metaphysical doctrine. Wolff treats metaphysics as both the key to knowledge of the true end of the state – the perfection of man’s intellectual nature – and as the means of acquiring the pure disinterested disposition required to direct government to this end. In other words he collapses the distinction between the sage and the prince – metaphysics and politics – and, on the basis of the continuum between the pursuit of moral perfection and the exercise of civil power, envisages his own natural theology forming the basis of a state religion (Link , ). As we have seen (..), Kant also regards metaphysics as necessary for leading the good life, treating prudential–empirical ethics not just as erroneous but as morally corrupting, and metaphysics as both true and morally purifying: ‘We know well that without possessing such a metaphysics it is . . . impossible . . . to ground morals on their genuine principles and thereby to create pure moral dispositions, grafting them onto human souls [Gemüthern] for the highest good of the world’ (.–; PP, –). Like its Leibnizian and Wolffian precursors, Kantian metaphysics may thus also be regarded as neo-confessional. Despite his attempt to open a gap between ethical cultivation and juridical coercion,

The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom



in treating the latter as a devolved version of the former Kant leaves the way open for juridical laws to be ‘elevated and absorbed’ into moral ones. Once this pathway has been opened, then it is possible to envisage a state governed by ethical laws. In Kant’s account of this ‘ethical state’ or ‘kingdom of God on earth’ – whose blueprint is sketched in the Religion, the essays on world peace and cosmopolitan citizenship, and the Conflict of the Faculties – we see the full and final neo-confessional character of his metaphysics. For, unlike Pufendorf and Thomasius, who treat all moral societies or churches as voluntary associations permanently encased in a morally indifferent political state, Kant envisages the emergence of an ‘ethico-civil society’ that is co-extensive with the political state and destined eventually to displace it from within. There must be, Kant argues, a publicly proclaimed religious doctrine in order to form individuals into an ethico-civil society, even if such a public historical doctrine threatens to straitjacket the inner freedom of the moral law and corrupt the purity of ‘rational faith’. In fact, it is in overcoming this threat – via the progressive hermeneutic revelation of the rational faith contained in historical religion – that Kant’s metaphysics inherits its full confessional role, constituting itself as the rational theology of a ‘true visible church’ or emergent ethical state. Kant’s political metaphysics thus resiles from the ideological neutrality of the desacralised state not by directly giving this state moral ends, but by envisaging its progressive withering in favour of the moral state hidden within, giving rise to ‘a union of human beings merely under the laws of virtue . . . an ethical commonwealth [gemein Wesen]’ (.; RRT, ). In proposing a state run on laws of virtue Kant is of course adopting a position antithetical to Pufendorf ’s fundamental separation of the kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom, which entails that: ‘there need not be established a particular state in order to propagate and preserve truth, no more than it is necessary to set up a separate commonwealth where philosophy and the other sciences are to be taught’ (DHR, ). For Pufendorf and Thomasius there can be no ethical state, because the condition of bringing tranquillity to religiously divided communities was the radical moral indifference of the state and the equally radical privatisation of religion. Hence, despite his insistence that the members of the ethical state are united by non-coercive moral laws, Kant’s political metaphysics compromises both the religious neutrality of the state and the political neutralisation of religion. It is here that the neo-confessional character of Kantian metaphysics is most fully evident and its difference from civil philosophy most fully



Postscript

apparent. This difference – approaching incommensurateness – is given symptomatic expression in the different uses that the two cultures make of the distinction between private and public. For Pufendorf and Thomasius it is religion and morality that define the private domain, their inward and unenforceable character defining the kingdom of truth inhabited by the teacher and auditor; just as use of coercion to preserve social peace defines the civil kingdom inhabited by sovereign and subject – there being no interstitial world or persona. In Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, however, it is the individual’s official duties that define the private domain, while the public domain is constituted by scholars in free intellectual exchange. Moreover, it is envisaged that one day the free exchange of ideas will itself make the official exercise of power redundant, as the persona of the scholar displaces that of sovereign and subject. This inversion of the usual conception of private and public has understandably struck many commentators as anomalous. It makes perfect sense, however, as soon as the community of scholars or republic of letters is seen as an avatar of Kant’s spiritual community and as an analogue of his ethical state. Under these circumstances, the official use of reason, for the purposes of church and state, indeed appears limited and restricted – ‘private’ in comparison with the spontaneous and transparent ‘public’ communications of the community of pure intelligences. It is, therefore, in envisaging the moral renovation of political governance through the figure of the rational community – the figure known today as ‘rational communication in the public sphere’ – that Kantian metaphysics assumes its full neo-confessional form. For here, an antipolitical enclave politics, grounded in the metaphysics of rational community, envisages its own expansion into the ‘true visible church’. In this setting, under such intense pressure to make the state ethical and accountable, the hard-won separation of the pursuit of moral regeneration and the exercise of civil authority threatens to collapse, at least ‘in thought’. Here too the gap between civil and metaphysical cultures is at its widest. For, while the former treats this separation as the condition of governing a liberal society, the latter regards it as something to be overcome, in order to facilitate the self-governance and self-perfection of a democratic moral community. At this boundary, where, from one side, the division of the kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom appears as the fundamental condition of a pluralistic liberal society and, from the other, as the unleashing of an instrumental repressive state, the rival intellectual cultures remain as far apart as they did in the eighteenth century.

References

Ahnert, T. (). Christian Thomasius’ Theory of Natural Law in its Religious and Natural Philosophical Context. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Albrecht, M. (). Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophieund Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Allison, H. E. (). Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (). Transcendental Idealism: The ‘Two Aspect’ View. In B. den Ouden and M. Moen (eds.), New Essays on Kant. New York: Peter Lang, pp. –. (). Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Althusius, J. (). Politica: An Abridged Translation of Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples (trans. Frederick S. Carney). (rd edn). Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Aner, K. (). Die Theologie der Lessingzeit. Halle: Niemeyer. Annas, J. (). The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anonymous. (). Predigten nach kantischen Grundsätzen. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation. Armstrong, A. H. (ed.) (). Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman. (Vol. ). London: SCM Press. Arndt, H. W. (). Erste Angriffe der Thomasianer auf Wolff, in Schneiders (ed.), Christian Thomasius, pp. –. Barbeyrac, J. (). Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoien, tels qu’ils lui sont prescrits par la loi naturelle (trans. Jean Barbeyrac). (th edn.) Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup. Barnard, F. M. (). Christian Thomasius: Enlightenment and Bureaucracy. American Political Science Review, , –. (). Rightful Decorum and Rational Accountability. A Forgotten Theory of Civil Life, in Schneiders (ed.), Christian Thomasius, pp. –. Barreau, H. (). Leibniz, précurseur de la conception universelle des droits de l’homme dans sa conception morale et religieuse du droit naturel. In Leibniz und Europa: VI Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress. Hanover, pp. –. Baumgart, P. (). Die Gründung der Universität Helmstedt. In Baumgart and Hammerstein (eds.), pp. –. 



List of references

Baumgart, P., and Hammerstein, N. (eds.) (). Beiträge zu Problemen deutscher Universitätsgründungen der frühen Neuzeit. Nendeln: KTO Press. Baur, J. (). Lutherische Christologie. In Rublack (ed.), pp. –. Beck, L. W. (). Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (). What Have We Learned from Kant? In A. W. Wood (ed.), Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. –. Bianco, B. (). Freiheit gegen Fatalismus: Zu Joachim Langes Kritik an Wolff. In N. Hinske (ed.), Zentren der Aufklärung I. Halle: Aufklärung und Pietismus. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, pp. –. Bödeker, H. E. (). Menschenrechte im deutschen publizistischen Diskurs vor . In G. Birtsch (ed.), Grund- und Freiheitsrechte von der ständischen zur spätburgerlichen Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. –. Bohatec, J. (). Die Religionsphilosophie Kants in der ‘Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft’. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer theologisch-dogmatischen Quellen. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe. Brecht, M. (). August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietmus. In M. Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus. Bd. : Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. –. Brown, P. (). The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity. In R. C. Trexler (ed.), Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, pp. –. (a). Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. (b). The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Brückner, J. (). Staatswissenschaften, Kameralismus und Naturrecht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Politischen Wissenschaft im Deutschland des späten . und frühen . Jahrhunderts. Munich: C. H. Beck. Budde, J. F. (). Bescheidener Beweis, daß das Buddeische Bedencken noch fest stehe, wieder Hrn. Christian Wolffens Nöthige Zugabe aufgesetzet. Jena: Meyerischen Buchladen. Burns, J. H., and Goldie, M. (eds.) (). The Cambridge History of Political Thought –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carboncini, S. (). Christian August Crusius und die Leibniz-Wolffsche Philosophie. In A. Heinekamp (ed.), Beiträge zur Wirkungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von Gottfried Wilhlem Leibniz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, pp. –. Cristi, R. (). Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Dahm, K.-W., Krawietz, W., and Wyduckel, D. (eds.) (). Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. Denzer, H. (). Moralphilosophie und Naturrecht bei Samuel Pufendorf. Eine geistes-

List of references



und wissenschaftliche Untersuchung zur Geburt des Naturrechts aus der Praktischen Philosophie. Munich: C. H. Beck. Di Giovanni, G. (). Translator’s Introduction. In A. W. Wood (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Dilcher, G. and Staff, I. (eds.) (). Christentum und Modernes Recht: Beiträge zum Problem der Säkularisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dilthey, W. (). Der Streit Kants mit der Zensur über das Recht freier Religionsforschung. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, , –. Döring, D. (). Pufendorf-Studien. Beitrage zur Biographie Samuel von Pufendorfs und zu seiner Entwicklung als Historiker und theologischer Schriftsteller. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. (a). Leibniz als Verfasser der ‘Epistola ad amicum super exercitationes posthumas Samuelis Puffendorfii de consensu et dissensu protestantium.’ Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, , –. (b). Säkularisierung und Moraltheologie bei Samuel von Pufendorf. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, , –. (). Samuel von Pufendorf ’s Berufung nach Brandenburg-Preußen. In Palladini and Hartung (eds.), pp. –. (). Samuel von Pufendorf and Toleration. In J. C. Laursen and C. J. Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. –. Dreitzel, H. (). Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca. –). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. (). Das deutsche Staatsdenken in der Frühen Neuzeit (). Neue Politische Literatur, , –. (). Vom Verfall und Wiederaufstieg der Praktischen Philosophie. Neue Politische Literatur, , –. (). Ideen, Ideologien, Wissenschaften: Zum politischen Denken in Deutschland in der Frühen Neuzeit. Neue Politische Literatur, , –. (). Hermann Conring und die Politische Wissenschaft seiner Zeit. In M. Stolleis (ed.), Hermann Conring (–). Beiträge zu Leben und Werk. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, pp. –. (). Der Aristotelismus in der politischen Philosophie Deutschlands im . Jahrhundert. In Keßler, Lohr, Sparn (eds.), pp. –. (). Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der ‘Eklektischen Philosophie’. Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, , –. (a). Gewissensfreiheit und soziale Ordnung. Religionstoleranz als Problem der politischen Theorie am Ausgang des . Jahrhunderts. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, , –. (b). Die ‘Staatsräson’ und die Krise des politischen Aristotelismus: Zur Entwicklung der politischen Philosophie in Deutschland im . Jahrhundert. In Aristotelismo Politico e Ragioni di Stato. Florence: L. Olschki, pp. –. (). Christliche Aufklärung durch fürstlichen Absolutismus. Thomasius



List of references

und die Destruktion des frühneuzeitlichen Konfessionsstaates. In Vollhardt (ed.), pp. –. Epstein, K. (). The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Erdmann, B. (). Martin Knutzen und seine Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur der Wolfischen Schule und insbesondere zur Entwicklungsgeschichte Kant’s. Leipzig: Verlag Leopold Voss. Eschweiler, K. (). Die Philosophie der spanischen Spätscholastik auf den deutschen Universitäten des seibzehnten Jahrhunderts. Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, , –. Fischer, K. (–). Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. Berlin: C. Winter. Foucault, M. (). The Use of Pleasure (trans. R. Hurley). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fouke, D. C. (). Metaphysics and the Eucharist in the Early Leibniz. Studia Leibnitiana, , –. Friedeburg, R. v. (). Reformed Monarchomachism and the genre of the ‘politica’ in the Empire: The Politica of Johannes Althusius and the meaning of hierarchy in its constitutional and conceptual context. Archivo della ragion di Stato, , –. Friedrich, C. J. (ed.) (). Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gram, M. S. (ed.) (). Kant: Disputed Questions. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Gregor, M. (). Kant on ‘Natural Rights’. In R. Beiner and W. J. Booth (eds.), Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. –. Gregor, M. J. (). Translator’s Introduction. In M. J. Gregor (ed.), Immanuel Kant: The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, pp. vii–xxxiv. Gründer, K. and Rengstorf, K. H. (eds.) (). Religionskritik und Religiosität in der deutschen Aufklärung. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. Grunert, F. (). Bibliographie der Thomasius-Literatur –. In Schneiders (ed.), Christian Thomasius, pp. –. (a). Bibliographie der Thomasius-Literatur –. In Vollhardt (ed.), pp. –. (b). Zur aufgeklärten Kritik am theokratishcen Absolutismus. Der Streit zwischen Hector Gottfried Masius und Christian Thomasius über Ursprung und Begründung der summa potestas. In Vollhardt (ed.), pp. –. Haakonssen, K. (). Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (). Christian Thomasius. In E. Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, vol. , pp. b–b. Hadot, I. (). The Spiritual Guide. In Armstrong (ed.), pp. –. Hadot, P. (). Neoplatonist Spirituality : Plotinus and Porphyry. In Armstrong (ed.), pp. –.

List of references



(). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (trans. Michael Chase). Oxford: Blackwell. Hammerstein, N. (). Jus und Historie: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universitäten im späten . und im . Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. (). Die Universitätsgründungen im Zeichen der Aufklärung. In Baumgart and Hammerstein (eds.), pp. –. (). Jurisprudenz und Historie in Halle. In Hinske (ed.), Zentren, pp. –. Heckel, M. (). Parität. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,  (Kanonistische Abt. ), –. (). Staat und Kirche, nach den Lehren der evangelischen Juristen Deutschlands in der ersten Hälfte des . Jahrhunderts. Munich: Claudius Verlag. (). Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. (). Das Säkularisierungsproblem in der Entwicklung des deutschen Staatskirchenrechts. In G. Dilcher and I. Staff (eds.), Christentum und modernes Recht. Beiträge zum Problem der Säkularisation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. –. (–). Gesammelte Schriften: Staat, Kirche, Rechte, Geschichte. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. (). Religionsbann und landesherrliches Kirchenregiment. In Rublack (ed.), pp. –. Heimsoeth, H. (). Metaphysische Motive in der Ausbildung des kritischen Idealismus. Kant-Studien, . (). Metaphysik der Neuzeit. Berlin: R. Oldenbourg. (a). Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants: vol. , Metaphysische Ursprünge und Ontologische Grundlagen. Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag. (b). Persönlichkeitsbewußtsein und Ding an sich in der Kantischen Philosophie. In H. Heimsoeth, Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants: vol. : Metaphysische Ursprünge und Ontologische Grundlagen. Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag, pp. –. (). Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism. In Gram (ed.), pp. –. (). Atom, Seele, Monade. Historische Ursprünge und Hintergründe von Kants Antinomie der Teilung. In H. Heimsoeth, Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants II. Methodenbegriffe der Erfahrungswissenschaften und Gegensätzlichkeiten spekulativer Weltkonzeption. Bonn: H. Bouvier, pp. –. (). The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages (trans. Ramon J. Betanzos). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Heinrich, G. (). Frankfurt und Wittenberg. Zwei Universitätsgründungen im Vorfeld der Reformation. In Baumgart and Hammerstein (eds.), pp. –. Henrich, D. (). Die Deduktion des Sittengesetzes. Uber die Gründe der Dunkelheit des letzten Abschnittes von Kants >Grundlegung zur



List of references

Metaphysik der Sitten